Autumn Statement Resolutions

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Monday 21st November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

It is critical that it is renewed over the foreseeable future, because the reality is that the issue is not going away. If we are to be serious about addressing the fundamental concerns that exist about the duration of the conflict and how it will affect people for many months to come, it is vital that the scheme is renewed long into the future.

The second is the need to resolve the current crisis of illegal immigration. Clearly, it is unacceptable for the country to spend some £5 million a day on hotel costs. It is a multi-dimensional challenge. I welcome the deal that was agreed with France last week, but the Home Office clearly needs to do more to secure lower cost accommodation and to improve the processing times for asylum claims, which are both key drivers of the backlog that has been allowed to accumulate. The Home Office received funding in the spending review in 2021 precisely for that purpose, and addressing that is vital.

We also need to alter the incentives that drive people into the arms of people traffickers. That means making the Rwanda scheme work and doing all that is required over the months ahead to ensure that it is able to be enacted. Both of those problems, if allowed to persist, would represent a risk to the public finances, and I very much hope that we can get an update on them from Ministers.

Those are specific issues, but I now wish to turn to the three broad principles that the autumn statement spans and on which we need to touch today. The first is the balance of tax and spending. Clearly, we are living through hugely challenging times. We have already rightly heard reference from the Front Bench to Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine. The Chancellor was right to say that this is a recession made in Russia and, of course, it comes hard on the heels of the covid pandemic. There are simply no easy choices here, and I recognise that, but faced with the available options I would have preferred to see a much greater emphasis in the statement on spending reductions rather than tax rises.

We simply cannot ignore the fact that the OBR says that the tax burden will now rise to its highest sustained level since the second world war, hitting 37.1% of GDP by 2027-28. Faced with that, I would have curbed our capital spending in particular more sharply. Most Departments have pronounced covid-related underspends and for many projects, such as HS2, the business case no longer looks as robust as it once did, after the pandemic. On current spending, I would not have increased spending on out-of-work benefits in line with inflation at a time when wages clearly will not rise in the same way, and I believe that there is a strong need to drive NHS efficiencies. At a time when we spend the equivalent of the GDP of Greece on our health service, we need to make sure that there is a robust plan to get maximum value for the taxpayer. While many NHS trusts perform fantastically, including mine in South Tees, we need to make sure that we measure outputs rather than simply inputs in the health service.

[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

I just wonder whether the right hon. Gentleman lives in the same world as I do. I have families who pay £2,000 per calendar month to live in a really grotty basement flat, and he thinks that they can do without a percentage uplift on their benefits. Really?

[Mr Clarke]

It is very important that we do not indirectly increase the disincentives to work. That sits at the heart of the wider debate around the affordability of the welfare system. The hon. Lady is quick to forget that we spent some £37 billion compensating people for the cost of living increases they have suffered in the past year, including £1,200 for any family on benefits.

The second issue is one where I believe spending does need to increase, and that is defence. We heard reference to this earlier, and I note that the former Prime Minister committed us to spending 3% of our GDP on defence by 2030. I believe that is a pledge that should be honoured. In a world where the challenge not only of Putin’s Russia, but frankly of China, too, is only worsening, we need to make sure we do not regard ourselves as having some kind of peace dividend. The only dividend of peace is peace. As my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) said in his intervention, defence spending during the cold war was significantly higher as a percentage of GDP. We should return to that, not least because delivering our existing defence commitments will require some 2.5% of GDP by the middle of this decade. There is a clear priority for us to move on defence.

Ultimately, the only sustainable way to fund public services is if we can grow the economy, and that leads to the third and final point that needs to be addressed in today’s debate. We need to facilitate more robust underlying economic growth. I welcome what my right hon. Friend the Chancellor said about solvency in his statement, too. This is a welcome opportunity to address that. Our reforms should be delivered at the maximum possible pace.

I put on record just how strongly I would oppose any move to a Swiss-style relationship with the European Union, which the Prime Minister has addressed decisively today. I just put a marker down that I do not believe that would be the right approach. We need more divergence, rather than less, if we are to make a success of Brexit.

