Amendment of the Law

Mark Garnier Excerpts

Thursday 20th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Ed Balls]

I do not think he will either. May I ask the Financial Secretary how it is going since his comments on women and the Monetary Policy Committee? Is he still revelling in that? If things were done on merit, he would be out on his ear.

I hope that the Chancellor will think again and join me, the Chair of the Treasury Committee and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury in supporting reforms to allow the Office for Budget Responsibility to audit independently the spending and tax commitments in the manifestos of the main political parties before the next election. We know from the head of the OBR that that can be done. Let us be honest: it is all a matter of political will. The problem with the Chancellor is that he wants to set traps, but he cannot be transparent on the matter of OBR audits. Why does he not think again, join the cross-party consensus and do the right thing?

[Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)]

Why was the right hon. Gentleman formerly so keen that the OBR should not do that? Why did Labour members of the Treasury Committee argue in 2010 that it should not happen?

[Ed Balls]

The irony is that back in 2011 the Chancellor was in favour of it, and now he has changed his mind. The OBR, which we supported from the outset in this Parliament, has established a good track record, and we are happy for our manifesto to be audited. What is it about the Conservative Front Benchers that means that they are scared of independent OBR audit of their manifesto? Who knows?

I return to the welfare cap, and I will give a bit more detail for Government Members. We have had a lot of tough and divisive talk from the Chancellor on welfare over the past three years, but it cannot hide the fact that social security is up by £13 billion compared with his plans, particularly because of his failure on housing benefit. We have called for a cap on social security spending, and we will support the welfare cap next Wednesday, but we will make different and fairer choices to keep the social security bill down. We will introduce a compulsory jobs guarantee to get young people back to work. We will scrap the bedroom tax, which is not only unfair but could end up costing more money, not less. We will also scrap the winter fuel allowance for the richest 5% of pensioners, get more houses built and tackle the low wages that have pushed up spending on housing benefit. That is the fair way to ensure we get people back to work and get welfare costs under control.