Budget Statement

Lord Soley Excerpts

Tuesday 21st July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley (Lab)]

My Lords, this is an interesting Budget, although as the noble Baroness, Lady Seccombe, almost implied, there is an interesting confusion between the politics of it and the economics of it. When the present Chancellor of the Exchequer starts writing articles in the Guardian, of all papers, and telling everybody on the Labour side to vote for it, you recognise there is a political message in this and really what he is saying is, “Look, we’re the new Blairites. You stay in the old-fashioned position because we are moving on”.

Actually, there is a more sophisticated argument than that and I think it is a pity if we focus excessively on the benefit cuts. There are some very painful cuts, which need to be faced up to and dealt with, and I think they are going to be more of a problem to the Government than they realise. But the underlying problem here is that I am not quite clear what the Government’s economic strategy is. As the Minister acknowledged in his opening remarks, the issue is that we need growth; we need improved productivity; we need greater investment, particularly in small companies; and I would argue massively for the advanced science and technology budget and the training that is linked to that. I will come back to that in a moment. I find the strategy a bit worrying.

Also, if you take the wider view, you cannot look at the British economy in isolation from what is happening in the rest of the world. The Government acknowledge that things could get blown off course by whatever happens with the euro or, indeed, the Chinese economy. All I would say is that if we carry on with this sort of arm’s-length approach to Europe, we will lose friends there, and they could be very important. It was significant in the Greek crisis that increasingly, the continental European papers were saying, particularly in France, “Where is Cameron?”. The argument was not that we should put money into saving the euro, but there was a very real opportunity for Britain to offer its good services, knowledge and experience in both finance and diplomacy to try to help Greece and the other euro countries reach an agreement which perhaps would have been better than the existing one.

I say this only as a passing comment—and the Minister, with his northern background, will know this—but the air passenger duty is still dangerously high on long-haul flights. If Newcastle airport loses its flights to the Emirates, Amsterdam and Frankfurt, which could well happen, that will be a severe blow to the region because Newcastle relies increasingly on those airports as an economic driver. As I have said in other debates, airports are indeed economic drivers; they do for the world economy what railways did for the British economy in the 19th century. We ignore that at our peril.

On the minimum wage—now the living wage—my immediate reaction, like that of many people, was that this is a step in the right direction. I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, with interest. He acknowledged the change that he and the Tory Party had to make on this issue. That is welcome and right but there is a problem because, for a start, the Government are excluding the under-25s. Secondly, it comes in over a period of time, so whether it is a living wage or just a continuation of a minimum wage depends much on how it is uprated. As someone who was involved in these discussions when Labour was in government, I acknowledge that there is a relationship between the minimum or living wage that you set and unemployment, and that you have to get that balance right. I think we all acknowledge that. The danger is that we will push the younger generation—the under-25s who will not be eligible—into that lower-paid category when they are precisely those whom we ought to be getting into higher wages as they get more skills and experience.

I hear all that the Minister has said and I note what is being done on training in the Budget, including on science and technology education, to all of which I say: “Yep, that’s good”. But as I have said before in this House, we are missing a trick with the advanced training we could offer in digital technology. Just because a person has been on benefits for a long time or is from a damaged background does not mean that they cannot manage modern IT systems. In fact, they are sometimes remarkably good at it. Everybody who comes before a government department of some type and is unemployed, or is perhaps in a dead-end job, really ought to be offered the skills to enable them to be fully IT-literate. By that, I mean having full digital ability to design and set up their own websites.

It is remarkable how many young people set up their own websites when they leave school and start designing and selling things. A couple of years ago, I spoke to a young girl who started by buying shoes and putting her designs on them, and then putting them on her website and selling them. People do a range of such things and, as I indicated, many people from what are often regarded as failed backgrounds can do quite well. I am a great fan of what the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, is doing and we really need to give her her head and say, “Get on it, right across the system”. The aim of the strategy ought to be to make Britain, in Brian Cox’s words, the best place in the world to do science. There is another message about Europe there: we get more grant money from the European Union for research in our universities than any other European country, so we need to keep winning friends there, not losing them.

I say again that in talking about the lack of strategy, I worry about the linkage. The Government have done a lot of things to take benefits away from young people but they do not do that with older people, because pensioners tend to vote Tory. I am a pensioner and I am entitled to a free TV licence but I do not actually want one. Indeed, when it all blew up that the Government were using the economic system to make the BBC pay for those, it suddenly dawned on me that I was not claiming one. I do not intend to because I want the BBC to succeed. The BBC is a real economic driver and we ought to be supporting it, not undermining it.

My final point is that there is, as yet, no housing strategy. I note what the Government say about housing, but whether it is the private sector, the social sector or the purchase sector, we do not have a housing strategy. Until we do, a lot of people will be vulnerable and lose out on employment prospects.