Spring Statement

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

Wednesday 26th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

As a result of the triple lock, which we have been able to protect, next month the basic state pension will increase by more than £400. By the end of this Parliament, the triple lock, which the shadow Chancellor opposes, will cost an additional £31 billion. That is the protection that we are giving to pensioners, as well as record investment in our NHS, which older people use with greater frequency than anyone else.

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Ind)]

The UK is the 6th richest country in the world, yet more than one in three children and 25% of adults live in poverty. Since Labour came into power, 25,000 more children have been pushed into poverty due to the two-child benefit cap. Now, according to the Government’s own impact assessment, more than 250,000 people will be pushed into poverty as a result of these cuts, including 50,000 children. I ask the Chancellor, who earns over £150,000 annually, who has accepted £7,500-worth of free clothing and who recently took freebie tickets to see Sabrina Carpenter, does she think that austerity 2.0 is the change that people really voted for?

[Rachel Reeves]

There is nothing progressive and nothing Labour about pouring more money into a broken system. The changes that we are making will help young people who are not in education, employment or training, through targeted support. As I set out, the OBR has not scored any of our back to work programme—the biggest programme for many years—and it will do so in the autumn. The best way to lift people out of poverty is to get them into good, secure work that pays a decent wage. From next month we are increasing the national living wage by £1,400 for someone working full time. The Employment Rights Bill will ensure that people have security at work. That is the difference that this Labour Government are making.

Fiscal Rules

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Darren Jones]

I thank the hon. Member for his question. He and his constituents will know, as much as mine do, that the problem for this country before the election was that the last Government had to borrow each month to pay for bills that they did not have the money to pay for, and that they made a whole list of promises across the country that they knew they could not pay for. That is why we have the £22 billion black hole, and why our first fiscal rule is that day-to-day spending will be paid for from tax receipts by the Exchequer. We will put the public budget back into surplus so that we are not in a doom loop of borrowing and borrowing just to keep ahead of ourselves each month. Where the Government do borrow, we will do so for productive investment to modernise our public services and to get growth back into our economy.

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Ind)]

New research published this month by the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows that reversing the two-child benefit cap would lift 540,000 children above the absolute poverty line. There are no fiscal rules, only fiscal choices. While taskforces meet, more and more children in Coventry South and across the country are consigned to avoidable poverty. Will the Government acknowledge that, prioritise ending child poverty and finally scrap the pernicious two-child benefit cap?

[Darren Jones]

I share my hon. Friend’s commitment to wanting to tackle child poverty in this country—this party had a proud record on that when we were in government previously. That is why we have set up the child poverty taskforce, which reported last week, and our ambition is to reduce child poverty over the course of this Parliament. We will set out further measures in the Budget on Wednesday on how we intend to deliver that.

Budget Resolutions

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I was a teenager when the Conservative party came to power. As that Government took office, they told us that they had to cut funding for public services, blaming “benefit cheats” and “welfare scroungers”, but they reassured us: “We’re all in it together”, they said. Of course, that is not how it turned out, as those paying attention at the time knew it would not. Fourteen years of Tory Governments and austerity have decimated our communities. Public services have been cut to the bone. Schools and hospitals are crumbling—often literally. Youth centres, women’s shelters and libraries have closed in their thousands. Local councils have lost billions in Government cuts, and dozens are now on the brink of bankruptcy.

Workers’ wages are lower than they were in 2008, and living standards are set to face the worst decline since the second world war; nurses are using food banks; teachers and doctors are leaving the profession they love in droves; the social security system has been gutted, and the number of children living in poverty is up 600,000 since the Tories came to power; and, while rents have rocketed, the number of people sleeping on the streets has increased by 120%.

Austerity was a political choice and we were never “all in it together”. Since 2010, the wealth of the richest has rocketed. In the last decade, UK billionaires have seen their wealth go up threefold. Fossil fuel giants have never had it so good. While the super-rich amass ever greater fortunes, people in my constituency are struggling. More than one in three children growing up in Coventry South are in poverty, with more than 3,000 affected by the cruel two-child benefit limit. The Central England Law Centre, which is based in my constituency, and Unite the Union warn that they are seeing increasing levels of conditionality being placed on people, including parents with young children and people with health problems. Over £1 billion has been cut from Coventry Council’s budget, with cuts filtering down and impacting services.

In particular, I want to highlight the impact on Coventry Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre—the only specialist sexual violence support service in Coventry—which has provided an invaluable service to Coventrians for more than 40 years. This year, strained budgets have meant that the council plans to end funding for the service, forcing the centre to close its waiting list, leaving survivors of sexual violence—overwhelmingly women—unable to access the support they need. That is just one example of the consequences of Tory cuts to local government. With this Budget, those cuts are set to get worse, because once the Government’s commitments to other areas are factored in, it entails yet more austerity. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said, this Budget means cuts worth £20 billion a year by 2028—again cutting local government, justice and Home Office budgets.

