Toby Perkins
Main Page: Toby Perkins (Labour - Chesterfield)Department Debates - View all Toby Perkins's debates with the HM Treasury
(13 years, 6 months ago)
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Ed Balls
I am not giving way to the hon. Gentleman again now; I might do later.
The reason why the VAT cut is needed now is that things are getting worse, not better. In recent weeks, we have seen manufacturing output and job vacancies falling and the biggest fall in retail sales for more than a year. The Chancellor likes to boast that a net 370,00 jobs have been created in the last 12 months; what he does not like saying is that 70% of those extra jobs were created in the six months before the spending review and only 29% in the six months after it. That is why his Budget forecasts of a year ago have gone so badly awry.
The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts for growth have been downgraded three times. Unemployment is now forecast to be 200,000 higher, while inflation is forecasted to be well above target this year and next year. The result of this stalled recovery, higher unemployment and higher inflation is that the Government are now forecast to borrow a further £46 billion more than was forecast in last year’s spending review. Public borrowing in the first two months of this year is higher than it was in the first two months of last year.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
The Chancellor said yesterday that he does not want to comment regularly on the OBR’s updates. Given that it is downgrading its forecasts every time he opens his mouth, it is hardly surprising.
Ed Balls
Whether or not the Chancellor comments, the fact remains that since the last OBR forecast, Britain’s growth forecasts have been downgraded by the International Monetary Fund, the OECD, the CBI, the British Chambers of Commerce and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. Everybody else is downgrading growth forecasts; we will have to wait for the OBR finally to catch up.
Mr Osborne
My hon. Friend makes two good points. First, there was a very welcome recent reduction in unemployment—the biggest fall for a decade. Secondly, he draws attention to one of the most staggering facts about the past decade: private sector employment in the west midlands fell in the decade leading up to the financial crisis. That shows how unbalanced the British economy became under the last Labour Government.
Mr Osborne
I will give way, and then I will come on to the shadow Chancellor.
Toby Perkins
If the Chancellor feels that the economy was so unbalanced, can he explain why he was still saying in 2008 that he would follow Labour’s spending plans?
Mr Osborne
We fought the 2005 election and, sadly, lost it, saying that Labour’s plans were unaffordable. In 2008, we made it clear that we were coming off Labour’s spending plans. [Hon. Members: “You didn’t.”] We did. I happened to be there—I am not sure that the hon. Gentleman was. We came off Labour’s spending plans in 2008, and thank God we did, because we earned a mandate to make the necessary changes to put the economy back on track.
Kwasi Kwarteng
This is the third time that the hon. Gentleman has tried to intervene, and I am afraid that I must press on. I am willing to take interventions from other colleagues, but he has had his say and I would like to have mine.
We have had a difficult time over the last year, during which time my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne) has been Chancellor of the Exchequer. No one will dispute that: the situation has been tough. However, it would have been far worse if we had followed the policies of the right hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls) and not tackled the deficit in the rather aggressive but timely way in which we decided to. Hon. Members referred earlier to Greece, which has indeed been a Greek tragedy. People are on the streets, the Government are practically insolvent and there is a real risk of some kind of political revolution—I am choosing my words carefully, but the situation is very unstable. The situation facing this country was, I confess, not as bad. However, if we had not been serious about tackling the deficit, there was every likelihood that the international markets would have forced our interest rates up, that our cost of borrowing would have increased and that markets would not have bought gilts in the way that, over the past year, they have. The consequent rise in interest rates would have affected every family in this country, who would have had to pay high interest rates simply because the Government did not have the courage or the conviction to deal with the deficit.
Toby Perkins
As for the comparison with Greece, does the hon. Gentleman recognise that if we had followed the advice of the Chancellor when the recession struck back in 2008, although events here might not have followed what happened in Greece, they would quite probably have followed what happened in Ireland, which saw huge public spending cuts? Ireland went into a cycle of more and more cuts, and more and more people being put out of work. The result of those cuts was not that Ireland’s deficit shrank, but that public services and poverty got worse.
