Peter Dowd
Main Page: Peter Dowd (Labour - Bootle)Department Debates - View all Peter Dowd's debates with the HM Treasury
(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your stewardship, Mr McCabe. I thank the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley) for securing this debate, which gives us an opportunity to brush aside some of the myths that he referred to. I also thank the hon. Member for Southport (Damien Moore), the hon. Member for Dundee East (Stewart Hosie), who spoke eloquently and sensibly, and the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk), who referred to the Greeks. I remind him that Thucydides said that
“while the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must.”
That is precisely what the Tories have done. They talk about the poor all the time, but it is the strong that they stick up for, and they do it time after time.
The hon. Member for North East Derbyshire forgot to mention that the global financial crisis that the Tories use time and again started in the United States. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Cheltenham can sit there and pretend to snore, but that is the reality: until the Tories accept that fact, we will not be able to move on. There is a danger that there could be accusations of dishonesty and disingenuousness—I am not making those accusations, Mr McCabe—until those on the Government Benches begin to acknowledge that.
The issue is not just about fixing the roof before the rain comes through; we were all in it together at the time, and we all know that we have not been in it together under Tory policies. The poor have been getting a stuffing year in, year out. The Tories have also missed every target they have set. Talk about a moving target! The situation was supposed to be sorted out years ago. The hon. Member for Cheltenham said there was a debt of £800 billion, but the Tories have doubled the debt since they came into power. They have borrowed more money than Labour ever has.
Alex Chalk
We have this extraordinary situation where on the one hand Labour complains that the national debt has gone up too much, and on the other it complains that the Conservatives are not spending enough. That kind of illogicality would embarrass a 10-year-old. Surely the hon. Gentleman can do better.
Peter Dowd
Of course I will do better. At the end of the day, it is about priorities. As the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) said, the Tories have spent the money in the wrong way. The hon. Member for Southport effectively accepts that. We have had £15 billion wasted on the introduction of universal credit by the Tory party, so let us get a little bit real.
I am sick to death of talking about how useless the Tory party is, so I will speak about Labour’s fiscal credibility, which I am sure will get a certain amount of unanimity in the Chamber, and the issue of balancing. [Interruption.] I am happy to deal with it. We could have discussed the issue in a mature and grown-up way with adults in the room. Yanis Varoufakis wrote a book called “Adults in the Room”, but there are not many in the Chamber today. I suggest Members have a read of that book; it will show them what happened to Greece.
Following discussions with our advisers, including Professor Joseph Stiglitz, on 11 March 2016, the shadow Chancellor announced a fiscal credibility rule, which has five key elements. I am happy to set that out in the symposium that hon. Members are here to attend. First, Labour committed to closing the deficit on day-to-day spending within five years. Secondly, we committed to excluding investment from that commitment so that we can borrow to invest, which is important. Thirdly, we undertook that Government debt as a proportion of trend GDP would be lower at the end of a five-year parliamentary term than at the start.
Fourthly, we committed to giving the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England the power to suspend the rule if it determines that interest rates are not having their usual effect due to the lower bound. That would allow stimulus action to step in when monetary policy is ineffective. Fifthly, we would shift the reporting requirements of the Office for Budget Responsibility so that it reports to Parliament, rather than the Treasury, and ensures ongoing Government compliance, to which the hon. Member for Dundee East referred. All the facts are there, so let Parliament have them. The elements of the rule mean that a Labour Government would not need to borrow to fund our day-to-day expenditure.
Alex Chalk
The United Kingdom last lived within its means in 2001. Under a Labour Government, when would it next do so?
Peter Dowd
If the hon. Gentleman listens to what I have to say, he will find out in due course. [Laughter.] The hon. Gentlemen laugh and snigger. Meanwhile, millions of people suffer under their policies. They should stop their sniggering and listen. I know that the Tories think they have some divine right to rule and some divine economic ability, but they have not. They need to show a little humility occasionally and listen to other people.
Unlike the Conservatives’ different, haphazard and unsuccessful attempts to achieve fiscal credibility, our fiscal credibility rule has three criteria for good economic policy. I know that economic good in economic policy is an alien concept to the Tories, but they might learn one or two things if they listen to what I have to say. The three criteria are: responsibility in economic management; recognition of the value of long-term public investment; and flexibility for changing economic circumstances. A Government trying to bind themselves into a model that has palpably failed all over the world are not particularly helpful. There has to be some flexibility.
Stewart Hosie
Is the irony not that that model would look like Greece? It is running a current account surplus, but the pain of a decade of even more brutal austerity than was faced here will be felt for generations to come. That would be success according to the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley).
