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Debate between Richard Fuller and Lindsay Hoyle(2 weeks, 4 days ago)
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Richard Fuller (North Bedfordshire) (Con)
Two weeks ago, the spring statement rushed through changes to disability benefits, or “pocket money” to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, to help plug the £14 billion gap in public finances created by the first Labour Budget. Now we are already in the Office for Budget Responsibility’s scenario 2 on tariffs, and the Chancellor is once again forecast to be out of room on her fiscal targets. What does she plan to ask the Chief Secretary to the Treasury to do to update departmental budgets in his multi-year spending review in order to avoid punishing businesses and people once again with further taxes?
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Debate between Richard Fuller and Lindsay Hoyle(1 month, 3 weeks ago)
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Richard Fuller (North Bedfordshire) (Con)
Improving public sector productivity was the No.1 ask of Institute of Directors’ businesses trying to weather Storm Rachel, but under Labour, public sector productivity has fallen further behind pre-pandemic levels. The number of civil servants working from home has gone up and, shockingly, as The Daily Telegraph has found, thousands of civil servants are being signed off to work from abroad. Therefore, whether it is on civil servants working from their bedrooms or from Benidorm, or on other blockers of public sector productivity, what has the Chief Secretary to the Treasury actually done in his last eight months in office, or is he too comfortable with what the Prime Minister calls
“the tepid bath of managed decline”?
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Debate between Richard Fuller and Lindsay Hoyle(3 months ago)
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Richard Fuller (North Bedfordshire) (Con)
Confidence on Britain’s high streets is sliding faster than the Chancellor will be down the ski slopes of Davos later today. With retail sales down—rather than up, as expected in the run-up to Christmas—and with the British Retail Consortium saying that two thirds of stores will raise prices to cover her national insurance increases, when will the Minister accept that the Chancellor’s economic strategy of raising taxes and increasing regulations is not working?
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Debate between Richard Fuller and Lindsay Hoyle(4 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Richard Fuller (North Bedfordshire) (Con)
A cornerstone of sound management is economic certainty, but this Government seem to specialise in creating economic uncertainty; most recently they did so by delaying the date for the critical multi-year spending review. It looks like the Chancellor does not have a grip on either her Cabinet colleagues’ spending plans or her own plans for public sector productivity. Which is it—or is it both?