Public Spending: Inheritance

Debate between Rachel Reeves and Jon Trickett

Monday 29th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

The challenge of productivity sits across both the public and private sectors. In the last 14 years, productivity has flatlined in the public and private sectors and we need to boost both. We need to boost productivity in the public sector to ensure that we get better value for money for our public services, but we also need to improve productivity in our private sector so that we can improve living standards and have the money for our public services.

[Jon Trickett (Normanton and Hemsworth) (Lab)]

I welcome the Chancellor’s statement about public sector pay, but is it not clear that, after savaging public services, holding down public sector pay and driving 3 million people into food banks, this crazy ideological austerity programme of the Tories has failed massively while at the same time, the richest 250 people in the country gained wealth of £500 billion? Can I tempt the Chancellor to say that, while we accept that there are hard decisions to make, we reject the ideological commitment to this form of Tory austerity?

[Rachel Reeves]

I thank my hon. Friend for that question. We do owe it to our armed forces, our prison officers, our police officers, our nurses and our teachers to reward them properly for their work, and that is what we did today in implementing in full the recommendations of the pay review bodies. I echo his view that a return to austerity would be no way to run our economy. It resulted in growth haemorrhaging in the last Parliament, with all the damage that that did to living standards and to the money for our public services.