Budget Resolutions

Sammy Wilson Excerpts

Wednesday 30th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

Unlike the Father of the House, the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), I have not sat through 45 Budgets, or however many he mentioned—I am far, far too young for that—but I have sat through a number of Budgets where, after a change of Government, Chancellors and Prime Ministers have sought to blacken the people they inherited the economy from. When I played football, we used to call it “getting your retaliation in first”; I think that we have seen a bit of that. We had it under the last Government as well, of course. For about three years, I had to listen to George Osborne telling us that the previous Government had not fixed his roof while the sun was shining, and I suspect that for about the next three years we will have to sit and listen to the black hole that the present Government have inherited—and so it will go on as people try to justify the situation they find themselves in and indeed some of the failures of Government, year after year.

When listening to debates like this, I suspect that there are points that go over the heads of most of the population. Billions are thrown around—“We’re going to spend billions on this, and we are going to take billions out of that”—but that does not immediately resonate with the population. What does resonate, as we have seen in the last three months, is seeing figures that enable them quickly to identify the impact on them of the policies being introduced. I suspect one reason that there has been such reaction against the withdrawal of the winter fuel payment is that people can understand. They might not understand when the Government take £3 billion off a departmental Budget, but they understand when they take £300 off them in the middle of winter, when they are struggling with their fuel bills.

I wonder whether the Chancellor has learned that lesson already. I was relieved when she announced that she was not going to increase fuel duty. I suspect that one of the reasons is that she knows that an increase would have been easily understood by people who went to a petrol station to fill their car up and saw another 7p on the price of petrol per litre. If she has learned that lesson, I am glad that costs will not go up for my constituents, many of whom live in rural areas and depend on their car. In Northern Ireland, an awful lot of our supplies come in by road.

One thing I am fairly sure of, looking at the broader picture that the Government have tried to paint, is that the Budget, and the behaviour of the Government in the lead-up to it, will increase the existing cynicism towards politics and politicians. During the election, the Labour party said, “We have a fully funded programme. We know what the figures are. We’re not going to increase your taxes.” Then suddenly there is a black hole. After painting the black hole, what do the Government do? They immediately start spending stacks of money. They give wage increases, set up quangos to deliver net zero, and spend money on carbon capture and storage. Billions of pounds are suddenly announced against a background of: “We have no money, and we’re going to have to put up taxes.”

Labour’s promise was that no taxes would be imposed on working people. The Government tried to wriggle out of that. Who are these working people? Who will be affected? I will not go through all the iterations that there have been of “working people”. The fact is, as a result of the Budget, people know that they will pay more tax and their wages will be affected. I notice Labour Members shaking their heads; they should look at the report from the Office for Budget Responsibility. What prediction does it make? It predicts that disposable income will fall in real terms, real earnings will be reduced, and interest rates on Government bonds, which were already expected to go up, will go up further—all of which has an impact on people’s livelihoods.

The Government promised that they would not fiddle the figures and would be dead straight with people. Yet immediately—the Chancellor talked about it today—they have started to redefine borrowing. It does not matter what we call borrowing. It does not matter whether we put it in one barrel or another; at the end of the day, borrowed money has to be paid back, and interest has to be paid on it. It does not matter how we classify it; it is fiddling the figures to try to pretend that borrowing is not borrowing, and it has consequences for the economy and for individuals.

There are some things in the Budget that I welcome. As the chairman of the loan charge and taxpayer fairness all-party parliamentary group, I welcome the fact that there will be a review of the loan charge. It will be interesting to see what its terms are; they are not outlined in the Red Book. We will have to tease that out from the Government. The all-party group would be more than happy to talk about what the terms should be, and what issues need to be addressed.

I also welcome the fact that the suspended city deals, one of which would have affected the periphery of my constituency, have been restored. Being a cynic, I wonder whether they were stopped so that they could be given back, and we could all be grateful that we had got something back as a result of our lobbying. I know that there was extensive lobbying by councils, by the Chair of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi), whose intervention I welcome, by the Secretary of State, and by the political parties in Northern Ireland. Those city deals were important because, as we heard from the hon. Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman), one way of growing our economy and making it more robust is to spend on research and development and innovation. In both city deals, there was a strong element of research and development, and innovation hubs, and there had already been interest from the private sector because of the money that was going to be spent on them.

I also welcome the additional money under the Barnett formula. Northern Ireland has been short-changed under the funding formula for many years, because it was not based on need as it was in other parts of the United Kingdom. I note that it will, in future, be based on need, and that welcome change will help the Executive in the delivery of public services in Northern Ireland.

So many of my constituents have been affected by infected blood. Now that the funding commitment is there, I hope that there will be no slowdown in the delivery of that funding to those who have been infected.

I have concerns. About half of my constituency is rural and made up of small farms. The inheritance tax, and especially the ending of the agricultural property relief, will have huge implications. Not only do we have small farms, but the average age of farmers is 58, so many of them are coming to the point where the farm will be passed on. They are not cash-rich, so how will they pay the tax? They will simply have to sell the land, breaking up the farm and making is less viable. That will have a huge impact on the agricultural community in Northern Ireland. The Government have made a mistake on that. It will impact on small farms and food security. I hope that there will be greater examination of that.

Most of our many businesses in Northern Ireland are small and medium-sized businesses. The Government have placed further burdens on them in the Budget, not least in the tax on jobs and the cost of jobs through national insurance contributions, the threshold being lowered, and the percentage that businesses will have to pay. I believe that that will add to the difficulties that businesses are already experiencing.

I have already mentioned this last point. The borrowing that the Government will undertake will have—and is already having—an immediate effect on interest rates. The OBR points out that the yield on Government bonds is already increasing and will continue to increase. That will feed through to ordinary mortgage payers and to people who have to borrow money for their businesses. That will, in turn, have an impact on growth. In fact, the OBR indicates that, as the next four years go on, growth rates will fall—they will be lower at the end of this period than they are currently—yet this is meant to be a Budget for growth.

I noticed Members cheering the Government as the Chancellor made her announcements today. I hope that they are still cheering in a year’s time; I hope that they are still cheering in two years’ time. I want to see people cheering—I do not want to see the country do badly just to make a political point—but it is important that we are honest about the warning signs and do not build the expectation that this Budget will deliver all the good things that the Government talk about. We will certainly examine and hold the Government to account over future years on whether the policies that they have announced today will deliver what was promised to people.

[Several hon. Members rose—]