Management of the Economy and Ministerial Severance Payments

Debate between Paul Howell and Anna Firth

Tuesday 15th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Paul Howell]

There are so many people who have so many opinions about the different things that have happened and will put them into different contexts. We need to keep ourselves in context. To quote the numbers, the House of Commons Library estimated that the Government spent between £300 billion and £400 billion on various pandemic-related issues. That is between £4,600 and £6,100 for each individual. That is a tremendous amount of money. Before we had the chance to recover from the pandemic, Russia invaded Ukraine, causing the price of food and so on to explode. The enormous support that the Government have given in response to energy prices is expected to cost £60 billion over six months.

The Labour party are scaremongering that the support will stop in April and everybody is falling off a cliff. Nobody has said it is stopping in April. They have said that the likes of you and I, Mr Deputy Speaker, might not be receiving support—I would quite like to get support, but I do not need it. We need to ensure the money we spend is spent with those who need it, not those who just want it, and achieve that balance, but the immediate reaction on energy support—to provide it as quickly as possible—was wholly appropriate.

When people start to talk about interest rates, the rhetoric we hear from Labour about the £500 increase is selective noise, using a specific comparator of a two-year mortgage that was 1.6% two years ago, was 3.7% before we went into the mini Budget and is now probably close to 5%. The real effect on people is not a £500 difference.

[Anna Firth (Southend West) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making an important point about interest rates. Does he agree that UK interest rates are down since the mini-Budget? The five-year rate is now 3.3%, compared with 3.5% before the mini-Budget, and the two-year rate is now 3.1%, compared with 3.4% before the mini Budget. Does he agree that, when we talk about long-term management of the UK economy and interest rates, it is only the Conservatives who can be trusted to deliver?