Budget Responsibility and National Audit Bill [Lords]

Mark Tami Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Williams]

This is a short but very important Bill which I hope will change the conduct of economic debates. Of course, we have a Budget and days of economic debate starting tomorrow. I do not know whether the former Prime Minister and Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), is going to be with us in person, but I am sure that his parliamentary ghost will be with us as we remember Budgets from previous years. We remember his earlier Budgets and his close relationship with Prudence, and we remember that after the 2001 general election was safely out of the way, spending soared. So began the structural deficit, long before the intervention of the banking crisis.

I remember listening to those Budgets, autumn statements and pre-Budget reports year after year, both in a professional environment before I became a Member of Parliament and, from 2005, as an MP. I remember listening to the then Chancellor’s reports of rosy growth and nirvana ahead of us. We heard a bit more of that today from my neighbour, the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy). One would swear that the current Government had inherited a golden legacy in May 2010 rather than the catastrophic public finances that we are actually having to cope with.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman recall that at the time, the Liberal Democrats were attacking the Government by saying that they were not spending enough, not that they were spending too much?

[Stephen Williams]

I recall very well that from 2001 onwards I and my colleagues, whether candidates or Members of Parliament, were saying that the Government should spend more on health and education, but we actually said where the money was going to come from. It may not have been popular, and it did not lead to great electoral success in 2001, but we said it should come from an increase in taxation, not from building up a structural deficit over the next six years.

We all remember the Budgets back then—they were essentially a combination of forecasting, policy, boasting and spin. That is why the OBR is so welcome. In the Budget tomorrow, the Government will take political responsibility for the difficult decisions that we have to make. I welcome that, and I welcome the scrutiny of it. It will be based on a separation of forecasting by independent experts and policy making by elected politicians.

There will certainly be no scope for boasting, and I think it will be some time yet before the coalition Government can take credit for rescuing this country from the dire economic circumstances in which we find ourselves. I cannot promise a complete absence of spin—that would be asking too much of all of us—but we will have a Budget based on independent forecasts and sound political judgment, and it will be a better Budget for that.