Budget Resolutions

Toby Perkins Excerpts

Monday 11th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Frazer]

The Chancellor’s tax plan is allowing people across the country to benefit from around £900 if they are an average earner, and we know that every time the Labour party leaves office there is higher unemployment. Last time the Labour party was in government, it left a note that said there was “no money left”.

Let me tell the House what impact the Conservative plan has delivered over the last decade. As I said, there have been tax reliefs in every Budget over the past 10 years, and every time they were voted down by the Labour party. The impact of that year-on-year investment is clear. Statistics show that more than 1 million jobs in the creative industries have been created since 2010. There has been almost a doubling of the economic value of creative industries to more than £124 billion since 2010, with exports up 210% in that time. Recently published figures confirm that the sector has grown by more than 10% since the pandemic. The Conservative party is powering one of our world-leading industries.

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

The Minister is talking about the state of the nation’s finances in 2010, and at that point we had a national debt of £1 trillion. We now have a national debt of £2.6 trillion. Does she think that the Conservatives have sorted out the nation’s debt when it is now almost three times higher than it was?

[Lucy Frazer]

I hope the hon. Gentleman was listening when the Chancellor delivered his Budget. He highlighted that debt will be reducing next year, with the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasting that we will meet our fiscal rule to have debt falling as a share of the economy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Wes Streeting]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and Government Members should not groan at him for raising a problem; they should be outraged at the misuse of public money. They should be as appalled as we are that in the midst of a national crisis, when so many people rushed to danger or played their part in a national response—those businesses that shifted from their normal activity to try to help, genuinely doing the right thing for the right reasons—there were others at the same time who sought to use the pandemic to make a quick buck at our expense. It is disgusting, and the fact that so many billions of pounds of personal protective equipment was wasted—much of it literally going up in smoke—should exercise all of us. Voters can make their own judgment on why the Conservative party is still so relaxed about that profligacy, waste and fraud.

I accept the point that the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) made about the importance and impact of financial events, because a narrative was spun after the 2010 general election about the global financial crisis. The Conservatives love to say it was all the fault of the last Labour Government, but I have bad news for them: the former Chancellor of the Exchequer—I had better name him, as there have been so many—George Osborne was talking recently in his excellent podcast about the late, great Alistair Darling, and he said:

“In the financial crisis, he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who earned a lot of trust with the way he handled that crisis.”

Of course, it was politically expedient for the Conservative party at the time to pretend that the economy was going through so many challenges because a Labour Government had bailed out the banks, but when presented with a crisis, you do the right thing. We did the right thing then, and we would do the right thing in the future when presented with crises, as we expected this Government to do. In fact, we engaged with the Government in good faith throughout that crisis. We never imagined that people would use VIP lanes to rip off the British taxpayer. That is why, if she is the next Chancellor of the Exchequer, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) will go after those people to get that money back. We do not doubt her determination to do so.

The Budget was pitched as the Tories’ last roll of the dice before the general election. It was meant to be the one to bamboozle the Opposition and wow the public, but instead of starting the campaign with a bang, they are going out with barely a whimper. It was meant to bring millions of voters who have abandoned the Conservative party back into the tent. Instead, it has driven the former deputy chairman of the Conservative party out of the tent all together. After 14 years of Conservative Government, Conservative MPs are leaving because, to quote the hon. Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson):

“you can’t get a police officer to turn up to your house when it gets burgled…people are pulling their own teeth out, you can’t get a GP appointment.”

What a damning indictment of the Conservative party from a man who this Prime Minister chose to elevate to one of the highest offices in that party.

The claws came out as soon as today’s defection was announced, but they are not aimed at the hon. Member for Ashfield—no, Conservative MPs are begging him to come back. They have told “Channel 4 News”:

“The fact Rishi promoted him to Deputy Chairman and tells you all you need to know about his judgment.”

Even Conservative MPs admit in private that the Prime Minister is too weak to run his own party, let alone the country. As Lord Lloyd-Webber might have written if he were scripting a new musical for the Conservative party, they are past the point of no return and looking to Boris Johnson, saying

“Wishing you were somehow here again.”

I have to give credit where it is due: this is a Budget so bad that it has done what was previously unthinkable: it has united the warring factions of the Conservative party. They are united in agreement that it was a disaster. Before the Chancellor stood up, the leader of what is left of the Scottish Conservatives had already announced his opposition to it, soon followed by the Energy Minister, the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie), who exclaimed his deep disappointment with his Government’s own energy tax. Then, the Security Minister, the right hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat) and a Foreign Minister, the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Anne-Marie Trevelyan), wrote a joint article opposing the Chancellor’s lack of investment in defence. The Energy Minister does not support the energy policy; Foreign and Security Ministers do not support the defence policy, and even the Chancellor says that he does not support the tax rises that he is imposing on working people. It begs the question: is there anyone left who believes in what this Government are doing? Government Members should feel free to intervene and leap to the Government’s defence but, sadly, they agree.

The Chancellor named several Members in his speech, presumably on the basis that misery loves company. I wonder if even the Members who made their way on to the Chancellor’s list of the damned will defend this Government’s dismal record. I extended an invitation to them earlier today, but they have not shown up. I am sure that they are busy back in the office or in their constituency writing leaflets extolling how great the Budget was.

[Mr Perkins]

Twenty-five MPs who will not be extolling how wonderful it was are the New Conservatives. The 25 Conservative MPs who support that organisation said:

“We cannot pretend any longer that ‘the plan is working’. We need to change course urgently.”

