Budget Resolutions

Seema Malhotra Excerpts

Wednesday 6th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

The context in which I speak to today’s Budget is one of chaos and instability, following 14 years of Conservative failure on the economy. This Budget has not changed the dial; the reality is that people will still be worse off after the last 14 years. Sky’s Ed Conway has shared a graph that he says

“the Chancellor didn’t want to talk about”,

which shows that after the Budget, the UK tax burden will still be heading up to the highest level since the aftermath of the second world war. This is not a turning point: household mortgage costs are up, prices are still rising, and the tax burden is at a 70-year high. The Chancellor likes to speak of stability, but he seems to forget that he comes from the same party that gave us the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss)—who was beaten by a lettuce—and her disastrous mini-Budget, with its impact on our national debt, our businesses, our local council finances and our family finances. Those consequences are still playing out, and will be for years to come.

What Britain needs, first and foremost, is a serious plan for growth. We should be in no doubt that our low-growth, high-tax economy is the endgame of 14 years of Conservatism: the result of the hollowing out of our public sphere, the stripping back of businesses’ potential and the levelling down of hope. Official figures show that people are worse off at the end of this Parliament than they were at the start. The consumer prices index’s average hourly pay for residents of Feltham and Heston has fallen by 6% since 2019, when it was around £17 in today’s prices, and has fallen by 20% since 2010. The number of small businesses in Feltham and Heston has been falling for the past two years running, and is now lower than it was in 2019. Some 40% of children are in relative poverty after housing costs, and it is no surprise that the average family will be £1,200 worse off under the Conservatives’ tax plan, given the 25 Tory tax rises since the last election.

But it does not have to be this way—that is the point, is it not? There is an alternative to the choices that the Conservatives are making, which have left people in Britain worse off while friends and donors do well out of that VIP fast lane. Labour has a plan for growth—growth that leads to businesses thriving, stronger public services, more money in ordinary people’s pockets, good and secure jobs, and an end to people and businesses paying more and getting less. It is a plan for stability and growth that commands national and international confidence and makes Britain the best place to invest and to start and grow a business, where we become leaders in the green economy of the future, creating opportunity for all.

Under Labour, we will have stable and competent political leadership and stable and competent stewardship of the economy, and we will see the strengthening of our economic institutions, such as the Bank of England, the OBR and our new industrial strategy council. How we do politics and how we govern really matters, but under the Tories, business investment has been lagging for years. Today’s Budget brings more sticking-plaster politics, but nothing on support for the co-operative sector and growth.

Let me say a few words about skills, because we cannot grow our economy without investing in our people. The biggest opportunity we have for inclusion, productivity, economic growth and the competitiveness of our nations is a strategy for human talent. A few years ago, a Boston Consulting Group report highlighted how human capital is under intense pressure worldwide, as powerful forces—globalisation, demographic and regional shifts, and digitisation—gain momentum. As such, nation states need a national plan, but this Budget comes on the back of years of failure and gives no answers to the skills challenges that we face.

New official data from September shows worrying trends since 2017, when the last survey was done. The proportion of employers with a skills shortage vacancy has gone up from 6% to 10%; the proportion of the workforce with a skills gap, where an employee is judged by their employer to lack full proficiency, has gone up from 4.4% to 5.7%; and the proportion of employers that have provided training for their staff has fallen from 66% to 60%. Meanwhile, the number of apprenticeship starts has plummeted under the Tories by over 200,000 since 2017, with more than £3 billion of the apprenticeship levy unspent since 2019.

I recently visited South and City College Birmingham with our superb West Midlands mayoral candidate, Richard Parker. Apprenticeship starts in the west midlands have fallen by over 30% since 2010. Small business engagement with apprenticeships has dropped by a staggering 49% since 2016, which we must change. This decline has not been an equal one. In 2015, more apprenticeships were started by learners in the bottom 40% of the income distribution; now they are started by those in the top 40%.

The Chancellor rightly talked about the productivity challenge, with some improvement coming from digitisation and artificial intelligence, but over half of secondary schools in the UK were not even offering a computer science GCSE in 2021, and the number of 14 to 19-year-old students taking technical, IT or computing qualifications has fallen by a third since 2015. To tackle our productivity, we need a plan for our young people.

Under a Labour Government, Britain’s skills plans will be led by a new national skills taskforce, Skills England. That will go alongside our industrial strategy, and bring together businesses, training providers and unions to meet the skills needs of the next decade across all our regions. We will recruit over 1,000 new careers advisers for our schools and colleges, and deliver two weeks of work experience for every young person, so that young people know the pathways that are available to them.

We will better support our further education sector to meet local skills needs, where local skills improvement plans demand it, by putting in place new technical excellence colleges. We will transform the apprenticeship levy to bring more flexibility. Up to 50% of the levy will be spent more flexibly, on courses, which is what Tesco, the Co-op, the British Retail Consortium, techUK, City & Guilds, the British Chambers of Commerce, Superdrug, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and many others have called for.

Britain needs a change, and only our changed Labour party will deliver it, with our costed plan for all our policies, which will drive the change that we need in our economy, our NHS, our public services and our communities. The Government are out of ideas and out of time. More than anything, this Budget has shown that what my constituents need, what our economy needs, and what our country needs is a Labour Government.