Budget Resolutions

Preet Kaur Gill Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab/Co-op)]

I want to use my remarks today to focus on the west midlands, my home. We are the birthplace of the first industrial revolution and the co-operative movement. We are the home of Britain’s second city, Cadbury’s chocolate and J. R. R. Tolkien. We are the inventors of the pacemaker, the balti and the world’s leading brain cancer drug. It is where, in the ’50s, my family and thousands like them travelled halfway across the world to make our home. We are a diverse, young and dynamic region. The west midlands has immense potential, but for the past 14 years we have been let down.

The headline of the Budget last week was that this would be the first Parliament in modern history where living standards have fallen. That is the grim culmination of 14 years of economic mismanagement under this Government, with taxes rising, living standards falling, growth stalling and empty promises. The Prime Minister may write off his recession as a technicality, but working people in the west midlands know better. They feel worse off because they are worse off. As the OBR revealed last week, GDP per person is set to shrink this year, having shrunk last year too.

This is also the longest period of no growth since records began in the 1950s. According to the Centre for Cities, since 2010 the average person in the west midlands is £4,320 poorer than if the economy had grown at the same rate as it did under Labour. In Stoke-on-Trent, that means that the average person is £7,360 worse off under the Tories, and in Coventry the average person is nearly £9,000 worse off. That is this Government’s legacy, and giving people £5 back with one hand after taking £10 with the other is not going to fool anyone.

At the heart of the problems facing our broken economy is Britain’s productivity crisis. Increasing productivity is critical for our success as a nation, for growth and for living standards, but our productivity levels are now lower than at any time since the industrial revolution. Our shadow Chancellor knows that productivity is a key driver of higher wages, and that is partly why we have made growth and productivity the first mission of the next Labour Government. Under Labour, London and the south-east will not be the only engines of growth. We will spread good jobs and productivity growth to every part of the country to make everyone better off. Yet there was no proper plan for growth in the Budget last week. The forecasts reveal that the growth we might expect in the next five years depends largely on the Chancellor having revised up net migration by 350,000.

As the Productivity Institute has shown, low investment, regional inequality and a lack of long-term, joined-up government are key drivers of the Tory low productivity and low growth doom loop. But where was the plan to address that in the Budget last week? Where is the long-term mission to secure the highest sustained growth in the G7, with good jobs and productivity growth in all parts of the country? Where is the industrial strategy to guide the partnership between Government and business to transform challenge into opportunity? And where is the joined-up skills strategy to bring together businesses, training providers and unions to meet the jobs market of tomorrow?

The chaos of the past few years has damaged business confidence and investment. Short-termism has been a hallmark of this Government, who have lurched from crisis to crisis. We know that businesses cannot operate like that, which is why Labour has set out a long-term industrial strategy.

The west midlands should be at the cutting edge of these frontiers. I recently visited the precision health technologies accelerator at Birmingham’s life sciences campus, bringing together the University of Birmingham, business and the NHS to create more than 10,000 jobs for our region. There is a revolution taking place in medical science, technology and data, and it has the potential to transform our healthcare. We should be at its forefront but, under this Government, Britain’s life sciences sector declined from second to ninth in the global life sciences league table for inward foreign direct capital investment in 2022—that is a £900 million drop. The UK’s share of global pharmaceutical research and development halved between 2012 and 2020.

At a stroke, the Prime Minister’s decision to attack Britain’s net zero targets trashed Britain’s reputation as a place to invest in developing the clean energy of tomorrow. The outcry from industry shows how self-defeating this was.

Far from scaling back our ambition, Labour will increase it. We will deliver a cheaper zero-carbon electricity system by 2030 through our green prosperity plan. We will bring much-needed investment into the west midlands, worth hundreds of millions of pounds, through our battery power fund. There will be a gigafactory in the west midlands and investment in green hydrogen manufacturing to make the clean power of the future. We will reform our planning system and create jobs for construction workers, so that we can upgrade our region’s old, draughty housing stock. And there will be more than a thousand local power projects through our local power plan.

The reality is that people in the west midlands need change. Change from a Government who have left them thousands of pounds worse off, who have brought public services to their knees and who have left the economy in tatters. We are in a make or break decade for our economy, and the choice at the next election will be clear: five more years of the same failed approach or a decade of national renewal with Labour—good jobs in every part of the country, a world-leading green investment agenda and a life sciences sector that will create the jobs and technologies of tomorrow. Only Labour will give the west midlands its future back.