Budget (North-East)

Sharon Hodgson Excerpts

Tuesday 17th April 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this morning, Sir Roger. I add my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) on securing this important debate.

I hope that the Minister has brushed up on the geography of our region and where the north-east covers—the Government sometimes struggle with that. I will not repeat what the Minister has said, but other examples make interesting reading in Hansard. I am sure that the Minister will want to talk in her response about the recent good news of Nissan’s success. Nissan is in my constituency, and I am personally very happy about its fantastic success. The announcement was a great vote of confidence in the local work force in particular, as well as a reflection of all the hard work and sustained relationship-building with Nissan by Sunderland council over the past couple of decades.

A few other welcome gems of news in my constituency include the recent announcements by Calsonic Kansei and Rayovac. However, all those new jobs and pockets of investment in the north-east are not enough to mitigate the effects on tens of thousands of people of losing their jobs in the public sector and elsewhere in the private sector, or the reality of long-term youth unemployment in my constituency, which is up by 188%.

I want to focus my remarks on household budgets and family finances. At the start of this month, an estimated 1,400 households in my constituency were no longer eligible for child tax credits worth £545 a year. A further 355 households will lose their working tax credits, worth £3,870 a year, unless they find a way to increase their working hours by at least eight hours. Throughout the north-east, such changes will affect just short of 50,000 households—so that is 50,000 households having their budgets squeezed, spending less in local shops, pubs, restaurants and other businesses and with less money to have days out, if any, at local attractions. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that families with children will, on average, be £511 a year worse off, and that includes the token amount given back to them by increasing their personal allowances. Some parents may find, therefore, that they are better off not in work than taking up work if it does not make financial sense. What is the sense in policies that push people out of jobs?

We have yet to see the full impact of the changes, but no one believes it will be positive—certainly not our pensioners, who have worked hard and saved throughout their working lives to provide a modest pension for themselves in later life. They will be hit by the freezing of age-related allowances, the worst affected being those who retire next year. In total, Treasury figures state that the changes will take more than £3 billion out of pensioners’ pockets—again, £3 billion that will not be spent in local economies such as Sunderland’s. At the other end of the scale, however, those on more than £150,000 a year will get a tax cut; unfortunately, not many of them live in my constituency.

We needed a genuine plan for growth and real help for families; we did not get it. What we got was worse than nothing. We got measures that will deepen the north-south divide and, as usual, the lives of my constituents will suffer at the hands of this out-of-touch Tory-led Government. Has it not always been so?