Peter Grant
Main Page: Peter Grant (Scottish National Party - Glenrothes)Department Debates - View all Peter Grant's debates with the HM Treasury
(1 year, 5 months ago)
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John Glen
Let me take those points in turn. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) made a point about nurses’ salaries and the cost of not having that workforce in place. That is exactly what this work will do: we will look at the gaps and respond to the pay demands in due course.
The hon. Member for Bristol South asked what the Treasury has done in terms of the money that has already been expended in looking at the changes; I cannot give her a precise figure but I would be happy to write to her. The Treasury is focused on working closely with Patricia Hewitt, the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England to grip this issue in the fullest possible way, recognising the interaction between hospitals and social care, to ensure that we have the best possible solution to deal with the challenges we face.
Members will recognise that only by expanding the capacity of the social care system will we free up hospital beds, so we are making up to £2.8 billion of extra funding available to the adult social care system in England. That will increase to £4.7 billion in 2024-25. We of course need the NHS to continue to look at where it can squeeze more out of every pound—not at the expense of those on the frontline, but so that we can deliver ever-greater care—yet even with efficiency savings we will not have the NHS we all want without more money so, because of the difficult decisions taken elsewhere, we will increase the NHS budget in each of the next two years by an extra £3.3 billion. Taken together, our actions will ensure that up to £8 billion of additional funding is made available for health and social care in 2024-25.
The NHS and schools in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland face equivalent pressures, so the Barnett consequentials of today’s announcement will mean an extra £1.5 billion for the Scottish Government, £1.2 billion for the Welsh Government and £650 million for the Northern Ireland Executive. We make this investment not just because it is the right thing to do but as a central plank of our economic policy.
Similarly, as my right hon. Friend the Chancellor said, an investment in education is an investment in growth. The foundation of our success lies in the classroom just as much as it is found in the boardroom. I was very pleased to see representations from my parliamentary neighbour, my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse), who made that point very clearly, as did a number of colleagues.
We are not just going to protect the education budget; we are going to increase it. The core schools budget will rise by £2.3 billion in both of the next two years—2023-24 and 2024-25—restoring 2010 levels of per pupil funding in real terms. Not only is that the right thing to do, but it makes economic sense: more opportunity will not only reap a fairer society, but deliver a more prosperous economy.
Just as we look to improve opportunities for those aged 16 and under, we are determined to help people already in work to raise their incomes, progress in work and become financially independent. That is why we have uprated working age and disability benefits in line with inflation, at a cost of £11 billion. It is also why we will ask more than 600,000 more people on universal credit to meet a work coach, so that they can get the support they need to increase their hours or earnings, and we will invest an extra £280 million to crack down on benefit fraud and error over the next two years.
Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
The job conditionality that the Minister has just referred to has been welcomed in certain sections of the right-wing press, whose agenda says that the only reason somebody is not working full time is that they are too lazy and would rather be on benefits. For the record, can he state categorically that that is not the way His Majesty’s Government regards people on benefits?
Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
The Office for Budget Responsibility and the document that accompanies the Budget tell us that it was asked to prepare forecasts six times in six weeks for a succession of Chancellors. Most of the time, it did not even have time to do a proper assessment before it had to go back and change all the numbers because of yet another screeching handbrake turn by the Government. Perhaps if the Government had thought about the economy during the months over the summer, when they were more interested in fighting over jobs for the boys and girls, there would not have been so many urgent changes this time.
What we have arrived at is a Budget that will see the vast majority of people in these islands worse off, with probably the biggest and most rapid fall in living standards since records began. Millions of families will be plunged even deeper into poverty, hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost, and there will be unsustainable cuts, even to the areas of public services that the Tories claim to care a jot about. If that is a well-balanced Budget, it is balanced in the way that the bus was at the end of “The Italian Job”. Practically the only good thing that even the Government’s supporters can say about the Budget is that the cliff edge that they are driving us off is not quite as high as the cliff edge that they tried to drive us off a few weeks ago.
It seems a long time ago, because it was, that the Chief Secretary said that we need to be honest with people, but nobody on the Government Benches has been honest enough to mention the B-word. The reason that the cuts are so bad and our economy is in such a mess is as much to do with Brexit as anything else. Putin’s war has affected many people across the world, as did the covid pandemic, but why will the United Kingdom’s growth be lower than that of any of the 27 EU member states next year? Why is the United Kingdom the only place in the G7 that has still not caught up with pre-covid? What kind of global phenomenon always picks on poor Britain to make things worse here than anywhere else?