Kwasi Kwarteng
I accept the hon. Gentleman’s point about Ireland, but let us look at what happened last year and the situation that we faced going into the general election in May. The shadow Chancellor quite rightly observed that the market price of gilts was rising and that interest rates on them were coming down in the period before the election. It is true that in the six weeks before the election, interest rates on gilts came down, but that was only because the market realised that there would be an end to the Labour Government. The market anticipated the result of the general election, after it became clear that, as a consequence of Labour’s total irresponsibility, the end of a Labour Government would mean a new Government who were serious about dealing with our financial position. It is true—I remember this—that the rates came down from mid-March, but that was only as a consequence of people in the markets literally rejoicing because Labour was going to leave. The shadow Chancellor was quite right to make that point; I just felt that we needed a bit more context.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
I think the hon. Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke) forgets that the reason he sits on the Government Benches is that the Liberal Democrats changed their policies and decided to let him sit over there.
Toby Perkins
It is so good to see a Liberal Democrat turn up that I have to let him in. It will encourage him to come again.
John Hemming
I simply point out to the hon. Gentleman that we have not changed our policies. He is asking for more money to be borrowed. Where would it be borrowed from, and what would the interest rate be?
Toby Perkins
It is interesting that the hon. Gentleman assumes what I am going to say already. I am only three seconds into my speech. I will come to that point.
The hon. Member for Elmet and Rothwell said that he was proud of the Government’s record so far. I would not like to be here when he is ashamed. Government Members would like this debate to be about whether we need to reduce the deficit, but that is not what it is about at all. Everyone recognises that we need to do that, and that in 2008, prior to the onset of the biggest global economic crisis in history, we had a lower deficit as a ratio of GDP than in 1997 when we came into power. It was only the scale of the economic crisis that forced the Labour Government to spend money to stop the awful situation that ordinary people were finding themselves in, with jobs being lost and the danger of houses being repossessed. We are proud of the decisions that we made at the time, which were supported by the IMF. It said strongly that this country, under the Labour Government, showed leadership when the rest of the world did not know what to do in the face of a terrible global economic crisis.
Toby Perkins
Because the hon. Gentleman was so generous to me, I will allow him to intervene.
Kwasi Kwarteng
I believe in debate—it is good that interventions are taken. If the problem was global, why was our deficit to GDP ratio four times higher than that of the Federal Republic of Germany?
Toby Perkins
Each country was in a different situation. Our ratio was much lower than Japan’s. There are a number of reasons why the German economy was different from ours. We over-relied on financial services and our manufacturing sector was reduced. We had high increases in housing prices. I do not remember any point in the past 13 years when Conservatives jumped up and down saying that they wanted the Government to engineer a house price crash.
Toby Perkins
I think I have given way enough. I am grateful for the fact that the hon. Lady has turned up for the debate, but I shall carry on.
As someone who for the five years prior to coming to this place ran a business that relied on people having money in their pockets to buy non-essential items, I know very well how important it is that decisions on our economy are balanced between the need to support growth and the need to reduce the nation’s borrowing. However, we are debating the economy today because since the Chancellor’s Budget a year ago, the OBR’s initial predictions get worse at every stage. The OBR now predicts £46 billion more borrowing than it predicted a year ago. The Government have discovered that the policies that they are pursuing are not working, so why do they not listen to the advice, change course and ensure that we protect not only the growth that we need in our economy to reduce the budget deficit, but the people on the ground in our constituencies—that includes the constituencies of Conservative Members—who are struggling to get by, whose houses are being repossessed? Repossessions are increasing.
Toby Perkins
I have given way to the hon. Gentleman once. I am grateful for the fact that he has turned up, but I do not want to give him any further encouragement.
The scale of the deterioration in the OBR’s forecasts is stark. The OBR, which was set up to provide an independent view of the state of Government finances, has downgraded its forecasts three times. The Chancellor told us of all the steps he is taking to stimulate growth, but even taking those into account, the forecast is that public sector net borrowing will increase by £46 billion over the next five years, which demonstrates the failure of those policies.
The Chancellor might be failing to get our economy growing, but the same cannot be said of unemployment. Government Members are celebrating, as we all do, the fact that unemployment is down in the last month, but unemployment over the course of the Conservative-Lib Dem Government will go up. Youth unemployment is up. The OBR forecast is that unemployment will rise––[Interruption.] Going forward, the OBR is now predicting that in every year over the next five years unemployment will be higher than in its prediction of a year ago.
