Budget Resolutions

Preet Kaur Gill Excerpts

Wednesday 30th October 2024 Commons Chamber

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

It is my great pleasure to speak in this debate responding to the first Labour Budget in 14 years, delivered by the first ever female Chancellor of the Exchequer. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Chancellor on making history today.

In July, the country elected Labour to fix the foundations of our country and put us on a path towards national renewal, and that is what this Budget does. The Chancellor is not ducking the big decisions or slapping sticking plasters on the problems; instead, she is fronting up to the challenges and taking long-term decisions in the interests of Britain. My constituents voted for change, and with this Budget they will see a Government who are on their side—on the side of working people—pulling up their sleeves to deliver the change that they voted for. I was delighted to see the Prime Minister visit Birmingham earlier this week, where he set out his desire to put our city at the centre of the Government’s plan for growth. Growing our economy is the only sustainable way in which to fund the public services on which we all rely.

I thank the Chancellor for the many excellent announcements in her speech. We have already heard a lot of bluster from the Opposition, playing silly games with semantics over the definition of a working person, but it could not be clearer whose side this Government are on. May I remind Conservative Members that the last Parliament was the first in modern history in which living standards fell? They left an economy of high taxes, low growth and low wages. Public services are on the floor, and we have had a “pay more, get less” doom loop of stagnation and decline. Under the Conservatives, the very basics of what one needs to live a good life—a safe and affordable place to live, money in one’s pocket, and the security of strong public services that are there when needed—were all ripped away. First, austerity stripped more than £1 billion from Birmingham over a decade. Then we had the Conservatives’ botched Brexit deal. Finally, they crashed the economy under Liz Truss.

The Tory record left us with slow economic growth, nearly 8 million people stuck on NHS waiting lists, a housing crisis, with 24,000 people on Birmingham’s housing register, crumbling schools and hospitals, stagnant wages, rising living costs, and limited job growth, with young people and graduates facing fewer employment opportunities for the jobs of the future. Worse still, under the last Government, people lost faith in the fundamental promise of this country that the next generation should do better than the last. They lost trust that politicians were able to take tough decisions for the long term, and to put the country before their own political skins.

The “here today, gone tomorrow” culture of broken promises damaged people’s faith in politics, but with this budget we can begin the patient work of rebuilding our country, because we have a Prime Minister and a Chancellor who understand that we were elected to serve. The people of our great country finally have a Government who are prepared to take tough decisions and get on with the job of cleaning up the mess left by the Conservative party. We will invest in our NHS after 14 years of decline. We will make fairer choices on tax, spending and welfare. We will protect working people by not increasing national insurance, the basic, higher and additional rates of income tax, or VAT, just as we promised.

We brought a record-breaking £63 billion of private investment into Britain at our international investment summit this month. That is a vote of confidence in this Government. We have £500 million of new investment in battery storage, which will create the jobs of the future in Birmingham. Today, the Chancellor has confirmed a change to the fiscal rules to break the low-investment, low-growth cycle under the previous Government. That is a decision to secure Britain’s long-term future. It will put muscle behind the Government’s industrial strategy so that we can invest in the industries of the future in partnership with the private sector, and create revenue to fund the public services that our constituents expect and deserve. The question has always been whether to invest or decline. The Conservatives can choose decline, but we choose investment.

The truth is that the average person in the west midlands is £4,320 poorer than they would have been had the economy grown since 2010 at the same rate it did under the last Labour Government. That is why I heartily welcome the Chancellor’s decision to increase the national minimum wage, which provides a £1,400 boost to full-time equivalent pay for over 45,000 people in Birmingham alone. University Hospitals Birmingham, which is in my constituency, is the largest trust in the country, so I thank the Chancellor for announcing funding to support the delivery of 2 million extra NHS operations, scans and appointments a year in order to cut waiting lists across England. I cannot describe how much that means to not just NHS staff, whose morale has been ground into a fine dust over the last 14 years, but people throughout my constituency. Some of my constituents have died while waiting for treatment, and I know of one child who lost her sight while waiting for an appointment.

A healthy economy depends on the health of the country. Under the last Government, nearly 3 million working-age people were out of work or long-term sick—a British record. That is why I am pleased to see the announcement of £240 million for local services, to help people back into work. Skills England will map the jobs that are needed and the pathways to opportunities. Some £30 million will be spent on primary school breakfast clubs, which will help children to get a nutritious start to their day and take the pressure off parents who want to get out to work. The confirmation of £1.8 billion to support the expansion of Government-funded childcare is extremely good news for hundreds of young families in my constituency, especially given that more than half of our children’s centres in Birmingham were closed under the Tories. Families will be far better off with Labour.

I appreciate that the Chancellor has had to make some extremely tough choices in this Budget to get the public finances back in order. The £22 billion black hole is the tip of the iceberg after the last 14 years, but it is no less appalling. The OBR has today revealed an absolutely shocking litany of mismanagement and failure, including spending the reserves three times over, wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on the Rwanda gimmick and billions on asylum hotels, propping up failing train companies, and unfunded spending commitments. So will the Conservatives please spare us some of their faux outrage about tax? They raised the tax burden to its highest level since the second world war, they knew full well that public services had to be paid for and they hid the £22 billion black hole from the public. How did they expect to pay for that? They should have some shame, frankly.

This Government are fixing the Conservatives’ mess and protecting working people’s payslips as they do it. Our announcements today will make a difference. We are investing billions to get Britain building, making business rates fairer to protect our high streets, giving certainty to business on tax, supporting frontline policing levels, providing funding to local government and £1 billion for SEND provision, protecting the pension triple lock and finding money for potholes—I could go on.

Some things will of course take time, but these decisions are the reason we can have confidence that the Britain we are building will be built on something solid, not on sand. With this Budget, this Government have returned stability to our economy. It has reinforced the role of the OBR, and it will make sure that we can never, ever again have a repeat of the reckless mini-Budget that sent mortgages through the roof. We are backing business by releasing investment in sectors with potential to grow, including rail and road, green technology, green hydrogen and gigafactories. We are investing in our public services, including our NHS, early years and affordable housing, to ensure that we are ready to face the challenges of the next decade in an increasingly uncertain world. This is a Budget to deliver on the promise of change. It is a Budget that will fix the foundations of our economy, invest in our future, get the NHS back on its feet and rebuild Britain.