Autumn Statement

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Thursday 3rd December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Carrington of Fulham, for enabling us to discuss the economy in the light of the Autumn Statement. I am grateful, too, to the Local Government Association, of which I am a vice-president, for its briefing earlier this week on the impact of the spending review on local government, not least its ability to expand its work in promoting growth. I hope there will be further opportunities to debate those cuts when we receive details of the local government settlement, but there is one overriding principle that I want to emphasise at the outset.

No Government should attempt to balance the books on the backs of the poor. I am glad the Government now recognise that their approach has been out of balance, through trying to get too much from cuts and too little from tax, and with growth too restricted by fiscal tightening, as the OBR itself has indicated.

In the March Budget, there were to be real spending cuts of 14.8% in departmental budgets over the three years from 2016 to 2018. Those spending cuts are now 2.3%, which is welcome. But have the Government got a long-term economic plan? I understand they have a long-term economic ambition, but I am not convinced it is a plan; nor is it adequately explained why the state has to be reduced in size by quite so much, particularly when infrastructure spending remains low. Taking the northern powerhouse as an example, I see that £400 million has gone into a northern powerhouse investment fund, but why that sum of money as opposed to another sum? Is there a plan for what investment will take place and where? For example, how much will go to support Teesside?

As the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, said, we have growth, but we have unbalanced growth. Most of it is in services, not in manufacturing, which is slowly declining due to lowering demand from the rest of the world as well as the strong pound. Last year, we had a trade deficit of £35 billion—we have to export more. A few days ago, I read a ResPublica report which says that the Government must distinguish between productive investment which generates jobs across the country and unproductive investment such as foreign investment in the London property market. Manufacturing provides 30% of the jobs in sectors producing goods for export, and the ResPublica proposal on export hubs seems a good one.

Growth is partly derived from greater productivity and investment in areas such as training, research and development, and infrastructure. The apprenticeship levy is welcome, but further education is suffering a real-terms cut over the next four years. The chief executive of the Association of Colleges has stated:

“If post-19 education starts to vanish so do the future prospects of the millions of people who may need to retrain as they continue to work beyond retirement age, as well as unemployed people who need support to train for a new role”.

As for energy, decarbonisation is going to be a big market worldwide, and we need to be able to compete in it. It is a mistake to axe the £1 billion support for carbon capture and storage and it is a mistake to cut so much from renewable energy projects. I wonder what the Government’s reaction has been to the attack on their policies by so many of our blue chip companies, which say the scale of the budget-support cuts for renewable energy is risking UK businesses.

Having announced plans for 400,000 affordable homes from 2018-19, could the Government explain how those figures will be achieved given the lack of construction industry workers and skills? In addition, there is the 1% rent reduction for social housing each year for four years, which will restrict housing association borrowing. Would it not be a good idea to look again at a housing investment bank to get further growth in housebuilding?

Finally, why is it that we cannot build our own nuclear power stations and our own high-speed rail infrastructure rather than relying on the nationalised industries of China and France to help us? That seems to me to say a lot about our failures to invest adequately in infrastructure.