Budget Resolutions

Rebecca Pow Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2017 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell]

Debt under the hon. Gentleman’s Government has gone up by nearly £800 billion, and it is debt to pay for failure rather than to pay for investment. If we borrow to invest, we grow the economy, which means that we can put more people to work with more skills and higher wages. They pay more taxes and it pays for itself. That is the lesson that the Government still have not learned.

The Government appear, as is demonstrated today, to be completely out of touch with the mess that our economy is in. They have no understanding of the consequences of their choices for the lives of our people. They do not seem to grasp the scale of what is happening to our people out there. The Chancellor has tried to claim that income inequality has fallen, but he does not seem to be aware that more than a million food parcels have been handed out in this, the sixth richest economy on the planet. Inequality is not falling. He may well be aware that London is home to more billionaires than ever before, but does he know that there are more people homeless than ever? How can he claim that inequality is falling when that stark comparison is made? This Government’s decisions will make the poorest poorer still. Buried away in an annex, at the very back of the Treasury’s own distributional analysis, is the truth on this. The poorest fifth are being made poorer by the changes this Government is implementing. Those in the poorest fifth will lose almost £250 a year.

The House of Commons Library has confirmed that the burden of cuts—86%—made in tax and benefits measures since 2010 have fallen on women. Is that what equality is under this Government—86% of cuts on the shoulders of women?

[Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)]

rose—

[John McDonnell]

I will come back to the hon. Lady.

On housing, the Government’s proposed solution to the crisis is inept, and counterproductive. The stamp duty cut for first-time buyers will not bring forward the new homes that we need. No wonder the OBR expects only 3,500 additional sales to happen because of the change. It says that thanks to the price rises

“the main gainers from the policy are people who already own property.”

The problem is simple, but perhaps it needs explaining: you cannot solve a problem of housing supply by driving up housing demand. We are not the only people saying that. Conservatives Ministers reviewed a previous stamp duty reduction and said that the cut had

“not had a significant impact on improving affordability for first time buyers”.

Setting a target of 300,000 homes a year for the mid-2020s does little for a housing crisis today.

[Rebecca Pow]

rose—

[Jo Churchill (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Rebecca Pow]

I was going to intervene on a previous point. The people of Taunton Deane have more money in their pockets, which is what they want. We have put up the national living wage, cut income tax by raising the personal allowance, and, again, frozen fuel duty. People actually have thousands more in their pockets than they had under the Labour Government.

[John McDonnell]

I know that the hon. Lady is well intentioned, but she has displayed ignorance of what large numbers of people are experiencing. May I suggest this to her—[Interruption.] I do not wish to be patronising. [Interruption.] If that is the way it is interpreted, it is not how it is meant to be. I just say that all of us, who are on relatively high wages, need to be very careful when talking about levels of income and levels of wealth because many people, including 4 million of our children, are actually living in poverty. Two thirds of those children are living in households where someone is in work, which says something about low pay to me, as it should do to all of us.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sajid Javid]

The hon. Lady will know that we are currently consulting on how councils across the country, however they are led, should assess housing need. Once the proposals go forward, it will be clear that no council will be able to avoid building the houses it needs to.

In the areas where supply and demand are most badly mismatched, where most homes are unaffordable to most people, we will increase local authority housing revenue account borrowing caps by a total of £1 billion. That will allow ambitious councils to invest in new homes where they are most needed. We will bring together public and private capital to support the delivery of five new locally led garden towns in areas of high demand. We are committed to building up to 1 million new homes in the Oxford-Milton Keynes-Cambridge corridor by 2050, and we have agreed one of our first ambitious housing deals, with Oxfordshire, to deliver 100,000 homes by 2031.

[Rebecca Pow]

Taunton has been made a garden town, and I am very proud to be part of it. Will the Secretary of State confirm that as well as building more homes, we are going to build homes that people really want to live in? We are going to make good communities and good places to live, with the right infrastructure and all the facilities that people want. We are going to be the Government who bring housing into the 21st century.

