Budget Resolutions

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Monday 16th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

Last week’s Budget will double Government borrowing, and it is proof that the Government’s austerity agenda, which brought unnecessary pain and suffering to millions, was a failure. Austerity has inflicted untold damages on our public services, and most obviously on our health service, which in 2010 had the highest patient satisfaction levels on record. It is painful to see what has been done to the police service, the fire service, the welfare state, the probation service, courts, the health service, education, and libraries—I could go on. All those ideologically driven cuts to our social fabric were in response to a worldwide banking crash for which Joe Public paid the price, yet now the public are supposed to cheer when the Government try to repair some of the damage that they have done, by raising council tax precepts to replace some of the police officers we have lost. Should the public now be grateful that the NHS can have anything it wants, after nearly a decade of sustained and deliberate under-investment that has brought the service and its staff to their knees?

Every person in the UK is now counting on the NHS to be there for them when this Government were not there for it. Money cannot fill the 100,000 workforce vacancies, including 43,000 nurses and 10,000 doctors, who we need right now. Despite the big spending announcements, austerity is not over for most public services, and according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, day-to-day spending per person will remain almost a fifth lower than it was in 2010, through to the middle of the current decade.

The £76 billion rise in overall spending by 2023-24 will be paid for largely by borrowing, paving the way for soaring debt and probable tax rises, particularly if the economy takes a significant hit from coronavirus and a disorderly Brexit. The Budget revealed just how weak the UK economy was even before coronavirus. Brexit has already made the economy 2% smaller than it would otherwise have been, and we are still in the transition period, which for now is protecting us from the economic shock. After a decade of Tory-led Governments, the NHS and our social care sector are chronically under-funded, under-resourced and under-staffed, just at the moment we need them most.

The substantial additional infrastructure investment that the Chancellor announced is welcome, but there are huge question marks over the Government’s commitment to tackling climate change, and the long-promised plan to fix the crisis in social care has been ignored again. I hope that the Prime Minister’s promise from the steps of Downing Street, to

“fix the crisis in social care once and for all, and with a clear plan we have prepared to give every older person the dignity and security they deserve”

has not been forgotten. It has now been six months, and the promised plan is nowhere to be seen. It is astonishing that social care has been ignored again in this Budget, and crushing for people with dementia. Every day we hear new stories of people with dementia who are trapped in unacceptable conditions, or of families who are struggling to cover the cost of dementia care. Cross-party talks must produce a long-term, sustainable solution for social care that delivers quality care, but that must also be backed by investment to keep the system afloat.

The spending measures, alongside last week’s cuts to interest rates, may keep us out of recession for the immediate future, but it is difficult to feel reassured that our economy is strong enough to cope with the unknown impact of coronavirus, at the same time as our plans for leaving the EU are still so uncertain. Even if the economy escapes a sustained hit from coronavirus or Brexit, the Budget leaves day-to-day spending on public services other than health some 14% lower per person in 2024-25 than it was when the Conservatives kicked off their austerity programme in 2010.

The Budget continued the Tory power grab, moving control of funding from local government to central Government. It is time local government had more of a say in how funding is spent in communities, rather than locally run services such as the police, schools and transportation having to go cap in hand to central Government through a flawed bidding system. The public sector does not belong to Boris Johnson; it belongs to the public. The Government would do well to remember that.

[Several hon. Members rose—]