Mortgage and Rental Costs

Debate between Pat McFadden and Richard Fuller

Tuesday 27th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)]

I thank everyone who has contributed to this afternoon’s debate. I cannot help noticing that the vast majority of them are Opposition Members, so I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Halton (Derek Twigg), for Bootle (Peter Dowd), for Bradford West (Naz Shah), for Harrow West (Gareth Thomas), for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), for Birmingham, Hall Green (Tahir Ali), for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova), for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Gerald Jones), for Blackburn (Kate Hollern), for Newport West (Ruth Jones), for Reading East (Matt Rodda) and for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham).

We did hear a couple of speeches from Conservative Members. I thank the hon. Member for Stourbridge (Suzanne Webb) for her speech, but she forgot something. She forgot to tell us that 9,000 households in Stourbridge are going to be facing an increase of £2,400 a year in their mortgage payments. She was followed by the hon. Member for North West Norfolk (James Wild), and he forgot something too. He forgot to tell us that 8,000 households in his constituency are facing an increase in mortgage payments of £2,800 a year because of the Tory mortgage bombshell. Just in case it slips the Minister’s mind when he stands up to make his own speech, he should tell us that 10,500 households in Arundel and South Downs will be facing increases of £5,200 a year. Those figures show the level of pain among mortgage holders and that will only grow in the coming months.

We should remember that those who have bought their own homes have done nothing wrong. They have done what generations did before them: they have worked hard, saved for a deposit and taken pride in having a home of their own. The security that comes with that has for many turned to dread, as month after month they receive a letter from their lender telling them that their bills are going up by hundreds of pounds a month. In my constituency, 6,800 households face paying an extra £1,800 a year for their mortgage, and that comes on top of the extra that people are already paying for energy, food and everything else.

The Resolution Foundation says that the average figure across the country is £2,900 a year more, but we must remember that that is an average. Depending on where someone lives—we have heard this through the debate—the real figure could be higher. In Uxbridge, for example, it is £5,200 a year. In Selby, it is £2,700 a year. And it is not just mortgage holders who are affected, but renters too, because the people they rent from are seeing their mortgages rise as well. Last year, private sector rents rose by more than 10%, and the proportion of people’s income being used to pay rent is rising too.

The inflation and interest rate figures we saw last week showed an economy and a plan that has been blown off course, because this was not the plan that the Prime Minister and the Chancellor had—this is not how it was supposed to be. Their plan was to bury last year’s disastrous Tory mini-Budget under 10 feet of concrete. If it was to be remembered at all, it was supposed to be thought of as a bad dream, from which we had all mercifully woken up, but their preference was for it never to be spoken of again. Their hope was that they would steady the ship, possibly get some small amount of economic growth and then offer tax cuts either this autumn or next spring, after which a general election would be called.

After 13 years of policy failure, that was all they had left. They certainly could not run on their record, because nothing is working better now than it was when they inherited it in 2010. They certainly could not run on hope for the future, precisely because their record is so poor and no one would believe them. But even the plan they had has turned to dust, because reality has intervened—their own economic mismanagement has intervened. Their plan turned to dust because the Tory mini-Budget was not the end of something; it was the start of something. The instability that it created has carried on and on, and the price is still being paid. The Prime Minister set out a target to halve inflation, but last week core inflation went up, not down. Once again, it was higher than expected and, once again, it was the highest in the G7.

[Richard Fuller (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. What is the Labour party’s view on forecasting and the Bank of England? It would be interesting to hear that, because it has been commented that forecasting by the Bank of England is not as accurate as forecasting in other countries, meaning that it is not as easy for outside investors to predict future interest rates. What is the Labour party’s view on that and, in particular, what is its view on requiring the Monetary Policy Committee in the UK to do a dot plot on future interest rates, as Federal Reserve governors do, to help with any confusion about forecasts?

[Mr McFadden]

We are not going to join the chorus of Government Members attacking the Bank of England. I thought the hon. Gentleman was rising to raise the issue of the 15,000 households in his constituency that are facing an increase in mortgage payments of more than £3,000 a year.

We all wanted to see a recovery, but we do not have a recovery. We have deepening financial difficulties for millions of households. The Government were desperate to say that the worst was over, but for anyone remortgaging over the next couple of years, the worst is not over—it is still to come. Most people on fixed rates have not refinanced yet, and the rolling financial thunder of mortgage renewals will continue month by month, as households receive those letters from their banks and building societies. That is the reality of the Tory mortgage bombshell.

