Budget Resolutions

Paul Bristow Excerpts

Wednesday 6th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Paul Bristow (Peterborough) (Con)]

I rise to welcome this Budget—a low-tax Budget focused on increasing productivity in our public services. By goodness, do we need it.

Yesterday, I had dinner with an old friend who had spent quite some time out of the UK. We were talking about what he felt life was like in the UK now, and he said that he felt that society was becoming “infantilised”. When I asked him what he meant, he talked about the ever-increasing intrusion of the state and other bodies into the lives of ordinary people. When I asked him for an example, he decided, curiously, to talk about the railways. He had got a train the other day and he was told on several occasions to mind the gap, to contact the British Transport police if he saw something suspicious, to ensure that he had the correct ticket for his fare, and to “See it. Say it. Sorted.” He was told that on loop about 20 times. One might think, “Why is he talking about these safety announcements? Surely they make sense.” But it was not as if my friend was about to leap into the gap, or pick up strange packages. It was not as if he was planning to evade his fare. The British state, or the institution in question, seemed to want to tell that individual about the dangers constantly. We are over-regulated, over-taxed, over-governed and over-leveraged, both at state level and individually. Thank goodness we have a Budget that will try to address some of those problems.

We desperately need a low-tax economy and productivity in our public services. There is no clearer example of the over-burdensome, intrusive and nannying element of the state than Peterborough City Council. Its administration would rather axe lollipop ladies, one of the only physical manifestations of the city council left on our streets, than tackle inefficiency in its back office, or look to make savings through productivity. It would also rather demolish, or at least close, three bridges—we can count them—over a local beauty spot known as Cuckoo’s Hollow, thus in effect cutting off hundreds of people from shops, and preventing them from going about their business. Many of those people are disabled, many have mobility issues and many are elderly. The council would rather do that on spurious health and safety grounds than take a common-sense approach and repair each bridge individually, one at a time. Instead, the council would rather close them overnight and not tell a single soul about it. More people have walked on the surface of the moon in the past 70 years than have been placed in any sort of danger by these bridges. But that shows the sort of council we have.

Our council would also rather fence off a local open space called Werrington fields, because it has some sort of concern about safeguarding. It would rather close a swimming pool—the regional pool in Peterborough, where I learned to swim—because, again, it has taken an over-cautious approach, in response to a survey; it has taken the worst-case scenario as being the letter of the law. The council would rather close it than make do and mend.

We have a planning system that treats people who want to build a small granny annexe, or a small addition to their house, as though they wanted to build St Paul’s cathedral or the Taj Mahal next to their house, rather than something that would obviously benefit the local economy and that individual family. We need to accelerate supply-side reforms to planning, and to get Peterborough and this country building.

We need to take a more mature approach to politics, and to how we talk about the economy and public spending. I am incredibly proud of the investment—hundreds of millions of pounds—I have managed to secure for future infrastructure in my city of Peterborough. We have not had our fair share over many years. However, we talk about spending commitments as if the amount we spend is itself the goal, but what we really want is outcomes. We say, “We are spending more than ever before on x, y and z,” but spending is not the goal. The outcome—what we get for our buck—is the goal, along with productivity. That is the sort of change we need to see. I was incredibly pleased to hear that point made very clearly in the Chancellor’s excellent speech.

Nowhere does the productivity challenge embed itself more than in our national health service, so I was pleased to hear about the public sector productivity plan. There are three things we might think about to increase the productivity of our NHS. First, the consultants, clinicians, nurses, doctors and people we pay to care for patients must operate at the top of their licences. I was disappointed to hear disparaging comments from the Opposition about the Prime Minister’s views on physician associates. We want more physician associates in our national health service, so that consultants, doctors and nurses can do what they need to do and operate at the top of their licences.

Secondly, we need to streamline ranking and grades in our NHS to ensure that people can move from one element of the service to another more easily. That will increase productivity and job satisfaction. Finally, organisations such as the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and programmes such as “Getting it right first time” tell us what works and how to do the best for patients, but the NHS does not adopt that advice at pace or at scale. We need to follow that advice to increase productivity in our NHS. I hope that the public sector productivity plan addresses some of those issues.

If we continue with the infantilisation of our society, where will it end? It will end with the Labour party, one of the two great political parties in our democracy, mandating a policy that tells people that teachers are there to brush children’s teeth. Where does the responsibility of the state end, and that of parents begin? If we are mandating teachers to brush children’s teeth in schools, we have a long way to go to create an independent and non-infantilised adult population in this country.

[Several hon. Members rose—]