Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Luciana Berger Excerpts

Wednesday 18th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

I rise on behalf of my constituents to share my bitter disappointment about the Budget. It was out of touch and arrogant, and the Chancellor even had the gall to use the phrase—from which my constituents recoil when they hear it—“We’re all in this together”. He told people that they are better off now, when my constituents—I meet and engage with them every week—tell me that they are not. In fact, if we look at the evidence and what is actually happening, we see that there has never been a bigger gap between the rhetoric we heard today and the reality of people’s everyday lives. The Chancellor has presided over the slowest economic recovery in the UK’s history and has borrowed more in this Parliament than Labour did in 13 years. He has also broken his promise to eradicate the deficit by the end of this Parliament.

I have said it before and I will say it again: giving with one hand but taking more away with the other is nothing to celebrate. This has not been a recovery felt by millions of people across the country. Looking at the Tories’ tax and benefit changes, we know that families are on average £1,127 a year worse off; working people are £1,600 a year worse off; wages are down for the first time since the 1920s; and people are earning less at the end of a Government than they were at the beginning.

Despite what the Chancellor said in his speech, I found buried—on page 67 of the OBR document—the fact that the real consumption wage will not rise above its pre-crisis peak until the end of 2018. The Chancellor’s own documents, and the OBR’s documents, do not correlate with what we were told earlier.

We also know that the Government have raised taxes 24 times since 2010. I contrast that with the fact that people on the highest incomes have seen a tax cut, and hedge funds in particular have seen a tax giveaway of £145 million. This is not a recovery felt by the majority: it is a recovery felt by a very few people.

I am concerned that our NHS is in crisis. We know that one in four people cannot access a GP appointment, and we know that the Government did not met A and E targets for the whole of last year. Too many people have not received cancer treatment in good time. I hoped that the Chancellor might talk about what the Government would do about the NHS, and I was struck by his comments about child and adolescent mental health services and maternal mental illness. He said that the people affected had been forgotten for too long. I was surprised to hear him say that because it is on his watch that we have seen some clinical commissioning groups spend as little as 6% of their budget on mental health. Despite the campaign for parity of esteem for mental health services by Labour peers—they were successful, and it is one of the few things that the Opposition can be proud of in the Health and Social Care Act 2012—in practice we have seen the complete opposite.

It is on this Government’s watch that we have seen cuts to mental health trusts that are 20% higher than for other elements of our national health service. A response to a parliamentary question reveals that there have been real cuts of £50 million a year to child and adolescent mental health services. Just yesterday, the CAMHS taskforce released its report. It was interesting to see the sanitised version of the report, because we saw a leaked copy in The Times a couple of weeks ago. Across the country, we have seen a reduction in the number of specialist mental health nurses by 3,300, and a reduction in the number of beds by 1,500. Too many young people are having to travel hundreds of miles to access mental health services, if they are able to access any sort of treatment or support at all. I thought it showed some cheek for the Chancellor to say that these people had been forgotten, because it is on his watch, over the past five years, that we have seen this reduction in attention and support for mental health.

There was nothing in the Budget to counter one of the biggest problems in our country: job insecurity. Many of my hon. Friends have raised the challenges of zero-hours contracts. I was very interested to hear the hon. Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke), who is no longer in his place, call them flexible work contracts. According to the ONS, 1.8 million zero-hours contracts were used by firms in the UK last summer. I know, from a report I conducted with two of my hon. Friends on Merseyside, the impact faced by too many of our constituents every time they wait for that text message or that phone call to find out if they have work. I was struck by the experience of my constituents who said that they could not buy a belt because they were not able to plan their finances from week to week. This is not just about zero-hours contracts, however; there are low-hour contracts too, and the millions of people who are in part-time work who wish to be in full-time work. If I had been the Chancellor, I certainly would not have talked about the national minimum wage, given that he previously backed a minimum wage of £7 an hour but has failed to introduce that in this Parliament.

Other hon. Friends have pointed to the challenges relating to food banks. It is a disgrace that just under 1 million people have had to access emergency food aid.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

My hon. Friend is making an eloquent speech. What does she make of the study by the Children’s Society and the StepChange charity, which points to 86,000 families in Wales—23% of the total number of families—who are failing to keep up with household bills and loan repayments, and the response of a Wales Office spokesman who said, “The UK Government’s long-term economic plan is working”? Where have we heard that before?

[Luciana Berger]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. He and I have been campaigning on this issue for many years, because we do not believe that in the sixth-richest nation in the world we should have any food banks, let alone the number that we have across all four nations. The fact is that just under 1 million people have had to access emergency food aid for themselves and for their children—all too often it is children who are affected. It is not just people who are out of work, but people in work, often on zero-hours contracts, who are struggling from week to week. People deserve better. I reflect on the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) on the increase in absolute poverty. I am ashamed to live in the sixth-richest nation in the world, when we have seen an increase in absolute poverty in 2015.

I represent Liverpool Wavertree in north-west England. We heard in the Budget that cuts to local authorities are coming down the line. I have very serious concerns about what will happen to local authorities, particularly in the north-west where already we have experienced cuts 75% higher than in other parts of the country. Yet another report came out last week, showing that Liverpool has seen a reduction of £390 a head in funding since 2011, while in the south Wokingham has seen a cut of just £2.29. Our budget in Liverpool has been cut by 58% in real terms since 2011. That is £329 million. Page 130 of the OBR report states that we should expect a much sharper squeeze on local authorities’ real spending in the next Parliament. I shudder at what that will mean for my constituents and residents across Liverpool and the north-west. I am concerned about what will happen to our libraries, our social care and our children’s centres.

Ordered, That the debate be now adjourned.—(Mark Lancaster.)

Debate to be resumed tomorrow.