Comprehensive Spending Review

Stuart Bell Excerpts

Wednesday 20th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and he has considerable experience in this area. The problem with the graduate tax, which we honestly looked at and honestly considered—[Interruption.] Actually, an enormous amount of work was done in looking at the feasibility of the graduate tax, some of it by the previous Government: the shadow Chancellor was the higher education Minister who ruled out a graduate tax, and under the previous Government the education Department published a paper about why it would not work. As I have said, we looked at this idea carefully—we approached it in a genuinely open-minded way—but there were many disadvantages to it. One of them was that it would represent a massive centralisation of the university system with, basically, the Treasury controlling, almost to the last pound, how much different universities would get. That is why, as I understand it, the Russell group of universities—for a start—are completely against it.

[Sir Stuart Bell (Middlesbrough) (Lab)]

On the Prime Minister’s statement which the Chancellor confirmed, the House will welcome the facts that the science budget is safeguarded, that the adult apprenticeship scheme will be advanced, and that £500 million will go into the Tyne and Wear metro and the Tees valley bus network.

Following on from the questions of my hon. Friends the Members for Erith and Thamesmead (Teresa Pearce) and for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), since the Chancellor places so much emphasis on fairness, how can it be fair to make 490,000 people unemployed in the public sector and a putative further 500,000 in the private sector? How can that be a sensible policy for growth?

[Mr Osborne]

That is, quite frankly, a deliberate misrepresentation of the number, which was produced independently. The number is for the reduction in the public sector head-count over four years. As I have said, there will be redundancies, but there will also be posts that go unfilled. The plan set forward by the Labour party also involved a reduction in the head-count of hundreds of thousands; the Leader of the Opposition admitted that on a number of occasions during both the general election and his party’s leadership contest. We have all got to face up to this challenge, but I should point out that the same organisation that produced the number that the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Sir Stuart Bell) cites—the Office for Budget Responsibility—also forecasts falling unemployment through to 2014.