Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Wes Streeting Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

Let me make a little progress and then I will take more interventions. It is a classic socialist illusion to think that we can solve all society’s problems with taxes on the very richest, and it is the age-old excuse for not managing public spending or welfare costs. That brings me to a central point that I want to make to the House today: there is not some inherent conflict between delivering social justice and the savings required to deliver sound public finances—they are one and the same thing. Without sound public finances, there is no social justice.

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Osborne]

I will give way in a moment to the Member for the taxi business.

It is the easiest thing in the world to do this job and say yes to every new demand for Government spending and to please all the people all of the time, but we know where that leads. We know that because before me we had a Chancellor who spent a whole decade going around the country saying yes to even more spending and ever higher welfare bills, and we know what happened then: it brought our country to the brink of collapse. That was not compassion; it was economic cruelty, and the people who paid the price are those who always pay the price when Government spending gets out of control and welfare bills spiral. It was not the politicians at the time who paid the price—no, they are happily sitting on the Opposition Benches; it was the poorest who paid the price and the most vulnerable who suffered. Those people lost their jobs and had their livelihoods snatched from them, and those are the people I am fighting for—real, decent, hard-working people, not numbers on a Treasury spreadsheet: people whose lives would be impoverished, and whose hopes and aspirations would be crushed, if we had gone on spending more and more than the country earns. Getting things right for those people is what I am all about, and that weighs on every decision that I have taken as Chancellor over the past six years. Those are the people whom we in the Conservative party have been elected to serve.

[Wes Streeting]

The Chancellor rightly talks about learning lessons, but it is also important to have clarity about the future. The Government line seems to be that there are no plans to further reduce the welfare budget, but yesterday the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions said in the House

“we will not be seeking alternative offsetting savings”,

and that

“the Government will not be coming forward with further proposals for welfare savings.”—[Official Report, 21 March 2016; Vol. 607, c. 1279-86.]

Will there be further welfare cuts or not? What is the answer? The Chancellor has not offered any clarity this afternoon.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Jackson]

I do. My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The fact of the matter is that this Government are taking the difficult decisions on infrastructure—on things such as nuclear power and airport capacity.

[Wes Streeting]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Jackson]

I will not at the moment, but I might later.

The previous Labour Government, in very benign economic circumstances—mainly driven, of course, by debt and borrowing—failed to take those decisions.

I welcome the Budget in general terms—of course, I took issue with the Chancellor’s comments about Brexit, and I think the OBR’s anodyne comments on Brexit were misrepresented. However, there were some good things in the Budget, which was not a redistributive Budget from poor to rich, but largely a redistributive-neutral Budget, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies said.