We have to confront the harsh reality that the typical British family are set to be poorer than a Polish family by the early 2030s if we do not achieve more robust growth. That will not come if we have a blizzard in taxes and regulation under the Labour party; it will come if we deliver robust supply-side reform. The most important reform we can offer is on housing. There are specific challenges here around nutrient neutrality, but there are also general ones about our attitude to new homes, which need to be addressed. We need to make sure that, on the Government Benches, we are standing in support of families who wish to own homes of their own by building them where they are needed, but the challenge is not restricted to housing. We need to adjust childcare ratios, which are driving up the cost of childcare unnecessarily, and we need to tackle the cost of judicial review and the curse and problem that so much infrastructure is thwarted or delayed by abuse of that system.

We also want to see rational energy generation, including the use of onshore wind. I will give the Government my loyal support in the Lobby tomorrow, but if we can address these fundamental pro-growth measures, we will be in a much better position to weather the challenges that lie ahead. I look forward to hearing more from Ministers in this debate and over the weeks ahead about how we will deliver the growth that ultimately was the whole purpose of the autumn statement in September, and which needs to be the animating principle of this Government over the years ahead.

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[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

After 12 years of Tory Government, the outlook is just so bleak. Forecasters now say that real wages may not return to 2008 levels until 2027—not one lost decade, but two. What does that mean for Newham, where we already have the highest rate of homelessness in the country and the second-highest rate of child poverty?

Last Friday, I was at one of our overwhelmed food banks and I heard about Geetha, who is pregnant, homeless and lives with her children in temporary accommodation in a hotel. The food available is nowhere near nutritious, which puts her and her family’s health at risk. Our food bank can offer ingredients, but she has no means of cooking them in her hotel room. What can she do? How much worse will it get?

Now the Government are slashing housing benefit again. Surely that will push homelessness up even more by making private rents less affordable than they already are. Frankly, there are no social homes available, so yet more Newham families will end up having to live out of hotel rooms like Geetha, because of Tory failure.

Before I got to the food bank, I had been at one of our secondary schools, which is considering laying off staff to feed students—it is that bad. Let me tell hon. Members how poverty is affecting our children. I know of one boy who stands by the shoulder of his friend every day to eat the leftovers—he gets no breakfast either—and he stays in school as long as he can because mum cannot afford to put the heating on. Effectively, the school is becoming yet another food bank and a warm bank, and all at the expense of children’s learning. In reality, this is all at the expense of our country’s future economy.

I have told the House before about the time, just a few years ago, when a little girl was sat at a table in her school eating her school meal, with her little plate piled high, and I, like the stupid politician I am sometimes, turned to her and said, “That’s a huge plate for such a small person.” “Yes,” she said, as she beamed at me, “it’s not my turn to eat tonight.” This is the reality, and it is getting much worse because of the failures of this Government.

There is the same link between poverty and our health, too. Our doctors are seeing more illness due to colder homes—it is a fact—and we have all heard the shameful story of what happened to Awaab Ishak, dying because of the untreated damp and mould in his home just after his second birthday. I can tell the Government that, based on my casework, there are thousands of children in Newham facing the same risks, so how many more children will die when these families simply cannot afford to heat their homes?

Locally, we are seeing reduced collection of asthma inhalers among patients who are not exempt from the prescription charges. They have simply got no money, so patients turn up at A&E saying they have lost their inhaler to get a free one. What if someone has a medical condition that needs daily treatment from a machine? Here are the numbers from one Newham family, with a frail grandmother who needs a pressurised mattress and a grandson who needs a breathing machine at night. The running costs have increased by £600 just since September, even with the energy price cap. It will now cost £3,600 a year to run those medical machines alone, without even thinking about heating for the rest of the home. How is that possibly affordable for many families living in London? Either the machines are not used, with a massive health impact on the most vulnerable, or patients cannot be treated at home and must go into hospital instead, with an even higher bill for our NHS.