It is no surprise who benefits the most from the giveaways in this Budget: the national insurance change benefits the richest households 12 times more than it benefits the poorest, while cutting capital gains tax will help those with huge property portfolios but will do absolutely nothing for the parents in my constituency choosing between heating and eating.

Morally, politically and electorally, this should be the Government’s last Budget. The inheritance for the next Government will indeed be dire, but we should learn from the past and rise to the challenge. In 1945, when Labour came to power from the rubble of war, we built the NHS, we built the welfare state, and we built millions of council homes. We redistributed wealth and power and transformed our country for the better. That should be the lesson for the future: making the super-rich pay their fair share, investing in our communities and building the green infrastructure for the future. We have done it before. We must do it again.

Public Sector Pay 2024-25

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

Wednesday 17th January 2024 Westminster Hall

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Robert. I too pay tribute to our colleague Sir Tony Lloyd, the hon. Member for Rochdale, who has sadly passed away. He will be remembered for his kindness, and his tireless commitment to his community and the Labour movement. My thoughts go out to his loved ones. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter) on securing this important debate. Our NHS, our schools and all our public services are the backbone of our society. It is those 6 million workers, from hospital porters to teaching assistants, who keep services running. They keep the country running.

Public sector pay has been slashed in real terms since 2008. While costs have soared, wages have failed to keep up, leaving workers in Coventry South and across the country struggling to makes ends meet. Recent research by Unison shows that the average public sector worker’s wage in 2023 was worth £12,000 less than it was in 2009. The work of teachers, nurses, firefighters and social workers has not got easier in that time. In fact, workload, stress and burnout have only shot up. Why is a teacher today paid a quarter less than they were in 2010? Why have social workers, paramedics, housing officers and so many others had their pay slashed by more than 25%?

For more than a decade, the failure to pay public sector workers properly has pushed staff to breaking point. It has created workforce crises, dangerous understaffing and a wasteful reliance on agency staff. Last year, public sector increases of around 6% were eventually secured in most sectors, but with inflation still sky high, those once again amounted to real-terms cuts that have left workers worse off. It has to be stressed that those pay rises were not handed to workers by the Government; they were won by trade unions who campaigned tirelessly for many months, and who were forced to take days of industrial action to claw back pay in the face of huge real-terms cuts.

It does not have be like this. The Government could choose to remunerate workers fairly. They could commit to increasing pay, at least in line with inflation, for 2024-25. They could plan to restore pay to 2009 levels, so that all public sector workers can enjoy the same standard of living today, and tomorrow, as they did in the past. In the past decade, Britain’s billionaires have seen their wealth go up threefold. It now stands at an eye-watering £684 billion, so we know that there is enough wealth to go around, to fund our public services and to give workers a decent wage. Let us tax the rich. Let us get the very wealthiest to pay their fair share. Let us invest in our public services and give the public sector workers who we rely on the fair, inflation-proof pay rises that they rightly deserve.

Inheritance Tax

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

Wednesday 17th January 2024 Westminster Hall

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Robert. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hemsworth (Jon Trickett) on securing this important debate.

For the vast majority, the past few years have been a time of unprecedented economic pain. Bills have rocketed, the supermarket shop is getting more and more expensive and, for so many, keeping their houses warm is unaffordable. Families are struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Constituents in Coventry South and across the country are having to choose between heating and eating. The Office for Budget Responsibility says it is the biggest hit to living standards since records began. Yet while it is a cost of living crisis for many, things have never been so good for the wealthy few.

In the past decade, Britain’s billionaires have seen their wealth go up threefold. It now stands at £684 billion. The 50 richest families in the UK have more wealth than the bottom half of the population. As I have said many times before, the problem is not that there is not enough wealth in this country; it is that the super-rich have hoarded all the wealth.

That brings me to today’s topic. While the majority are struggling like never before, the wealthy few have never had it so good. It is reported that the Conservative Government want to introduce a tax cut that would overwhelmingly benefit the very richest. Roughly 5% of deaths result in inheritance tax being paid, and according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, abolishing this tax would hand the richest 1% of estates more than £1 million each. Another study found that it would disproportionately help people in Conservative-held constituencies, particularly in the south-east and London. It is therefore little surprise why that is the tax Tories want to slash, in a move that would cost the public purse almost £15 billion by 2030.

