Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Nigel Mills Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con) [V]]

I join others in welcoming this excellent Budget, which strikes the right balance between trying to see us through the rest of the covid pandemic crisis and starting our response to what will be a pretty horrible set of public finances by the time we finally emerge. The sheer scale of the spending, the deficit that we have ended up with in this financial year and the one we will end up with next year should be pause for thought for all of us every time we ask for more tax cuts or public spending increases, because clearly they will not be affordable on any great scale for a very long period.

The Chancellor was right to extend all the various protection measures until well after we think lockdown will finally end. I warmly welcome the extension to furlough and the self-employment income support scheme, and I especially welcome 2019-20 tax returns being used to bring in those people who changed their occupation during that year. I hope that, when the grants are calculated, the income from that year will be used as one of the three years for the average for all claimants, so that they can have a more realistic assessment of what their earnings were, rather than it being based on years that can be quite a long time ago for some.

I also warmly welcome the £20 a week uplift to universal credit being retained, which I and the Work and Pensions Committee, on which I serve, called for. I see why the Chancellor chose to retain it for six months, so that he can wait and see how the job market and the economy are performing at the end of September. However, in a situation where we think we will need furlough until the end of August to protect jobs from redundancies, it is quite hard to see that there will be lots of new recruitment going on by the end of September at a scale that means we will not need that uplift to be around for a while longer. But we should be grateful that the Chancellor listened and has extended that uplift, which is much needed and much welcomed. I urge him to use the six months or the rest of this financial year to have a proper review of the levels of welfare in this country, so that we can work out whether we think UC, without that uplift, is giving people the right amount of money to have the decent kind of living that we hope. If it is not, we should retain the uplift more permanently.

Finally, on the corporation tax measures, the answer that the Chancellor has come up with to the puzzle of how we get businesses investing is a really interesting and innovative one. A 130% tax deduction for capital investment is a super idea, and I hope it works. I think that it is what businesses will call for and will need, and it balances out the decision to raise corporation tax. At a time when we have spent literally billions of pounds on saving businesses from going bust by paying their wages, it is entirely fair to ask them to pay higher corporation tax for a few years to repay that. On balance, this is an excellent Budget and I will be happy to support it.