Income tax (charge)

Sarah Russell Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir John Whittingdale (Maldon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Dagenham and Rainham (Margaret Mullane), who made an excellent speech. She spoke with knowledge and passion about her constituency and about the challenges that face the residents of Dagenham and Rainham. Hers is a constituency I know well, since I drive back to my own on the A13 every week. Sometimes, when it is closed, as happened last week, I find myself exploring even more of Dagenham and Rainham. I also congratulate the hon. Member for Worcester (Tom Collins), who also made a very good contribution. We look forward to hearing from both of them in the future.

I want to start by putting on record the thanks that I think are due to my right hon. Friend the Member for Godalming and Ash (Jeremy Hunt), the shadow Chancellor, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak), the former Prime Minister. One of the extraordinary things I have found in the Budget speech that we are debating is the complete failure to mention the two extraordinary challenges that the Government had to face: covid and the economic consequences of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Those two events combined potentially threatened the survival of every business in this country and could have led to a catastrophic increase in the cost of living for ordinary people. It was only through the intervention of the then Government in providing support that we managed to keep the economy going and that those businesses and the jobs associated with them survived. I find the Chancellor’s failure even to mention that challenge when talking about the economic legacy extraordinary. It has left us with a legacy, but despite the level of borrowing that was necessary, the Government were bringing it down and had restored the economy. I think that when the history books are written, a lot of credit will be given to my right hon. Friends the shadow Chancellor and the former Prime Minister.

[Mrs Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

Does the right hon. Member accept that the Conservative Government’s decisions to reduce gas storage and to fail to invest in the NHS over long periods made dealing with those crises considerably worse?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. Before the right hon. Member responds, interventions are a healthy part of debate, but the hon. Lady should draw the attention of the Member by speaking loudly in asking for an intervention.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Bobby Dean) for his comments about kinship allowance, which I will address in due course, because it is helpful when we have constructive opposition. However, he talks about the difficulty of obtaining NHS treatment, and I remind him of the five years that the Liberal Democrats spent working alongside the Conservatives to bring about cuts to our NHS, the police and many other vital services. I will leave it at that.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Chancellor on the Budget, which is clearly the start of a new chapter towards making Britain better off. I can see clearly how it links into our Labour target of securing the highest sustained growth in the G7, as well as into our other missions of having an NHS fit for the future and breaking down barriers to opportunity. It is clear that there is a strategy for achieving aspiration and providing people with support. Those two things can truly combine to make our country greater.

One measure that will affect my Congleton constituency is the work that will now continue at pace for hospitals affected by the RAAC—reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete—crisis, including Leighton hospital in Crewe, which serves many of my constituents. The hospital still has paper notes; it does not have an electronic records system. The major reason for that is that it has spent over £100 million in the past few years just on propping up its walls. That kind of failure spend to sustain the hospital’s most basic physical infrastructure means that the investment to make the NHS fit for the future cannot be made. I look forward to being part of a Government who enable us do the sort of forward-thinking work in which we stop making short-term decisions that simply prevent people from having access to the care that they need—we must work in a rational manner. People in the NHS, including doctors and nurses in my constituency, will be grateful that we are moving in that direction.

The NHS has been broken, but the Budget will begin to fix it. Our social care system has also faced significant challenges in recent years. Again, this Budget begins to fix that. Alongside the £600 million in grant support for local authorities, I am so pleased to hear about the £86 million increase in the disability facilities grant, which will enable us to support 7,800 more home adaptations. As I think we all know, people want to stay in their homes for as long as possible, and it is our duty as a Government to facilitate that.

Similarly, I am pleased to see the 4.1% uplift in the state pension through the triple lock, which will enable more than £475 per year to be given to many pensioners across the country. We are also going to see the biggest ever cash increase in the earnings threshold for carer’s allowance, meaning that many more thousands of carers in my constituency can increase their income—which is so important for people’s dignity—and many more people will be able to access carer’s allowance for the first time. I also want to say an enormous thank you to the kinship carers in my constituency: those grandparents, older siblings, aunts and uncles, extended family members and family friends who are looking after children. They will welcome the announcement of £44 million to support kinship and foster carers, including through the new kinship allowance trial.

Speaking of children, I turn now to schools. Schools across the country are crumbling. RAAC schools specifically have hit the headlines, but there are many other fundamental structural problems in many of our schools—schools that were decimated overnight by the previous Government’s scrapping of the Building Schools for the Future programme. This Budget will begin to fix those problems, with £1.4 billion allocated to delivering classrooms that children can learn and thrive in, and a £2.3 billion increase in the core schools budget to support the recruitment of 6,500 new teachers. It will also enable us to properly fund pay rises for the public sector, which are so important for retaining the experienced teachers on whom we rely. I am delighted that £1 billion of that £2.3 billion increase will go towards fixing our special educational needs system and systems for disabled children within education. It is so important that we get that right: parents in my constituency and their children are desperately reliant on us for it.

Our childcare system has also been struggling, which has had huge implications for parents’ ability to go to work. This Budget will begin to fix that by allocating £1.8 billion to continue the expansion of Government-funded childcare, which will help people to stay in, and return to, work. More than a quarter of children in my constituency of Congleton live in relative poverty after housing costs. The roll-out of free breakfast clubs in primary schools is a very welcome measure to help struggling families. Moreover, the increases in the national minimum wage will have an enormous impact on families and on child poverty. Some 70% of children in this country who are growing up in poverty live in a family with at least one working parent. It is low wages that are causing those problems, and I am very pleased that we are addressing them.

Our roads have also been broken by 14 years of austerity, and again, this Budget will begin to fix them. The investment of £500 million to fix an additional 1 million potholes per year is a good start. Drivers in my constituency will welcome that investment, as well as the continued fuel duty freeze.

Of course, businesses will welcome many of the steps in the Budget as well. While we are increasing the national living wage to support workers, we are also supporting small businesses through an increase in the employment allowance, fairer business rates, start-up loans, growth hubs and the new national wealth fund. Small businesses in my constituency will also welcome the funding the Chancellor has committed to tackling shoplifting, which affects all of our shopping bills and is worth billions of pounds to the economy every year. Shopkeepers in my constituency recently told me and the Cheshire police and crime commissioner, Dan Price, that they have given up on trying to report shoplifting in many instances because it is simply not a good use of their time. I am so pleased that we will begin to address this issue.

We are beginning to get the fundamentals right. Under the last Government, there were so many counter- productive cuts that undermined our national productivity. This Budget does not stand alone as a one-off event. Rather, it is part of a coherent set of plans to ensure that our public services are reformed and that we are able to develop cross-departmental working in government and deliver what working people need to have a good quality of life, an NHS that is there when they need it and work that pays. I look forward to working with businesspeople and families in my constituency to ensure that we get the delivery of those plans right over time, but right now, this Budget looks like a solution that will begin to fix the NHS and social care; rebuild hospitals and schools; fix the SEND system; and rebuild confidence in our public services, in the economy and in our future as a country.