Balancing the Public Finances
Debate between Royston Smith and Kirsty Blackman(6 years, 9 months ago)
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Kirsty Blackman
I was literally about to come to that. There are three ways for the Government to increase spending on public services: higher taxes, higher borrowing or higher growth. Those are not my words but those of the Chancellor, yet whenever an Opposition hon. Member suggests increasing public spending or simply not reducing it, Conservative Members say, “Oh, you will have to put up taxes.” As the Chancellor said, there are three ways to increase public spending.
Some of the things that Conservative Members said are a concern. My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) said that, according to the Resolution Foundation, 2011-21 will be the worst decade for pay growth for 210 years. That is quite some statistic.
It is interesting that the Government talk about how wonderfully they are doing for young people. The Institute for Fiscal Studies said that those born in the 1980s have by their early 30s accumulated half as much wealth as those who were born in the 1970s. The right hon. Member for Forest of Dean mentioned the IFS as a respected think-tank, and it won an award last night. If we are talking about mortgaging our future and concerns for the future, the lack of wealth accumulation compared with previous generations is a real problem, including for millennials. The way the Government are dealing with it is not working.
Kirsty Blackman
Not just now; I am conscious of time.
The Government are increasing spending on infrastructure. A recent report from the Institute for Government said that
“weak processes are leading to the wrong projects and contested decisions, wasting both government time and taxpayer money.”
We agree that infrastructure spending is a good thing, but we believe that the processes in place and the Government’s choices are poor and could be much better directed to infrastructure projects that will increase economic growth and create, as the Chancellor said, better spending on public services by growing the economy rather than simply cutting things or increasing taxes.