Slashing taxes for the richest and squeezing incomes for the rest is the opposite of what we should be doing, but there is another way to go about it. We could tax the richest and fund our schools and hospitals. An annual wealth tax of just 1.5% on assets over £10 million, for example, would raise about £12 billion a year. Equalising capital gains tax with income tax rates would raise another £15 billion a year. Introducing a windfall tax on bank profits could raise £20 billion in a year—I hope the Minister is making notes; these are good suggestions. Ending the nom-dom tax break for the super-rich would raise a further £3 billion. That is money that could be invested in our communities, reversing Tory austerity and rebuilding our crumbling services. This failed Tory Government have failed to do this and will not do it for the remainder their time, but it must be the mission of the next Labour Government.

Corporate Profit and Inflation

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

Tuesday 16th May 2023 Westminster Hall

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Mark. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) on securing this important debate and giving us an opportunity to shine a light on the lie that it is workers’ wages that are driving inflation, rather than the profiteering of big business. The truth is this is not just a cost of living crisis. There is no doubt that it is a crisis for the working class and for millions of people struggling to make ends meet across the country, but it is not a crisis for big businesses and the super-rich. For them, it is record profits, a record number of billionaires and record wealth for the top 1%. It is a cost of living crisis for the many, but a bonanza for the few.

An investigation by Unite the union found that the profit margins for FTSE 350 companies rocketed by 73% between 2019 and 2021 and were up an even more staggering 89% in the first half of 2022. From the well-known, obscenely high windfall profits of the oil and gas giants BP and Shell to the supermarket chains Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda, which saw a 97% increase in profits between 2019 and 2021, big businesses have seen their profits soar, but that is just one side of the coin.

On the other side are soaring prices for our constituents: energy bills through the roof, roughly doubling in 12 months; food prices up nearly 20%; rent inflation at eye-watering record levels; and mortgage payments continuing to rise. It is no wonder that living standards are set for the biggest fall since the 1950s, with the real value of wages falling at the fastest rate on record.

Let me be clear: wages have been lagging well below price rises, so they cannot be their fundamental cause. This is not wage-price inflation. It is something else, and that something else is greed inflation—inflation driven not by workers’ wages but by corporate greed. Big businesses are exploiting droughts and wars, post-pandemic demand and supply-side shocks from climate breakdown. That is, in effect, what even the likes of the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank have said. They both asked whether wages were driving higher prices, and both found that explanation wanting. Instead, the ECB found that profits contributed to two thirds of the rise in inflation in 2022 alone, having been responsible for just one third in the previous two decades.

The next time we hear policymakers call for pay restraint or see Tory Ministers hit out at greedy workers for fighting for pay restoration, let us ask: why do they not call for profit restraint? Why do they not condemn chief executive officers for taking record pay packages, or complain about companies handing out hundreds of millions in dividend deals? With the Tories, why is it always workers who make the sacrifices while the rich reap the rewards?

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Burgon]

That is not true.

[Zarah Sultana]

I mentioned that.

[Andrew Griffith]

I stand corrected. I was being diligent and attentive, but I was clearly so taken by the force of the arguments made by the hon. Members that I missed that.

Autumn Statement Resolutions

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

Monday 21st November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Earlier this month, it was revealed that pay for FTSE100 bosses is up nearly 25% this year—their average salary now stands at almost £4 million pounds. Just before that, oil giants BP and Shell announced record quarterly profits of £7 billion and £8 billion pounds respectively. Although billionaires and big corporations are making eye-watering fortunes across the board, the Chancellor is not making them pay for the “difficult decisions” that he says he has to make. His difficult decision is austerity 2.0: slashing £30 billion from public spending, raising taxes on ordinary people, and denying fair pay for nurses and the other keyworkers the Government clapped for. Well, clapping does not pay the bills.

It seems to me that it is ordinary people, never the super-rich, who have to pay for the Tories’ difficult decisions. While the pay of the rich goes up, wages for my constituents go down; while their profits soar, public services crumble, energy bills rocket and millions more face poverty. The truth about the cost of living crisis is that it is not a crisis for their class but for everyone else; it is a crisis not because there is not enough wealth, but because they have hoarded it all. They say that there is no magic money tree, that there is a “fiscal black hole”, and that they have no choice but to unleash austerity—although they have stopped calling it “austerity”—but that is not what senior economists at think-tanks such as the Progressive Economy Forum say.