What Britain has done that none of those other places has done is: first, have a succession of calamitous and incompetent Governments; and secondly, take the ridiculous decision to isolate itself from the biggest single internal market on the planet. Not only are we now back in recession, but OBR and European Commission forecasts say that the fall in UK GDP in 2023 will be worse than in any EU member state.
In fact, 23 of the 27 EU member states are likely to see economic growth next year while we are in recession. Incidentally, the two highest are Ireland and Malta—two countries that, if we believe the Conservative party, could not survive without the broad shoulders of being part of the United Kingdom to lean on. Interestingly, I discovered only recently that in 1956 Malta voted to become part of the United Kingdom. Eight years later it changed its mind and voted for independence in a referendum. Well, well—how history can repeat itself sometimes.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has pointed out another great dishonesty, which is that this is two Budgets—one for before the election, and the other for the really savage cuts to happen after the next election. If the Government believed that the cuts were the right thing to do, they would be doing them now and then going to the people and asking them to cast a verdict.
Yes, there are parts of the Budget that I welcome, and perhaps they do not go far enough. I support the wealth tax in principle, but why is it only on energy companies? They are not the only companies whose directors and shareholders have become billionaires overnight, and not through their own hard work but through circumstance. The directors and shareholders of suppliers—in many cases, failed suppliers—of personal protective equipment were making millions overnight, and other covid contracts were given in very dubious circumstances, with huge amounts paid for nothing or next to nothing. What about the big tech companies, which made massive windfall profits as a result of covid? Does nobody think that perhaps they should pay a wee bit more towards the customers who made those profits for them?
I welcome any increase in the legal minimum wage, but an indication of the lack of honesty from those on the Government Benches is that they call it a living wage. It is not enough to live on, and if anybody left on the Government Benches wants to challenge me on that, I would like to see them live on the minimum wage and nothing else for six months and see how they get on. Even the increase that the Government have announced is not enough to keep pace with inflation, which means that the 2 million lowest-paid earners in the United Kingdom will see a real-terms pay cut under this Government. That is before we take into account the stealth tax of leaving all the tax bands where they are while inflation is in double figures, and it means that somebody working full time on the minimum wage will pay £400 of their money back to the Treasury by way of increased income tax.
This Budget responds to the cost of living crisis by making it even worse for most people. It forces Scotland to pay a per capita share of the eye-watering costs of a new nuclear power station that we neither want nor need to meet our current and future energy demands. At the same time, it does nothing to address the scandalous anti-Scottish discrimination that charges electricity providers in Scotland more to feed their electricity into the grid, and charges customers in Scotland more to take the same electricity back out again.
This is a Budget in hock to the xenophobic, anti-immigrant elements on the far right of politics in these islands, some of which, I am ashamed to say, we have heard from Members on the Tory Benches today. It is so in hock to that xenophobia that not only do Conservative Members want to build barriers around their own country, but they insist on building them around my country, to stop my country welcoming back the workers on whom our economy and essential services depend. If Conservative Members want to turn their country into an immigrant-free isolationist society, that is up to them, but they have no right whatsoever to do it to my country. We want to welcome people back in.
This Budget is the economic manifesto on which Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories will hold hands in Better Together mark 2 next year. They will try to tell us that this manifesto is better than what we could get with independence. They will tell us that this manifesto is the best our country can do, and the best our people deserve, but our people deserve a lot more. This Budget, even as we speak, is persuading more Scots than ever before to conclude that the question is not, “How can we afford to be independent?”, but rather, “Can we afford not to be independent?”, and the answer to that is a resounding no—we cannot.
The Economic Secretary to the Treasury (Andrew Griffith)
In these challenging times, this was an autumn statement that responds directly to the needs of our country. It is serious and sensible, it delivers on stability, growth and public services, and it does so at a time of great geopolitical uncertainty. Inflation is on the march around the world, with higher rates in Germany, the Netherlands and Italy than in the United Kingdom. Interest rates are up from historic lows across the Atlantic and in the euro area. Growth forecasts around the world have been downgraded.
We are not immune from these global challenges, and so many colleagues on the Government Benches were right to provide that context. My hon. Friends the Members for South Cambridgeshire (Anthony Browne), for Poole (Sir Robert Syms), for Ipswich (Tom Hunt) and for Delyn (Rob Roberts) talked about how anybody who denies that economic context is taking the British people for fools. Those of us on this side of the House will never take the British people for fools. We will tell them the truths.