Does my hon. Friend question, as I do, whether those 25 MPs who want to change course urgently will vote for this Budget? If they will, how can they possibly suggest that they are changing course?

[Wes Streeting]

Who knows? I must confess I do not even know who the New Conservatives are, there are so many warring tribes and families involved every week. It is a level of reproduction that even the former Prime Minister Boris Johnson fails to match.

Turning to the list of the damned who made their way into the Chancellor’s Budget speech, the hon. Member for Dudley North (Marco Longhi) was identified as pushing the Government to give into the shadow Chancellor’s call to cancel their planned rise in fuel duty. Where Labour leads, the Tories follow. I wonder if he will defend his Government making pensioners in Dudley £1,000 a year worse off. The hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory) was singled out by the Chancellor. Does she think her constituents earning £15,000 a year will forgive her for voting to pinch an extra £580 from their pockets in tax rises?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Perkins]

I would not want my hon. Friend to miss out the consultation on banning water bosses’ bonus, which was also nicked from us.

[Wes Streeting]

The list is inexhaustible, is it not? It is just one thing after another, and then they have the audacity to say that Labour does not have any plans. If that is true, why are they swooping in like magpies every five minutes, ready to pick the next cherry from Labour’s tree?

It is just a shame that the Conservatives did not see the light earlier. Had they abolished non-dom tax status when Labour pledged to do so in 2022, 4.5 million children could be enjoying free breakfast clubs today. They could have funded an extra 3.6 million NHS appointments and operations, hundreds more artificial intelligence-enabled scanners, and 1.3 million more urgent and emergency dental appointments. The Prime Minister would have delivered on his pledge to cut waiting lists, if only he had listened to Labour. What stopped him? Why was the Prime Minister so wedded to the non-dom tax status?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

This Budget demonstrates that this is a Government that exist for one reason and one reason only: if they did not exist, the Conservative party would have to face a general election. The only thing that the five families all agree on is that the one thing they hate more than facing the tough choices that their disastrous legacy has left this country is facing the harsh verdict of the British people. And so the Government limp on endlessly, joylessly, hopelessly and without any sense that they have a clue how to tackle the kinds of issues facing our country that I see at my constituency surgeries every week of the year.

This is a Budget that self-evidently fails to rise to the challenge that 14 years of Tory government have left our nation facing. Crumbling public services, growing social problems and a bleak fiscal forecast are the damning but unsurprising legacy of 14 wasted years. This is a Government who have failed by every measure. They came to power saying that they were going to cut the nation’s debt. My hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Sir Chris Bryant) knows British history far better than I do, but the earliest example of UK debt that I could find was under King William III back in the late 17th century. It took the collective Governments of the next 316 years to raise a cumulative debt of £1 trillion. This Government, in 14 useless years, have increased that debt from £1 trillion to £2.6 trillion. This is a Government that, for all their failure on public services, told us that they existed to reduce the nation’s debt.

It is not just the national debt that is rising. People are worse off. Real GDP per capita will be lower at the end of this year than it was at the start of this Parliament. Real pay has gone up just £17 a week over 13 years of Conservative government. Under the 13 years of Labour government, real wages rose by £183 a week. Office for Budget Responsibility figures show that, within this Budget, for every 10p extra that working people pay in tax under the Tories’ plan, they will get only 5p back as a result of the combined national insurance cut. The idea that this Budget is on the side of working people is simply untrue. Under this Tory Government, work does not pay.

It was interesting to spend a moment of my day today listening to the hon. Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson). This is a man who just two months ago was a deputy chairman of the Conservative party. He said that under this Government the cost of living was out of hand, that people could not get a GP appointment, that there was no control on migration, that there was crime on our streets, that people could not get a police officer to a burglary and that they were pulling their own teeth out for the lack of a dentist. I have to say that there is not much wrong with that analysis, coming from someone who was the deputy chairman of the Conservative party just a couple of months ago, but there is so much more that we could say.

I see the disastrous decisions that my own Conservative council in Derbyshire is making. I have no time for the leadership of the Conservative council. I see the huge impact on parents whose children are waiting for a special needs assessment or are unable to get support with special needs teaching assistants in schools. I see the state of our roads, which are simply unfit to be driven on. I see people who are waiting for a social care assessment. I met a gentleman just today who was at the end of his tether trying to get support for his wife, who is in a terrible state. But for all the failures of Tory Derbyshire County Council, we have to come back and look at this Government’s funding of local government, because councils right up and down the country are experiencing the same, whether they are Labour, Conservative or Liberal. They are all saying that council funding is out of control.

We also see the impact on NHS waiting times, with the longest waiting times in our history. We see food bank usage becoming commonplace and we see rising child poverty. Every time I go to a school, I hear that the school has children turning up unable to learn because of hunger. This Government are so out of ideas that, at the same time they are claiming that Labour does not have a plan, they are stealing Labour policies in a whole raft of areas, whether it be the non-doms announcement, our plan on dentistry, our plan on the NHS workforce or the current consultation on water bosses’ bonuses. The thing that all those policies have in common is that they have been attacked by the Tories and then stolen by the Tories.

It is clear that this Government have neither the ambition nor the courage to tackle the issues facing our country. Our economy needs growth, but our country also needs a shot in the arm from a Government with a commitment to tackling poverty and the causes of failure that have gone unchecked under this Government. No more a country where people die on an NHS waiting list, waiting for the treatment that could have saved them. No more a country where the trains do not run and the roads are not fit to drive on. No more a country where the place someone is born is the biggest determinant of their chances in life. Change is coming, and it cannot come a moment too soon.