Budget Resolutions

Ruth Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Ruth Jones (Newport West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel). I am grateful for the opportunity to speak briefly in the final day’s debate on the Budget 2021. Sadly, the Budget does little to help the hard-pressed communities in Newport West who are suffering from the worst effects of more than a decade of Tory austerity. This is not a Budget for working people; it is a budget for the banks and the bankers—or, otherwise put, those who fund the Tory party. Thousands of working people in Newport West will be forced to fork out for the national insurance tax hike next year, but the banks, thanks to this Prime Minister and this Chancellor, are getting a £4 billion tax cut.

The people of Newport West, like many across the country, are facing a cost-of-living crisis now, but there was nothing in the Budget to address the crisis. There was nothing to help people with heating their homes, nothing to help people with filling their cars and no help for people with feeding their families. That is why Labour in Government would cut VAT on energy bills for at least six months and that is why we would tackle the cost-of-living crisis from day one.

The spending review makes provision for an extra 8,000 police officers, as part of the overall commitment to hire 20,000 new officers. Yes, that is to be welcomed, but even if the Government meet their target, police officer numbers will still be lower than they were in 2010, as over the last 11 years the Tories have cut police numbers by 21,000. Now, I am not a mathematician, but even I know that that is an overall net loss.

I am not even going to begin to talk about the pay freezes and below-rate-of-inflation pay awards to our hard-working public sector staff. So much for recognising and rewarding our amazing key workers.

It is, frankly, a disgrace that online giants such as Amazon will get a £12 billion tax cut when some of the poorest in our country are forced to pay more. People with the broadest shoulders should be paying their fair share of tax, not the hard-working people who will end up paying an extra £1.7 billion over the next five years under this Tory Government.

Like many local people in Newport West, I am desperately concerned that there was no real attempt to address the impact of the cruel Tory cuts to universal credit, which was the biggest overnight cut to welfare since world war two. Millions of people, including over 9,000 families in Newport West, have had their universal credit cut, which has had a devastating impact on families here and across Wales. We will not let the Tory Ministers forget that. Although I welcome the decision to cut the universal credit taper rate from 63p to 55p, it still means that a single parent claiming universal credit on the minimum wage will lose an estimated £361 next year. That is unacceptable and I say to the people living in Newport West: I will keep fighting to cancel this cut.

There was little in the Budget to help the poorest in the world. There was little action to preserve our planet and protect our environment, and there was nothing to mitigate the worst impact of the failing and unravelling Tory Brexit deal. I am proud that Labour would take a fairer and wiser approach to our public finances, not wasting billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money by handing out dodgy PPE contracts to mates and contacts on WhatsApp. After a decade of faltering growth and broken Tory promises, Labour would get the economy firing on all cylinders and get our country back on track.