The Chancellor and the Prime Minister were supposed to be the fix-it crew, but things have not been fixed at all. Borrowing costs are even higher now than in the wake of the disastrous Tory mini-Budget last year. Let me be clear with Treasury Ministers: if they are doing worse than the last Prime Minister and the last Chancellor, they are not fixing anything. That begs the question, what is the point of them? They have nothing left to offer. They are caught between telling the country not to risk it with Labour, with their little dossiers full of made-up pledges, and then adopting pale imitations of our policies, whether on the windfall tax, the NHS staffing plan or the voluntary mortgage proposals that they announced on Friday. Time after time, they have no ideas of their own; all they have left is a pale imitation of what we have already proposed.

We wanted a mandatory plan, and that is what is at the heart of our motion today. The truth is that the Tory party has shredded its own economic credentials—the Tory party of sound money, which saw debt top 100% of GDP last week; the Tory party of low taxes, which has lifted the tax burden to the highest level in living memory. There is literally no point to this Government. They are running out of options and they are running out of road.

We are not speculating about what might happen in the future. We are talking about a real crisis, with a real cost of living squeeze on real people, right now, and it has all happened on their watch. After 13 years, they have run out of excuses and run out of people to blame. From Brussels to the blob and now the Bank of England, there are no scapegoats left. Their sense of entitlement to rule is matched only by their total unwillingness to accept any responsibility for anything that happens while they do rule. The Prime Minister says he is “on it”. What a reassurance to working people! I do not know what he is on—usually, a helicopter—but I know it is not working.

The Government cannot fix the problem, because they are the problem. The answer for the country is not another iteration of a Tory project that has already failed over and over again. It has failed on the cost of living crisis. It has failed on public services. And it is failing on mortgages, too. It is time for change, but the Tories cannot offer it. It is time for recovery, but they have failed to deliver it. It is time for an election and a new start, and the sooner they come, the better.

Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Bill

Debate between Pat McFadden and Richard Fuller

Monday 5th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr McFadden]

I will keep my remarks brief, because I know we all want to get on to the debate about relocation. However, I wish to say a word about new clause 5, which shows the difference between the Bill before us and what the Government know they might have to do. The new clause and the draft Bill on enhanced TPIMs measures published last Thursday represent the Government taking out an insurance policy against the failure of the Bill before us this evening.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) reminded us that we are debating the matter around the 10th anniversary of 11 September. It is important that the House remembers that, because that incident, more than any other, forced Governments around the world to reassess their thinking and their expectations of what terrorists were capable of. It also forced all of us in democratic regimes to look again at the protections in law and law enforcement that we can give our citizens against terrorist activity. That is the basis of this whole debate and the Bill.

We did not get here entirely by choice. We got here partly because of court judgments shaping the regime for us in an involuntary way. The problem is simple: what do we do when we cannot bring someone to prosecution, but we have a good and reasonable suspicion that that person would engage in terrorist activity if they could, and there may be inadmissible evidence that they have tried to do so? There has been an assumption running through this debate that such people are necessarily less dangerous than those who have been convicted. That is not necessarily so. If they were able to carry out their intent, they may in fact be far more dangerous than people who have been convicted of other terrorist events.

The Government have published draft legislation that is an insurance policy against the Bill, and they cannot have an in-principle objection to the measures within their own draft Bill. Whereas the Bill before us states, unbelievably, that the Secretary of State must grant terrorist suspects access to mobile phones and the internet, the draft Bill would give the Secretary of State discretion over that. Whereas the Bill before us disarms the Government from giving the public the protection that relocation can provide, the draft Bill would reinsert that possibility. The question that the public will ask, and which the Minister must believe they will ask very seriously should the draft legislation be needed in future, is why the Government did not include those powers in the Bill before us. Why wait until an incident has happened?

I repeat the question that I put to the Minister before. What would he say to the victims of terrorism in such circumstances? Would he say, “We knew we might need these powers, and we could have legislated for them, but we chose not to because we believed that the balance of civil liberties was wrong”?

[Richard Fuller]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr McFadden]

Not at the moment.

Let us deal with the point about civil liberties. The Minister has said several times that the motivation behind the Bill was a perceived imbalance in the last Government’s civil liberties legislation. The notion that we are some sort of quasi-police state or overly authoritarian state is complete nonsense. In this country we enjoy freedom of expression, religion and association that is the envy of the world. That is why so many dissidents from regimes around the world have sought refuge here. Indeed, the criticism that is sometimes levelled, and perhaps with validity, is that we have been very generous in accommodating dissidents from other regimes, and that sometimes our freedoms have been abused by some of those individuals. It is simply the wrong analysis and the wrong starting point to say that civil liberties in this country have been fundamentally compromised. That is not the case, but because the Government believe it and have carried forward into government the wrong analysis that they developed in opposition, that is leading to the wrong policy and to greater risk for the public. New clause 5 addresses that to some extent, but people will not understand why it, and the draft emergency legislation, were not put into the Bill.