Even if that were true, there is another way to raise revenue. It is not magic and it does not involve trashing our public services. It is called taxing the rich. Ending the non-dom tax status, which the Prime Minister’s own wife benefited from, would raise £3 billion. Introducing a new 50p tax rate for the highest earners would raise £6 billion. Introducing a 1% tax on wealth of more than £5 million would raise £10 billion. Equalising dividend and capital gains tax with income tax would raise £21 billion. That is how to squeeze the rich, not the people, but of course that is not what the Government are doing. Instead, they will make people pay for yet another crisis. The Chief Secretary shakes his head and looks disapproving, but living standards are set to fall by another 7% over the next two years. Millions more will be in poverty, food bank queues will be even longer and more warm banks will open in our constituencies, while the NHS is in deep crisis. Instead of addressing those challenges, Conservative Members use tried and tested techniques and tactics.

In a very recent debate, the hon. Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson)—I have notified his office that I would mention him—stated that 5,000 of his constituents were waiting for a council house. But he did not blame his party which has been in government for the past 12 years for selling off millions of council homes and refusing to replace them. He did not blame rip-off landlords or property developers who build skyrises as investments for the super-rich, not as homes for the people. Instead, predictably, he blamed migrants and said that they were at fault. He said that the problem was people coming to Britain for a better life. He is not the only one. Twenty-four hours after a far-right attack on a migrant detention centre, the Home Secretary came to the Chamber and used far-right inflammatory language. It is the old Tory trick: when people are struggling and life gets harder, the party opposite plays divide and rule. Rather than blaming a Government that have gutted our public services and trashed living standards, it chooses to scapegoat.

There is another way, and workers are showing it. From nurses to teachers, cleaners to call centre workers and firefighters to posties, workers are uniting across race and religion, to say enough is enough and to demand their rights. Going on strike is actually a difficult decision. I shall finish this speech by giving my solidarity to all workers who are standing up for their rights, but especially to nurses who for the first time in the Royal College of Nursing’s 106-year history have voted to go on strike, to demand fair pay and the restoration of a properly funded, truly public health service. Victory to the nurses and all workers!

Autumn Statement

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Hunt]

We have announced a lot of measures to help people on low incomes. Anyone in receipt of means- tested benefits will receive £900 to help them with the cost of living, along with the inflation-linked uplift in universal credit, which is about £600, and about £500 to help them with their heating costs next year, at today’s prices. So there is a lot of help. However, if the hon. Gentleman is saying we should do more to support the creative industries which are so important to this country, I absolutely agree. I used to be the Culture Secretary, and I will do everything I can as Chancellor.

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Four million children live in poverty in our country: that is one in three kids. Today the Chancellor could have tackled that. He could have extended free school meals to all primary schoolchildren, guaranteeing that they would get a decent meal every day. That would cost £1 billion a day, which could be paid three times over by closing the non-dom tax loophole, but the Chancellor did not extend free school meals or close that loophole. He talked about tough choices, so let me ask him this: was it a tough choice to protect this tax-dodging loophole and deny meals to kids living in poverty?

[Jeremy Hunt]

It was a tough choice to increase taxes by £25 billion, largely for the well-off, so that we could find more money for schools in the hon. Lady’s constituency.

Economic Update

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

Monday 17th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Hunt]

I thank my hon. Friend for his generous comments. It is not for the Government to say what the Bank of England does when the Monetary Policy Committee makes its decision on interest rates, but of course I have had conversations with the Governor about what the Bank needs to hear for it to feel that the inflationary pressures will be lower and so it will not have to make as high an increase as some people are predicting. Our constituents’ mortgages are at the top of my mind.

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)]

The Chancellor has pledged a new wave of austerity, with public spending cuts squeezing services that have already been cut to the bone over the past 12 years. This is without a mandate and, as before, this round of austerity is a political choice not an economic necessity. Instead of cutting our services, the Government could raise taxes on the super-rich. If the Chancellor believes in his approach, why does he not put it to the people and call for a general election?

[Jeremy Hunt]

With the greatest respect to the hon. Lady, I did not pledge a new wave of austerity. If she does not like austerity, she should look at the generosity of the furlough scheme and what we are doing on the cost of living crisis. This has all been done because of difficult decisions she opposed every time.

The Growth Plan

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

Friday 23rd September 2022 Commons Chamber

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)]

My constituents are terrified about rising bills. The word they use is “terror.” Energy bills will still be double what they were earlier this year. This is a crisis for the working class, but it is not a crisis for the Chancellor’s class. When they are already making record profits, this is a bankers’ Budget. It scraps the cap on bonuses, slashes tax for the top 1% of earners and cuts tax on the profits of big business.

Up and down the country, people are saying that enough is enough. Does the Chancellor really believe that bankers and millionaire CEOs, rather than working-class people, need the most help?

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

I would say two things: the reversal of the national insurance increase will mean £330 a year, on average, for 28 million people; and bringing forward the 1p basic rate cut puts £330 into the average person’s pocket. This is not a bankers’ Budget.