Finance Bill

Sajid Javid Excerpts

Tuesday 20th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

Precisely. The Minister could not understand that point from his own Budget, but I shall explain it in more depth in a moment.

On Friday this week, we will be able to test the durability of the recovery that Labour delivered. Almost two years on from the oil price hitting $147 and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Office for National Statistics will publish growth figures for the second quarter of 2010, which I am sure all hon. Members await with some interest. But this much we already know. The ONS has told us that our economy has grown by 0.7% since its low point last year; that growth in the first quarter of 2010 was some £8 billion larger than it was in the final quarter of 2009; and that output is growing by about £88 million a day.

The National Institute of Economic and Social Research has also already estimated that output in the second quarter of this year could hit 0.7%. If that comes to pass, it will be no mean achievement, especially when our neighbours tell us precisely how hard it is to sustain recovery. In the first quarter of this year, our last quarter in office, growth in this country reached 0.3%. In Germany, it was lower; in France, it was lower still; in the eurozone, it was lower; and Spain, Ireland and Greece are all forecast to see negative growth this year. Labour is proud to be the party of the recovery, and the question that the Bill should have answered is, how do we guarantee the recovery’s future?

We are proud to have been the party that brought together a global response to the recession. Here in London, countries from throughout the world agreed a plan, including a £1.1 trillion support package, that helped to ensure the revision of global growth from 1.9% last year up to 3.5% this year. We are very proud to be the party that stopped the British banking system collapsing in the face of its exposure to melting international credit systems, and we are very proud to be the party that put in place here at home the most comprehensive recovery plan to protect people’s jobs from the axe, homes from repossession and employers from liquidation.

[Sajid Javid (Bromsgrove) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman quotes ONS statistics, but he will also be aware of how last week the ONS reported that, from peak to trough, the British economy declined by 6.7%—more than any other industrialised economy. Is he also proud of that?

[Mr Byrne]

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will intervene again and remind us what happened in Germany and Japan. Will he tell us a little more about what happened to unemployment in other major economic nations?

[Sajid Javid]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving me the opportunity to intervene again. The 6.7% decline was bigger than that of any other industrialised economy; no other economy racked up a debt, both visible and unofficial, at the rate that we did; and no other economy pumped in £200 billion of its own printed money, the results of which we still do not know. He might be proud of the results that he thinks have been achieved, but the full consequences of the Labour party’s actions over the past two or three years are not yet known and may be much worse than we know them to be today.

[Mr Byrne]

Let us come to that point directly. If we want to understand the difference between our parties, we need only compare the recession that we have been through in the past two years with the one presided over by the Conservative party. Unemployment in this recession is half what it was during the recession of the 1990s. Furthermore, repossessions are 40% lower and company insolvencies are running at about a third of the rate reached in the 1990s recession. We Labour Members believe that it is right to act to protect people’s jobs and homes and the firms that they work in.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Byrne]

The hon. Gentleman makes an extremely good point. The evidence on that is mixed. The CBI industrial production survey, which was published earlier this afternoon, shows that manufacturers reported that the second quarter of this year was good and that they have a degree of confidence in exports. However, the problem is that the OBR is projecting a £100 billion increase in exports over the next four or five years. That is the equivalent of our exports to America tripling, our exports to China going up by something like 20 times, and our exports to India going up by something like 40 times. That may well come to pass, but it is safe to say that very few people would bet on it. That is why the Opposition believe that the Government should do a little more to nurture both domestic business investment and domestic demand.

The alternatives for reducing the deficit that we have rehearsed in the past couple of weeks bear a final word this afternoon. I want to return to the explanation of the difference between the scorecard projections for tax growth and what the OBR said would come through the door, which the Exchequer Secretary struggled with earlier. The point centres on how much growth will contribute to paying down the deficit over the next four years. The Labour Government’s deficit reduction plan projected that the deficit would be reduced by something of the order of £78 billion over the next four years, and the OBR inconveniently told the Chancellor that we were on course to deliver that. That plan involved £57 billion-worth of discretionary action, which was set out in detail in chapter 6 of the March Budget—£19 billion in tax increases and £38 billion of spending cuts. However, £21 billion of the deficit was projected to be closed by the economy returning to growth, with higher tax receipts and lower benefit bills.

The June Budget appears to hit growth so hard that £9 billion of extra tax is necessary to make good the effect of lower growth. That is the price of slowing the recovery. The Liberal Democrats are awfully pleased that they got an increase in income tax thresholds, and I congratulate them on securing that concession, but the truth is that they have been sold a pup. They could have had the increase in the threshold they originally wanted if we did not have to pay for the cost of lost growth.

The Budget scorecard on page 40 of the Red Book says that by rights, the Chancellor’s decision ought to bring in an extra £8.2 billion in tax by 2014-15, but the OBR says that only £3.1 billion will actually come through the door, because growth will be depressed so much by the Budget. The Red Book goes on to say—on page 97, table C9—that something like £9 billion in extra taxes and spending cuts are necessary because of this go-slow Budget. In other words, the Government have almost halved the contribution of growth to closing the deficit. It is now quite clear to the House that although the Government may have lost their monetarists, they have certainly not lost their masochists.

[Sajid Javid]

The right hon. Gentleman was comparing the growth forecast of the previous Government to that of the current Government. Is not the truth that the forecasts of the previous Government were made up by Ministers whereas the forecasts we are looking at today were made up by the independent OBR? He talks about selling a pup, but was not the pup the forecasts of the previous Government?

[Mr Byrne]

I hope that at some point in his future illustrious career in this House the hon. Gentleman has the chance to put that argument to the chief economist of the Treasury, David Ramsden. The growth forecasts that were published in our Budget were set out by Treasury civil servants. Like me, the hon. Gentleman will have noticed that the rebound in growth that was projected by the then Chancellor—now the shadow Chancellor—was very much in line with the rebound in growth that we saw after recessions in the 1980s and 1990s, but it was supported by far stronger monetary policy action. We were comfortable with the growth forecasts that we presented. The hon. Gentleman will have to reconcile himself in the months to come to the impact of slower growth and the fact that we are now having to put taxes up—something that I always thought the Conservatives opposed—because demand has been depressed to such an extent.