Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

I am among those whose names are on both amendments today. I congratulate, in particular, the hon. Members for Dewsbury (Paula Sherriff), for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) and for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mrs Trevelyan), and I acknowledge the good work of Ministers on the important issue raised in amendment (b). I also acknowledge the thoughtful contributions today, including the critiques by the hon. Members for East Lothian (George Kerevan) and for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) on the issues of productivity and public sector investment.

On some of the more local aspects of the Budget, I must decry the fact that Northern Ireland gets very little out of the Budget, although that is not all the fault of Ministers. A lot of it is the fault of a dereliction of initiative and responsibility on the part of our own devolved Executive. They have not made the case for city deals in Northern Ireland. They have certainly refused for a very long time to make the case for a city deal for Derry, pretending instead that city deals were for England, which did not have devolution. That completely ignored the fact that much work on city deals has been done in Scotland and Wales. Some of them are represented in the Budget. I know that the city deals, in terms of the northern powerhouse, are not all necessarily what the Chancellor puffs them up to be, but they are initiatives worth pursuing, and we in Northern Ireland have been left out of them.

As for what is in the Budget for Northern Ireland, I welcome the spending for the air ambulance coming from the LIBOR fines. I and others had lobbied for that. Billed as a big gain for us are the enhanced capital allowances for an enterprise zone in Coleraine—a zone that should have been in Derry, which is the place of the highest unemployment. It is intended that Coleraine can benefit from Project Kelvin—a project that was initially meant to benefit Derry in the first place and other places on both sides of the border. This has happened courtesy of a letter from the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister to the Chancellor before the 2014 Budget, asking for that enterprise zone so that Coleraine could benefit from Project Kelvin.

As for the wider arguments around PIP, having listened to the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) and to the Chancellor on both his Budgets, I think we have tuned into the cognitive dissonance game, whereby each gives an account of their motives and purposes on the record that are far removed from my sense of what is really happening and certainly far removed from my constituents’ experience.

I am one of 22 who voted against the introduction of the welfare cap nearly two years ago in March 2014, and I am very glad that I did. We said at the time that while it was being bubble-wrapped as a neutral budgetary tool, it would be a cuts weapon in the hands of the Treasury—and that is exactly what it has been. What we heard from the former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions at the weekend was essentially that the welfare cap, which he voted for and used to boast about, has become simply a search engine for benefit cuts by the Treasury. We saw that in the summer Budget when the Chancellor revised the welfare cap downwards by £46.5 billion over four years. It is no wonder that we then saw other cuts being pursued.

We need to hear exactly what is going to be done with the welfare cap in future. Is it the case from what we heard from the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions yesterday that the attempt to have further legislative change on welfare is going to be abandoned, or will the welfare cap be used to impose cash-limited administrative decisions on rates, rules, interpretations around criteria and so forth so that the cuts will effectively be stealth cuts? Yes, Parliament will be spared any legislative cuts, but the cuts will still be there by administering the welfare cap ruthlessly.