Peter Dowd
The hon. Gentleman is spot on. I do not want to misquote the Secretary of State for Transport, but when East Coast went bottoms up he said that that just proved that the market works. That is the sort of economic approach that the Tories take to our country.
Let me go through the three criteria one by one. We are a party that, first, takes seriously the mantle of being guardians of a sustainable economy. We fully costed our election promises in our grey book, “Funding Britain’s Future”. The Conservative party, by contrast, gave no costings whatever in its manifesto. As the shadow Chancellor said, the only numbers in the Conservative party manifesto were the page numbers.
Meanwhile, Carl Emmerson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies said in his election briefing that Labour’s
“forward-looking target for current budget has much to commend it”.
The IFS also estimated that we would have met our deficit target with £21 billion to spare, and that we would meet our debt target.
Secondly, we recognise that Government spending is not something to be scared of, or to have a phobia about, and that some economic metrics do not fully capture the benefits of the gradual build-up of public assets, as the hon. Member for Dundee East mentioned. That is why we distinguish between day-to-day spend and investment in our fiscal credibility rule, because investment is a different kind of Government activity that contributes to a stock of public assets, providing benefits over time. A country is not a house, or an individual who has a lifetime; it goes on, as we know, for a long time. Comparing us to a household might be a soundbite, but it is economic fantasy.
Lee Rowley
Given the hon. Gentleman’s point about us binding our hands, can he explain why, in 2006, I think, his sister party in Chile not only determined that it was going to adopt the kind of policies that he just described, but codified them into law?
Peter Dowd
I am not here to explain what sister parties anywhere do. I could quote sister parties for the Tories all over the place. The hon. Gentleman should be careful what he is wishing for when he starts to make those sorts of comparisons.
The Conservatives have been unable to appreciate this point in their words and in their actions: the Government’s fiscal target of cutting borrowing to less than 2% of GDP by 2021 does not exclude investment, or distinguish between spending and investment. In so doing, the Government overlook, and undervalue, the special character of investment. They do that time after time.
Their austerity programme, the mythical end date of which was in 2018—previously, it was before that—was more a signal of the Government’s failure than of any actual shift in approach. It has done lasting damage to our economy and society, and has left us with rough sleeping up by 169% since 2010, stagnant wage growth—the worst since Napoleonic times—and few examples of public infrastructure being patiently built up and supported.
The third aspect is flexibility when thinking about sound economic policy. The Tories’ austerity programme arises from, as the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire has reaffirmed today, a rigid ideological belief—not always reflected in practice, I have to say—that a smaller state is always better, notwithstanding good evidence of the state’s entrepreneurial capacity and the human costs of austerity. Such rigidity in approach is something that we have avoided in our fiscal credibility rule.
The zero bound knockout that we proposed, which would allow the Bank of England to change course in times of impending crisis when interest rates can do only so much, shows our willingness to adjust economic policy frameworks in the light of circumstances. Any sensible Government would do that—not bind themselves into a failed ideology and process. That knockout is informed by lessons learned after the global financial crisis—lessons that the Conservative party seems incapable of learning—when it became clear that continual cutting of interest rates was having little impact on spending habits and aggregate demand.
More was needed from fiscal policy, and that zero bound knockout—the fourth element of the fiscal credibility rule—acknowledges that that will sometimes be the case. Professor Simon Wren-Lewis writes that if that part of the rule
“had been in operation in 2010, we would have seen further stimulus in this and perhaps subsequent years, leading to a much quicker recovery from the GFC.”
Wren-Lewis describes that part of the rule—the part that allows a reversion to expansionary fiscal policy in times of crisis—as the part that makes the rule
“unique, and brings it up to date with current macroeconomic thinking.”
Stewart Hosie
Is it not part of the problem, although we are moving slightly away from a balanced budget, that there has not been a comparable fiscal response to the substantial monetary response that we have seen over the last decade?
Peter Dowd
That is a perfectly reasonable comment. Time and again the Conservative Governments whom we have had to endure—I choose to use the word “endure”—over the last nine years have failed to take a wider view on policy-making in the country. Petty in-fighting over Brexit has put us on a precipitous, catastrophic no-deal path. They failed, through austerity, to see, and to care about, how an ideological commitment to cutting apart Government would have ripple effects across the country on rough sleeping, indebtedness, demand and productivity, which is virtually the worst in Europe under this Government.
Our fiscal credibility rule, and economic policy in general, takes a wider view, which is important. We understand how fiscal and monetary policy have to interrelate for the economy to function well in different times, and we understand how principles of economic management such as our fiscal credibility rule have to fit into a broader vision of an economy that serves society, and not just those with the strongest voices.