In designing our response, we have focused on the need to be compassionate, honest and fair, just as we did during the covid pandemic, spending £400 billion to protect the people and businesses of this country. We have put our values front and centre, and that means, despite a downturn, delivering a stronger NHS and protecting pensioners. It means spending £55 billion this winter to protect households on energy bills, and it means, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) talked about, giving us the time to deliver the public service reform that will make sure that we spend every pound of taxpayers’ money in the right way. It means that, even with underlying debt as a percentage of GDP falling, we are investing in an education system that gives people the skills they need to take advantage of the job market of the future that we are going to create. And it means that, even with public sector borrowing kept below 3%, we will be building the infrastructure we need to compete in the world.
As my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin), the Chair of the Treasury Committee, talked about, inflation is the most invidious thing, and that is why this autumn statement goes with the grain of the action that we need to take now. These are immensely difficult decisions. Increasing taxes is not something that any Government want to do, but right now it is what a responsible Government, facing these challenges, must do. My right hon. Friends the Members for Gainsborough and for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Mr Clarke), and my hon. Friends the Members for South Dorset (Richard Drax) and for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) talked passionately about that. None of us on this side of the House came here to do that. Conservatives believe in people keeping more of what they earn. We are on the side of strivers, and the quicker we can get back to that, the better, but now is not that time.
We are going to grow public spending, but we are going to grow it slower than the economy. As my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Treasury said in his opening speech, for the remaining two years of this spending review, we will protect the increases in departmental budgets that we have already set out in cash terms. We will then grow resource spending at 1% a year in real terms for the three years that follow. Although Departments will have to make efficiencies to deal with inflationary pressures in the next two years, that means that overall spending on public services will continue to rise in real terms for the next five years.
This was not just a statement about stability and our public services. Central to it was growth. As my right hon. Friend the Chancellor said to the House last week:
“Sound money is the rock upon which long-term prosperity rests; but it is not enough on its own. Our plan is designed to build a high-wage, high-skill economy that leads to long-term prosperity.”—[Official Report, 17 November 2022; Vol. 722, c. 851.]
This autumn statement delivers on that: more money for education; working with the Department for Work and Pensions and seeking to tackle the crisis of inactivity, at a time when employers are crying out for workers, with more than 600,000 people off welfare and into work; and increasing public funding for research and development to £20 billion by 2024-25, as part of our mission to make the United Kingdom a science superpower, with the highest level of research and development that the country has ever seen. We are investing in high-risk, high-reward research, and we seek for the constituency of every Member, the vision that my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley seeks for his constituents.
We will grow by using our Brexit freedoms to take the next step in our supply-side transformation, targeting five growth industries of outsize opportunity. [Interruption.] Opposition Members may disagree that these are outsize opportunities, but do they disagree with digital technology, life sciences, new low carbon industries, our wonderful financial services, and advanced manufacturing? We need to be better at turning world-class innovation into world-class companies, but the capital to invest in opportunities cannot come solely from the taxpayer, whatever the hon. Member for Coventry South (Zarah Sultana) may wish. That is why our decision last week on the reform of Solvency II is so important for growth. Without compromising policyholder protection, the changes will better mobilise the UK’s £3.4 trillion of pension wealth. As the Association of British Insurers estimates, that will unlock £100 billion of new investment here in our economy over the next 10 years. That is investment in sustainable assets, clean energy, house building and local communities, and it is just the start of a series of measures that will combine with the Financial Services and Markets Bill—the first ab initio review of financial services regulation for over 20 years, and the first since we left the European Union—and will make the UK the world’s most innovative and competitive global financial centre.
That is why, unlike those on the Opposition Benches who yearn wistfully for powers to be returned to their Brussels overlords, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor were right to reaffirm today that we must never go back, and never pursue a relationship with Europe that relies on alignment with EU laws. Brexit can deliver and is already delivering enormous benefit and opportunities—something my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset reminded us.
Andrew Griffith
I will happily give way. Perhaps the hon. Member will tell the House how dividing this great Union will grow our economy.
Peter Grant
As I think everyone on these Benches will agree, the Budget we have just had presented to us means that the Union is anything but great. Will the Minister tell my constituents one thing from Brexit that is a definite benefit even to 20% of people in my constituency—something about which they will notice a difference?