Medical staff are enduring brutal working conditions and financial worries—our local NHS is doing more and more to support them not just with food banks for our nurses and porters, but with debt advice. And then there is social care. What a surprise: the Government are yet again hiking the regressive council tax to keep our care systems going just a little bit longer. It is not affordable for my constituents. Frankly, I wonder how the Chancellor sleeps at night, because there have been 12 years of Tory economic failure. Let us face it: this Government have done nothing but offer despair. Truly, Newham cannot afford a Tory Government any more.

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[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

It is always a pleasure to follow the robust Conservative good sense of the right hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson). Most of the time, I agree with everything he says. Of course I acknowledge the difficulties facing the Government from the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, although many of those difficulties were exacerbated by our over-intrusive attitude to regulation during the pandemic—successive lockdowns, furloughs and all the rest, for which we are now paying the price.

I am also very worried about the disincentives to work, particularly for the lower paid. We have heard a lot about those on benefit. I understand that this is an extremely complex area. We have to help those genuinely in need—those with genuine long-term sickness issues, disabled people—but we do have a massive problem in this country, with more and more people choosing not to work. If benefits are increasing with inflation, which is very high, while public sector pay is being kept down, that is a disincentive to work. Many people who are striving—working very hard, perhaps in low-paid jobs—wonder why their pay is being kept down, while those on benefits who could work see their benefits rising with inflation. It is a complex area; there is no easy solution. My right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) has done some wonderful work with the Social Justice Institute that he heads, but we have to find a way forward.

[Ms Lyn Brown]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

No, we have heard from the hon. Lady. I want to get through my remarks as quickly as possible.

As there are these disincentives to work, people say that we need mass migration. We are told by the bosses of the NHS that they cannot fill all the vacancies, so we need more mass migration. Mass migration is deeply unpopular with the British public. It is particularly unpopular with those who are working hard, particularly those on relatively low wages. They see their wages are kept down by employers who will always get people in from abroad. We have to defeat this argument as a Conservative Government that the way to achieve growth is through mass migration. That is the easy way to achieve growth. The best way to achieve growth is through high productivity, encouraging people to work.

May I follow my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean) on the subject of channel migration? Frankly, the Government must grip this. It is utterly destabilising. We have thousands of people pouring across the channel, making the Government look incredibly foolish. We could solve the problem: we need to get out of the Human Rights Act and out of the refugee convention. We need to have our own Bill of Rights and ensure that when people land on these shores, they can be detained, arrested, dealt with quickly and deported, because it is utterly debilitating to our reputation.

We have heard a lot about the NHS. The fact is that the country has been increasingly weighed down by an ever-increasing benefit bill, and we are pouring, every year, more and more of our gross national product into the NHS. I do not have private health insurance; I rely entirely on the NHS, as does my family. People of my age are now frightened. Up to now, Conservative Governments have assumed that the NHS was very popular. I can assure Members that it is not very popular at the moment when we are facing these enormous delays. If a person has a non-urgent condition, they can be required to wait for up to two years. Then we are told that the NHS is the supreme example of healthcare in the world. We all recognise the wonderful work that our doctors and nurses do, but I read today that perhaps up to 50,000 people working in NHS quangos and other NHS bodies never actually see a patient. That organisation is riddled with low productivity, waste and incompetence, and we must learn from what other countries are doing, because someone elderly is much better looked after in Italy, France, Germany and Sweden. Indeed, in his statement the Chancellor recommended what is happening in Sweden and Singapore, and all those nations have social insurance policies. Under our system, someone pays taxes all their life, and when they get to a certain age and have a medical condition they are told to join the back of the queue. In France, Germany, Italy or Sweden, they have rights, and the Government have to address that. We cannot just go on repeating the mantra that the NHS is the best health system in the world. It simply is not. Its outcomes on cancer and in many other areas are lagging behind those of similar nations.

As well as considering social insurance, one simple thing that the Government could do—I have suggested it many times—is what Ken Clarke did in the last Conservative Government and provide tax relief for those of pensionable age who take out private health insurance. We could at least give some guarantee that if the NHS fails to deal with someone’s case within a year, or two years, the Government will fund them to go private.