Autumn Statement Resolutions

Tim Farron Excerpts

Monday 21st November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is euphemistic to talk about us facing a crisis in this country: what we are talking about is families who simply cannot afford to feed their children; people who cannot afford the mortgage or the rent and who see food prices going up and cannot see how on earth they will make ends meet; and businesses that cannot find the staff they need or that are being forced out of business because of ludicrous costs.

As the hon. Member for Ipswich (Tom Hunt) mentioned, it would be ludicrous to pretend that this crisis has nothing to do with the pandemic, Putin’s evil actions in Ukraine and other global issues. However, it would be equally ludicrous not to say that this Government have made things significantly worse in the last few weeks. Surely the first principle of being in government is to do no harm, yet harm has indeed been done. This debate is exhibit A. We were not meant to have this extra Budget. This is a Conservative Government seeking to mitigate the damage done by a Conservative Government.

It is people of my age or even older—there are many in this House who are not that age—who remember inflation being a major issue in this country. It erodes people’s ability to get by and causes enormous poverty. We recall that the headline inflation rate may be around 10%, but for those on the lowest incomes, inflation is about 16%. Can Members imagine what it means for someone to lose a sixth of their ability to survive when they are already poor to start off with? All of us in this House have seen the flourishing, if that is the right word, of food banks and warm banks in our constituencies. I see the outstanding Christians Against Poverty, which works in nearly every community in this country, being burdened—it is their choice and their joy to do it—with so many more cases of intractable poverty and debt than it has ever dealt with before.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer admitted in his statement last week that we are in recession. If we are in recession, it is the wrong time to start cutting public spending, especially given that, as the Treasury Committee Chair, the hon. Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) said in her wise speech earlier—I did not agree with all of it, but I did with much of it—if 80% of the inflationary pressure we are facing is external, it is not public spending in this country that is the trigger anyway. What better way to make a bad situation worse—this Government are brilliant at making bad situations worse—than to decide to compound the problem by saying, “Inflation? Let’s have stagnation, too. Let’s have stagflation. Let’s exacerbate the recession while not tackling inflation”? It is unwise in the extreme.

In the moments available to me, I want to speak about some key issues that matter very much to me and my communities. Probably everybody in this House has either suffered themselves or experienced a loved one having to live with, and sometimes dying from cancer. Half of us will have cancer at some point in our lives. The UK is suffering from a calamitous cancer backlog. In our communities in south Cumbria, 42% of those diagnosed with cancer are waiting two months or more for their first treatment. In north Cumbria, 63% of people are waiting two months or more for their first treatment. We know that for every four weeks we delay treatment, there is a 10% reduction in someone’s chances of surviving. People are dying, and the consequences are not only appalling for the economy, but for those who are directly affected.

Why in this autumn statement was there no mention of tackling a cancer backlog that is literally killing people by the week in my communities and in communities across the country? Things could have been done not in terms of a workforce review, but with an immediate plan. How about altering the pensions situation so that we make sure we make best use of doctors, maximising the time they have available and not pushing them into early retirement when they would happily be working to clear that backlog and save lives?

We hear from the Government that we are going to have a war on pen pushers, but it is administrators who take the burden off clinicians so that they can treat people. We need more administrators so that we can make best use of the clinicians we have now, so that they can treat more people more quickly and save lives. What about immediate investment in IT so that we can treat people remotely? It is possible to do that, particularly with radiotherapy. Imaging and treatment can be done remotely and the impact the workforce has could be maximised—we could get more out of the workforce and save more lives in the process.

Where is the cancer plan? Where is the investment in infrastructure? Some 50% of people with cancer will need or benefit from radiotherapy, yet we spend 5% of the cancer budget on radiotherapy. It is a colossal waste. It is relatively cheap to fix, and the Government are doing little or nothing about it. In communities such as mine in Westmorland, people are making maybe two or three-hour round trips to get daily radiotherapy for weeks on end. The Government’s own national Radiotherapy Advisory Group says that it is bad practice for anyone to have to travel more than 45 minutes. Nobody in my constituency lives within 45 minutes of that treatment. These failures to invest are costing lives and are relatively easily fixable, if only the Government would invest in the technology, trust the science and listen to the workforce.

It is worth also talking about the impact in rural communities of the Government’s failure to fund general practice. I have a petition later on, so I will leave that for later. However, the minimum practice income guarantee, which this Government scrapped a few years ago, gave a solid basis for necessarily small rural surgeries to be sustainable. They removed it and—surprise, surprise—we have seen the collapse of surgeries such as those in Ambleside and Hawkshead; in Bowness a few years ago, although we have managed to rescue that one; and more recently in Brough. That is not acceptable. These are things that the Government could fix.

On care, the Dilnot review and the solutions to the care crisis have been kicked over for yet another couple of years. People talk about “difficult decisions”. Difficult for whom? Difficult not for the Government but for the millions of people who suffer because of a lack of care and the impact of the care crisis on the rest of the health service. In the hospitals serving my communities in Cumbria, bed blocking was at 32%. That is caused by a lack of investment in care because dealing with it is delayed every single time there is any kind of bump in the road. The impact, of course, is that A&Es are clogged up, ambulance response times are longer, and people die because the Government will not tackle the problem when the chance to do so is in front of them.

I have a couple of quick words to say about farming. In answer to a question of mine, the Minister for Farming, the right hon. Member for Sherwood (Mark Spencer), revealed just today that 24% of the £3 billion that the Government said was ringfenced for farming in this country has not been spent. Think of what farming delivers for this country in food, environmental protection, biodiversity, and the protection of our larger communities from flooding. Yet the Government, who promised to ringfence that money, have betrayed farmers in failing to do so. The Government’s failure to invest in farming and keep that promise has massively undermined the country’s ability to feed ourselves and look after our environment. We know that in just a few days’ time in December, we will see a 20% cut in the basic payment to farmers, but only 2% of farmers are in the new sustainable farming incentive scheme. The Government’s botching of that scheme is costing our countryside and costing Britain.

Finally, the protection of school budgets was a headline announcement in the Budget, but the damage has been done, so it is a sleight of hand. Most headteachers in Cumbria will say that they are cutting staff numbers. Why? Because of unfunded pay rises and the unfunded bills rises that came through last year. Yes, teachers deserve a pay rise and that is right, but it is wrong that headteachers have to cut jobs to pay for them because the Government would not fund them.

We saw recklessness at the end of September, and now we have seen panic-stricken overreaction in November. Both those reactions were unwise, foolish and inexcusable for the damage, harm and pain that they have caused families and businesses in Westmorland and across the country. That is why this Government must go for the good of the country.