Ways and Means

Debate between Wes Streeting and Meg Hillier

Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Wednesday 6th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

There is no one here—even Conservative Members have given up defending the Government’s Ways and Means motions. We have the poor Minister, his Whip and his poor Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Chamber, but there we are. I thank everyone else for paying attention this afternoon. The serious point is that the Ways and Means motions do not actually address the fundamental structural weaknesses in our economy.

I will now draw heavily from today’s report by the Institute for Public Policy Research, which I commend to the House and which I hope people will read. The fact is that the UK has the most geographically unbalanced economy in Europe. Although I am proud to be a London and Essex MP, I understand why colleagues from other regions and nations of the UK want a more balanced approach to regional economic and infrastructure investment, which is in the interests not only of their constituents but of my constituents. If we are to build a stronger, more resilient, more prosperous and fairer economy, it has to be one that is fairly balanced across the UK.

As Conservative Members tell us, we have a high employment rate and unemployment has been kept low, which I acknowledge and welcome, but Ministers and Conservative Members must have some humility about the fact that the high employment rate has been accompanied by an increasingly insecure and casualised labour market. Fifteen per cent. of the workforce are now self-employed, and many of those self-employed people will be hit by the Ways and Means motions, particularly those relating to Making Tax Digital.

We welcome self-employment. I have been self-employed, and I admire people who pluck up the courage to take the plunge and the risk of starting their own business, but there are many people who are not self-employed in the conventional sense—the sense that is to be encouraged and welcomed—but are in enforced self-employment, driven either by businesses seeking to duck their employer responsibilities or, worse still, by a punitive welfare regime in which people seek to declare themselves as self-employed so that they do not lose their tax credits while they scramble to find a real job. That is not properly understood.

Of course, there is also an unequal distribution of economic wealth. Between 1979 and 2012, only 10% of overall income growth went to the bottom half of the income distribution; almost 40% went to the richest tenth of households. Small wonder that we see this outcry from significant parts of our population, concentrated in certain parts of the country in particular, who are not just angry about the injustice they feel but are completely aware that it is a genuine injustice. It is not just a feeling of resentment—an irrational emotional response—as they are being left behind.

Let us be honest about the fact that we have, as the IPPR says,

“both world-leading businesses and world-lagging productivity.”

We have a lower rate of investment than most of our major competitors, as I have already said. Yes, we have a trade surplus in services, but our overall current account deficit as a percentage of GDP is the largest of all the G7 countries. The extent of manufacturing in our economy should make Ministers blush.

In the past seven years, the Government have been far too reliant on monetary policy levers. They have been over-reliant on quantitative easing, over-reliant on extremely low interest rates and over-reliant on growth that is fuelled by record consumer spending and consumer debt. We are building a new debt crisis in this country—it is a consumer debt crisis, and it is here. All it will take is a marginal interest rate increase for people to be unable to service their debt, and they are barely able to service that as it is. There are real questions to be answered about irresponsible lending, and the Treasury Committee needs to examine that.

These structural weaknesses in our economy ought to be at the forefront of the motions, but they are not. That would be irresponsible in the best of times, but let us look at what we face down the track. We are going to see deeper globalisation, and a shift of economic power to the south and to the east, with a requirement on us to become far more competitive, particularly in seizing opportunities in the service economy. We face enormous and fundamental technological change. The rate of such change is now vastly outstripping the rate at which regulators, government and businesses are able to respond to it. I am not someone who sees the rise of the robots as the beginning of human serfdom in the age of the machine; as with globalisation, there are huge opportunities here to deal with enormous inequality and with big issues facing the planet, such as climate change. Automation presents huge possibilities, but let us learn the lesson from globalisation. This is not something that we can slow or stop; it is happening, and it is a process. We must make sure that this new industrial revolution, the fourth one, works in the interests of everyone, rather than a select few. Otherwise, we will end up back where we are with Brexit, which is the biggest risk facing our country.

When we think about what could happen in the next couple of years as the UK leaves the EU or comes crashing out, we see that the idea that these Ways and Means motions would make any bit of difference is fanciful—it is not serious. When we look at policy coming from the Treasury and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, we see that it is insufficient to meet the challenges of the time. Worse, it seems that far from pursuing policies that will address these big challenges, the Government are pursuing an approach that would make things even worse, relegating the economy to a second-order issue. As George Osborne said from the Government Back Benches after he left office as Chancellor, in a debate about our relationship with the EU,

“the Government have chosen…not to make the economy the priority”.—[Official Report, 1 February 2017; Vol. 620, c. 1034.]

Can you imagine that? Can you imagine a Government not making the economy the priority? As I have said throughout this debate, that would be inexcusable in the best of times, but it is absolutely outrageous in the worst of times.

In conclusion, I hope that the Government not only take on board the detailed critique that has been made of their Ways and Means motions, but reflect on the structural weaknesses in our economy, the challenges that lie ahead and how they can meet them. Let us think about the biggest political event this country has seen in post-war history: the decision to leave the EU. We know that the referendum was lost because of a coalition of voters. I accept that there were a lot of committed Eurosceptics who always wanted out come what may, but the referendum was won thanks to the votes of millions of people who simply felt left behind, who felt unheard and who wanted to send a clear message. They are the people who have been at the sharp end of globalisation; they are the victims of economic inequality and social injustice. When we campaigned in areas where people turned out in droves to vote leave and we told people they may be voting to make themselves poorer, time and again we heard the same reply: “Things cannot get worse than this.” The thing I fear more than anything else about the economic outlook in this Parliament is that things can, and indeed may well, get worse. It would be a tragedy if the very people whose voices cried out to demand change, and who expect that change, were once again the ones who bore the brunt of short-term economic thinking, and of a politics and economics that works in the interests of the privileged few.

I did my democratic duty in honouring the referendum by voting to trigger article 50. What I will not do during this Parliament is pretend that I think the right decision has been made or that the warnings we gave will not come to pass. It is my responsibility, and the responsibility of us all, to protect the interests of our nation and our constituents. If we want to deal with what we are seeing across western democracies—the consequences of people abandoning their faith in mainstream politics—and we want to see off that trend and process, the only way to change course is to change our country. There is no shortcut to achieving change. It has to be meaningful, serious and a lot better than the measures the Government have presented this afternoon.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Following the point of order made by the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) earlier today about the establishment of Select Committees, it has come to my attention that every party has a list of names of members of Select Committees. Will you and Mr Speaker use your good offices to encourage the Government to table a motion tonight with those names—if there are any gaps, they can be filled at a later time—so that the Committees of this House can scrutinise this Government as swiftly as possible, hopefully starting next Monday?