Seasonal Work

Debate between Nigel Huddleston and Joe Robertson

Wednesday 10th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Huddleston]

Yet more common sense is coming from those on this side of the Chamber, and I agree with my hon. Friend. Of course, it is young people in particular who do not have confidence in this Government and are fleeing.

It is clear that I do not have particularly high regard for Labour’s economic competence, but even I did not expect the Government to be running out of money quite so quickly. I expected them to be bad, but I did not expect them to be this bad. It does not give me any political joy to say that, because my constituents and their constituents are paying the price for Labour’s incompetence through higher taxes and, in many cases, with their jobs and livelihoods. I genuinely wish that they were better at government, but that is wishful thinking, because here is another hard truth about Labour: despite the party’s name and the false advocacy for working people, every Labour Government since the second world war have left office with unemployment higher than when they started, leaving the Conservatives to clear up their mess.

We Conservatives know that the best thing we can do for working people, and to lift people out of poverty, is to help them get a job, and we have a far better record than Labour in doing that. Between 2010 and 2024, Conservative-led Governments oversaw the creation of 4 million jobs—an average of 800 a day. This Government are destroying jobs by the tune of hundreds per day.

[Joe Robertson (Isle of Wight East) (Con)]

We know what the Government want to do to support tourism and hospitality: they want to get those on welfare to work in that sector, despite the fact that some of those people are on welfare because the Government have taxed tourism. Does my hon. Friend think that that is socialism or incompetence?

[Nigel Huddleston]

I think my hon. Friend knows my answer to that. It is ironic—it would be laughable if it was not so sad—that the Government announced over the weekend that they will introduce subsidies to create jobs, because if they did a better job at running the economy, jobs would be created anyway. I will come back to this issue in a moment.

On the record of the last Government, we took millions of people out of paying income tax. We increased the tax-free allowance from £6,475, which we inherited under Labour, to £12,570. As soon as we were in a position, following the pandemic, to start reducing taxes, that is exactly what we did. We reduced national insurance on workers from 12% to 10%, and then from 10% to 8%, with a plan to eliminate employee national insurance altogether and, of course, align the thresholds.

Labour talked about backing business when in opposition, but they are doing no such thing in government. In the Budget, the Chancellor had the brass neck to say that she was helping the hospitality industry with business rates. In reality, hotels, pubs, theme parks, restaurants, cafés are all seeing an increase in their business rates, as are the wider retail and leisure sectors. Investment in hospitality and tourism is already being paused or diverted overseas due to the UK’s rising costs and regulatory environment.