Income Tax (Charge)

Mick Whitley Excerpts

Thursday 4th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab) [V]]

I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

I represent one of the most deprived constituencies in the country. My constituents have suffered thanks to both the Government’s mismanagement of this pandemic and the decade of brutal austerity that preceded it. Their incomes have been slashed, their jobs thrown on the scrapheap, and their hopes for the future dashed by poverty.

Instead of laying the foundations for an economic recovery by investing in the high-skilled green jobs of the future, the Chancellor presented a Budget that barely papers over the cracks. Secure and well-paid work is the catalyst of any economic recovery, but successive Conservative Chancellors have done nothing to address the scourge of precarious employment and low pay.

When presented with the opportunity to rectify the mistakes of his predecessors and ensure that work really does pay, the Chancellor refused to do so. While Ministers shed crocodile tears for the one in 10 British workers who have been told to accept worse pay and conditions or face the sack, the Government have done nothing to crack down on the use of deplorable fire and rehire tactics.

We need to be putting money in the pockets of consumers, yet the Chancellor plans to freeze the pay of over 2 million key workers, force councils in the poorest parts of the country to raise council tax by up to 5%, and plunge up to 1 million universal credit claimants into poverty by cutting the £20 uplift at the very moment that unemployment is set to peak. That is not just economically illiterate; it is downright cruel.

Yesterday the Chancellor had a real chance to secure economic prosperity and tackle the existential threat of climate breakdown by creating thousands of high-quality green jobs. He spurned that chance and exposed the Prime Minister’s pledge of a green jobs revolution as a sham. By investing in electric vehicle production at the Vauxhall car plant, guaranteeing funding for the Mersey tidal project and the north-west hydrogen cluster and putting the green homes grant back on track, we could create vital jobs in a region that has been devastated by decades of economic vandalism and Government neglect. But the Budget contains a meagre £20 million for floating offshore wind production and no new investment for a green recovery in the automotive, steel or aerospace sectors.

The Government’s national infrastructure bank will provide less than half the funding we received through the European Investment Bank and falls far short of the £30 billion recovery package that Labour is calling for. This makes a mockery of the promise to level up towns like Birkenhead and leaves the UK far behind our European friends in the year that we are due to host COP26. The Government’s shambolic handling of the covid-19 pandemic has plunged the UK into the deepest recession of any advanced economy. The Chancellor’s failure of ambition, foresight and leadership means that the road to recovery will be uncertain, but the path into hardship for many is a certainty.