Income Tax (Charge)

Nadia Whittome Excerpts

Thursday 4th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab) [V]]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker—[Interruption.] Gosh, I am really sorry, Madam Deputy Speaker; we have building work going on in the house at the moment.

The pandemic has shown us the impact of a decade of austerity forced on us by Conservative Governments. We have seen that a cocktail of poverty pay, job insecurity and cutting public services to the bone has resulted in one of the worst death rates and the worst recessions in the world. This was not inevitable and the Budget was the Chancellor’s opportunity to put it right with a programme that meets the scale of the challenges we face. Instead, this Budget is filled with half-measures and wrong priorities.

There is a rise in corporation tax in 2024 but a huge £25 billion giveaway to big businesses before that. The wealth of British billionaires has already soared by a third in the last year. The Government talk of a green industrial revolution but they are slashing green homes grants, freezing fossil fuel duty and continuing to back coal mining. There is a lot of talk about looking after Brits, but the Chancellor did not mention the NHS once in his speech. He had no plan for the crisis in social care and he is freezing public sector wages instead of giving our key workers the pay rise that they deserve.

The Chancellor has taken the rhetoric of Labour’s policies but none of the substance. The centrepiece of yesterday’s Budget was the switch to fiscal austerity in April 2023, which will involve around £68 billion of spending cuts and tax rises until 2026. Make no mistake, this Budget has paved the way for more misery, more austerity and more hardship just over the horizon.

Today, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Resolution Foundation said that the cliff-edge cut in universal credit will bring down incomes to levels that we have not seen since the early 1990s. It is set to plunge 500,000 people into poverty. Does the Minister consider those people, including many of my constituents in Nottingham East, to be collateral damage?

We all want a secure job, healthcare we can rely on and a good home in a community that we can be proud of, but poverty pay, underfunded hospitals and catastrophic climate change threaten our lives and our futures. This Budget should have tackled the root of these problems—our rigged economic system—but instead, it rearranges the deckchairs on the Titanic. We need a permanent transfer of wealth and power from billionaires profiting from the pandemic to workers who have got us through it, but this Government do not want to tackle a broken economy that works for their super-rich friends instead of for my constituents. They have failed catastrophically during the pandemic and this Budget shows that they will fail to deliver the recovery that we need.