Budget Resolutions

Tom Collins Excerpts

Monday 1st December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Tom Collins (Worcester) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Barry Gardiner]

I will not.

Parliament is supposed to be a gathering of the leaders of our community: rational and intelligent human beings capable of horizon scanning and guiding our country to a safe and sustainable future. Instead, it acts like the frog in the pan of gradually boiling water, delaying its escape until too late.

The Budget should have been bold. It should have put our country on a wartime footing with a national programme of retrofit, no new build that is not net zero in its embodied and operational carbon, a huge roll-out of public transport and a major programme of electrification. We have a huge majority, yet we act as though we are afraid of the power that we spent 14 years seeking.

Today, the green economy is growing three times faster than the rest of the UK economy. If growth truly is our ambition, it is in that clean, affordable and secure future that we should be investing. People often talk of a just transition. I prefer to talk of a bloody marvellous one. What’s not to like about warm homes with affordable energy; comfortable, efficient, speedy and reliable public transport; the creation of thousands of new jobs; decent air quality; a secure food system with reliable supply chains; and a stable geopolitical world? We live in an age of public sufficiency and private luxury, as Professor Kevin Anderson said last week at the national emergency briefing. A Budget that was adequate to the challenge we face would have turned that on its head, creating a society where every private home had what was sufficient and every public domain was one of luxury. That would be the just and equal society I came into the Labour party to create.

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[Tom Collins (Worcester) (Lab)]

This Budget is designed to address the issues that people in Worcester really care about. The first is the cost of living. We will see a typical household energy bill reduction of £150, the first freeze on rail fares in 30 years, and an increase in the minimum wage. The Budget will boost the NHS through the roll-out of 250 new neighbourhood health centres; I will keep fighting for a new walk-in GP service in Worcester.

The Budget will begin the work of lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty, including over 2,000 children in Worcester who will no longer suffer from the two-child cap on universal credit. The Budget also includes more funding for small companies to support apprenticeships; support for the midlands rail hub, which will improve our services to Birmingham; and, I am pleased to say, a fresh commitment to innovation and support for entrepreneurs. If we get that right, we can see a true industrial renewal in the UK.

I chair the all-party parliamentary group on hydrogen, and I welcome the climate change levy changes in this Budget that support hydrogen production, an area that is ripe for growth and well suited to the UK’s strengths, both industrially and geographically. In recent years, we have led the world technologically in this space. It offers real opportunities for us, if we have an ambitious plan. UK industry is not confined to city regions and clusters; it is in every town and every region. The UK energy system is being reconceived for resilience and sustainability, but we need new energy storage at large scale, and we will need much higher levels of dispatchable power than we have today. An ambitious vision for hydrogen, in which the Government directly invest in hydrogen, and actively lead a strategic roll-out of its storage and transmission, is a prerequisite for an industrial renaissance that the UK could have and deserves to have, so I look forward to the publication of the upcoming hydrogen strategy.

We cannot ignore the major disruptions sweeping the world. The climate crisis is a global emergency that demands urgent and assertive action, but there is also digitalisation. I cannot overstate the impact that the digital revolution is having. Debate on the Budget now takes place not only in echo chambers of opinion, but in echo chambers of reality, and people have completely different understandings of what is happening in our world and how it works. This new digital world means that our children are unsafe, and that all of us are unsafe from harmful or traumatic images and narratives, from addictive user interfaces in apps or websites, from personified artificial intelligence that encourages attachment —we cannot imagine the harms that could cause—and from algorithms that curate news, views and the voices that we hear, which reinforce bias and present misinformation as fact. These represent a fundamental societal threat that we can and must address in the same way that we address the risks of physical products. The Budget rightly increases taxes on online gambling, but we must do much more.

It is not just the cost of living that is causing a crisis in mental health; there are digital causes; there is poverty and our special educational needs and disabilities crisis, and there is trauma. I chair the APPG on family hubs, and I welcome the £500 million commitment the Secretary of State for Education has already made to them. Our APPG represents a diverse ecosystem of people delivering in real communities. We have seen the sector diversify, innovate and embed in communities over the last few years, and we want to maintain those strengths. As a mission-led Government, that is right up our street. We can break the cycles of trauma by wrapping integrated support around households and families. That approach is a stark challenge to everyone who, remarkably, is criticising our changes to welfare payments, which are on track to lift half a million children out of poverty. This is a Budget about fair choices. It recognises that people come first, and that we are here to build a more just, more prosperous and fairer society.