[Sajid Javid]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is not just about building homes; it is about building communities. That means, among other things, supplying the infrastructure that is required, and I will come on to that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)]

I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey). I welcome the many positive announcements in the Budget, which demonstrate that the Government are listening, are in touch and are acting to make people’s lives better. Some of the announcements will certainly put money in the pockets of people in Taunton Deane and improve their lives, particularly increasing the personal allowance, freezing fuel duty and, judging by the number of texts and calls I have received, extending the railcard to 26 to 30-year-olds. The extension will please a lot of people, not least my 25-year-old daughter, who was wondering how on earth she would ever be able to come home again to visit us in Taunton because rail tickets are so expensive—the railcard extension has gone down exceptionally well.

I welcome the Government’s commitment to housing. In Taunton and Wellington we are already making a major contribution to meeting national targets. Yes, there is often opposition, but there is a demand for housing. I often meet constituents who are pleased to have gotten on the housing ladder by using Help to Buy to buy their first home. The more we can help people, the better.

I am proud to say that Taunton has garden town status, which attracts funding to set up a framework to develop the kind of housing and places to live that I believe people want. It is a great opportunity to develop sustainable, energy-efficient, environmentally friendly properties with sustainable drainage in settlements that have connectivity and green spaces where nature can live among the people. If we design such places, they will inevitably be more accepted.

It is essential that we have the right infrastructure in such housing developments, and I will give an example. A planning application has just been agreed for 1,600 houses in Staplegrove, but the application is controversial because it needs a small piece of road to go through the development. The developers say they cannot afford to put in the road and the 25% affordable housing as that makes the scheme unviable, so now they are committed to just 15% affordable housing. Luckily, help is on the horizon, because the council has applied for housing infrastructure fund money, which would enable the funds to come forward for this road to be built. I make no bones about the fact that I am very supportive of that. If that money was granted, we could build the road and build the school in advance, and everyone would be happy. I believe firmly that the Government are listening on this, because in the Budget we have put another £2.7 billion into the HIF for exactly these sorts of examples. If we can get these right, people will not be averse to the building of these houses that we so need.

Also on the housing front, I welcome the announcement that the Homes and Communities Agency is going to metamorphose into Homes England, as this will be a catalyst for bringing the right kind of housing forward and putting in money to help underwrite borrowing for developers to put in infrastructure and to work with local authorities on delivery. Before I leave the theme of housing, I would like to put in a bid to the Minister, if he is listening, for rural housing. I have met so many groups that actually want some houses in their villages; they do not want to be preserved in aspic, because if villages are to survive we need people to live in them. I ask the Minister to listen on that. I met the Blackdown Hills AONB Partnership recently and it raised this issue. We really need to pay attention, as this could help with our house building targets.

On education, I just want to praise the £20 million for the T-levels and the emphasis on maths. My maths teaching was terrible and I only hope that young people in future will have a much better maths education. This Government are putting the tools in place for that, as well as the digital skills training and the distance learning. Of course we can do distance learning only if the digital broadband and everything else is working properly, so I make a big bid for that, too.

I cannot end without mentioning the environment. It was music to my hears to hear the Chancellor say

“we cannot keep our promise to the next generation to build an economy fit for the future unless we ensure our planet has a future.”—[Official Report, 22 November 2017; Vol. 631, c. 1050.]

He has been listening, not only to “The Blue Planet” but to lots of colleagues in here who say that we cannot have an economy that works unless the environment is sustainable. So “Hear, hear” to that, to looking into a tax on single-use plastics and to the money for the clean air scheme.

Finally, on cider, may I make a plea to the Minister? I understand why we are going to put more duty on white cider, but please can we look at the position of traditional cider makers in my constituency, who may go out of business unless we can put a different definition in place for them? On that note, let me say cheers to this Budget and all the good things I think it is going to bring.