Robert Jenrick
No, I do not accept that for one minute. It is exactly as a result of this Government’s fiscal responsibility in that period that the public finances have now improved, credibility has been restored in the market and business has continued to invest. For those reasons and others, we now have continued record levels of employment, record low levels of unemployment and an economy that remains remarkably resilient. Let us not forget that public spending is £200 billion higher today than it was in the last year of the last Labour Government.
We are not complacent about the debt or the deficit. The fiscal outlook may be brighter, but the need for fiscal discipline continues, as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire made very clear. The debt is still more than 80% of GDP, which is equivalent to approximately £65,000 per household, and we want to reduce that figure, for a number of reasons. We are concerned to ensure that if there is a future economic shock, the economy is resilient, and we want to improve fiscal sustainability. In the most recent Budget, the Chancellor set aside £15 billion of headroom for economic shock, out of concern for any further uncertainty that might arise as a result of Brexit.
There is a broader point, however: servicing debt is costly. If our spending on debt interest were a Ministry, it would be the third largest, after health and education. Our spending merely on servicing our debt is equivalent to what we spend on the police and the armed forces. As my hon. Friend made clear, that has an opportunity cost, because that spending has no economic or social value and reduces our ability to spend on our priorities and keep personal and corporate taxes as competitive as possible. The debt burden of interest is merely being passed to future generations.
The foundations of the Government’s approach are our fiscal rules: first, to reduce the cyclically adjusted deficit to below 2% by 2020-21, and secondly to have debt fall as a percentage of GDP in the same year. Sticking to those rules will guide the UK towards a balanced budget by the middle of the next decade. The OBR’s economic and fiscal outlook, which was published in October and was quoted from earlier, shows that the Government are forecast to have met both our near-term fiscal targets in 2017-18, three years earlier than predicted. Sensibly, given uncertainties in the fiscal outlook, the Chancellor took the view that we should retain the £15 billion of headroom against the fiscal mandate in the target year and £73 billion against the target of getting debt to fall. The forecast also shows that borrowing will fall to 0.8% of GDP by 2023-24, its lowest level since 2001.
Peter Dowd
If the Chancellor and his predecessor have been so wonderful at economic management, why have they missed every single target that they have set over the past eight years?
Robert Jenrick
The hon. Gentleman rather makes the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) made. He cannot have it both ways. Either the hon. Gentleman supports debt falling—in which case he should support continued fiscal responsibility, which is one of the Government’s guiding missions—or he wishes to spend more and more. His speech argued that we should spend even more, getting us into further debt and making the situation more difficult for future generations.
Robert Jenrick
I will give way one last time, but then I must make progress.
Peter Dowd
First, I did not make the latter point. The Tories can make up their own policies on the hoof—but don’t make up ours. Secondly, the Minister still has not answered the question. It has nothing to do with the outcome; it is about why the Government, if they are so economically capable and confident, have missed all their targets.
Robert Jenrick
I have tried to answer. We are meeting our fiscal rules, as the OBR states—in fact, we are meeting them three years early. That has given us room in the Budget to invest at record levels, with £20.5 billion a year for the NHS, for example—its largest injection—and reserve headroom in the event of fiscal shock. However, the hon. Gentleman is arguing for £500 billion of additional public spending. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham said, that makes no sense whatever.
In the little time I have left, let me answer the question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire about how we can create better architecture to ensure that we and future Governments can be more fiscally responsible. We have done so in a number of ways. Our greatest step was the creation of the OBR, an institution that is now maturing and respected and will be retained on a cross-party basis in the future. It has enabled commentators and Members to have greater confidence in the figures—of course, there may be more that could be done in that respect. This year, we will institute the first zero-based spending review, which will look at all Government spending. We have taken account of the parallel with Chile, which has adopted that model in that past.
On longer-term spending, we have created the National Infrastructure Commission, which was designed to ensure that the Government think about the long-term challenges and invest appropriately within a defined spending envelope, guiding investments in our infrastructure according to a clear economic strategy. We have also taken action to ensure that our public accounts are among the world’s most transparent—they have been certified as such by the International Monetary Fund, for example. Most recently, the Chancellor announced the retirement of the private finance initiative, so that we continue to ensure that when our accounts are scrutinised, they are as clear and transparent as possible and we are always seeking to derive the greatest value for money for the taxpayer.
We have also sought to distinguish clearly between day-to-day consumption—important though such investment is for the future of the economy, whether it is in the police, in education or in the health service—and the long-term economic infrastructure investments that will really drive the economy forward. Over this Parliament, we will make the greatest investment in such economic infrastructure—our roads, our railways, our digital infrastructure—by any Government since the 1970s.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire for his remarks. This is an extremely important and timely debate. He made his case in his usual eloquent way, as one of the great champions in this House of smaller Government, lower taxes and fiscal responsibility. If only there were more colleagues who followed his example.