Ben Gummer
The hon. Gentleman is factually wrong. The OBR says that unemployment will peak at the end of this year and the beginning of next year, and that it will fall in every successive year.
Toby Perkins
The hon. Gentleman did not hear what I said. The OBR suggests that unemployment will be higher in every one of the next five years than it suggested in its predictions a year ago. That is what I said.
Alongside the increase in unemployment, we are seeing increases in inflation and interest rates. We have been here before: growth stagnating; unemployment rising; businesses failing; and inflation, interest rates and house repossessions increasing. Who was the economic genius who advised the Chancellor the last time a Tory Government led Britain down that road? The current Prime Minister. Should we be surprised?
The Prime Minister has a pedigree as an economic failure, but what about the Chancellor? The Chancellor is the master of hindsight. This was the man who told us that bank regulations were too stringent when Labour was in power. This was the man who, up until 2008, told us that the Conservative party supported Labour’s spending plans, but who now claims that Labour overspent for 10 years. We told him that he was cutting too far and too fast, but he then delivered a damp-squib Budget for growth because we had been right in the first place. He is the man who will soon gain huge dividends because of Labour’s sensible decision to nationalise Northern Rock at a time when he was still a rabbit staring into the headlights of an economic crisis that shook all his assumptions about the sanctity of the markets.
When the IMF was still praising Britain following Labour’s response to the international crisis, the now Chancellor was encouraging us to follow Ireland’s example of massive cuts at the heart of a recession. He is fond of his international comparators, so let me give him some. When he was supporting our economic plans, Britain’s net public spending as a proportion of GDP was 6% lower than when Labour came to power. We have seen an unprecedented clean-up of the disgraceful state in which the previous Conservative Government left our public services. At that time, our debt, as a proportion of GDP, was the second lowest in the G7. Now the growth that he promised to return Britain to lags behind every single country in Europe except for the absolute backmarkers.
People in business, whether in plumbing or double-glazing or the sports goods industry, as I was, need their customers to have money and confidence, but under this Government the amount of money in people’s pockets has shrunk, the cost of goods has risen because of the VAT increase, and people have no confidence that the economy is going to grow and so are not spending money. That is why we are not seeing growth in our economy. We all want the deficit shrunk, but that will happen only if we get growth back into the economy now.
Charlie Elphicke
Employment has gone up in my constituency, and unemployment has been falling, which is welcome. We are going in the right direction: across the nation, there are 520,000 new private sector jobs, while public sector employment has fallen by 143,000, so we see a net rise. The most recently announced figures show unemployment falling sharply by 88,000.
Charlie Elphicke
No. Time is pressing, and I need to allow time for the wind-ups.
Youth unemployment has also started to move strongly— although perhaps not as strongly as wider unemployment —in the right direction. Surely the House must welcome that. Manufacturing output is also moving more in the right direction, after being halved in the Labour years, and now being about 11% of our economy. I hope that the economy will rebalance under this Government so that we are less dependent on banks and fat cats—for party donations, frankly—on handing out knighthoods and on bonuses, and more dependent on much more productive service and manufacturing industries. We need less of financial services and housing, and more of making things, producing things, servicing things, and—yes—education.
The narrative of what this Government are doing is to ensure that our economy is stronger, that our work force are more incentivised to work by making work pay through universal credit, and that they are not only incentivised to work but given the skills to work under the Government’s skills and education agenda. We can have a country that is more productive, where more people want to be in employment, where we do not suck in people from overseas to do the jobs, and where we ensure that our countrymen are encouraged to get into work, do their part, fulfil their potential and have more of a sense of dignity, happiness and well-being. That will allow us to build a Britain that is fit for this decade, and it will ensure that we steam ahead, further ahead, of our European colleagues, and do well. The Government are working on that, and deficit reduction is part of it, but the growth, rebalancing, welfare reform and skills and education agendas are parts of the narrative that add up to a much stronger, much more vibrant economy—a much more exciting Britain-to-be where people will be able to benefit from much more success, much more money and much more good fortune, built on a solid foundation for the long term.