The comments made by Jonathan Ashworth, the Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, on 9 March 2021.
The head of the NHS has confirmed what we already knew: the Conservatives have broken their promise to the NHS and are cutting nurses’ pay.
The comments made by Kate Green, the Shadow Secretary of State for Education, on 9 March 2021.
The Conservatives have turned back the clock on education, reversing twenty years of progress to reduce class sizes and ensure every child gets the dedicated teacher attention they need.
Under the Conservatives the gap in learning between disadvantaged pupils and their peers had not narrowed for five years even before the pandemic. These Conservative choices are holding back children’s education.
Labour has launched our Bright Future Taskforce to tackle the damage done by these policies ensuring every child can recover from the pandemic and achieve their potential.
The comments made by Rachel Reeves, the Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, on 10 March 2021.
This report reveals how this Government’s outsourced, Serco-led Test and Trace system failed the British people and led our country into restrictive lockdown after lockdown.
It underlines the epic amounts of waste and incompetence, an overreliance on management consultants, taxpayers’ cash splashed on crony contracts, all while ministers insist our NHS heroes deserve nothing more than a clap and a pay cut.
The Conservatives’ wasteful obsession with outsourcing must end and contact tracing should be run by our public health teams.
The comments made by Anneliese Dodds, the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, on 9 March 2021.
Labour has argued for over a decade that cuts to corporation tax don’t boost investment or raise extra revenue – they just cost the Treasury billions that could have been put to better use.
We welcome the Chancellor’s conversion to our point of view, but we can never get back the £95 billion lost to the Treasury over the last few years from this economically illiterate tax cut.
That money could have been used to strengthen our economy going into this crisis. Instead the Conservatives slashed salaries for key workers, ran down our schools and hospitals, and cut 21,000 police officers from our streets.
Never again should any Conservative government be allowed to use such a discredited economic argument to weaken the foundations of our country.
The comments made by Andrew Adonis on 8 March 2021.
It is an honour and a challenge to become chair of the European Movement at this time of crisis in Britain’s relations with Europe. Churchill founded the European Movement to bring Britain and continental Europe closer together – socially, economically and politically – after the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust. We have a duty to seek to do the same again after the experience of COVID19 and Brexit, faced with the twin emergencies of climate change and a global slump.
We will campaign strongly to put right the immediate failings of Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal, including the lack of automatic EU work visas for artists, musicians, engineers and architects; the absence of EU market access for our huge financial and business services industries; and the end of our membership of the Erasmus scheme for student exchanges. Millions are affected and we need to change these damaging policies as soon as possible, which almost no one voted for as part of Brexit.
The speech made by Douglas Ross, the Conservative MP for Moray, in the House of Commons on 3 March 2021.
I want to welcome the Budget on behalf of my constituents in Moray and of people across Scotland. There is a lot of good news in what the Chancellor had to say today. First, however, I want to pick up on a few remarks in the speech made by the leader of the Scottish National party, the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford). He accused members of this Government of not understanding what it was like to be poor. That is quite an incredible statement from someone who earned his fortune as an investment banker in the City of London before he rediscovered himself as a humble crofter.
The right hon. Gentleman went on to say that this Budget lacked ambition, but I thought there was ambition weaved throughout the Chancellor’s statement. It has ambition for individuals, families and businesses in the weeks and months ahead, and ambition for our country in the years ahead. If the leader of the SNP at Westminster wanted to see a statement that lacked ambition, he should have looked at Nicola Sturgeon’s statement last week on her partial route map out of lockdown restrictions for Scotland. That was a document and a statement that lacked ambition, hope and clarity and one that we are seeing unravel at the moment as people in Scotland expect more from their Government.
The final point I want to focus on from the right hon. Gentleman’s speech is his comment about how in Scotland there has been an extension to the freeze on business rates for a further year. That is true, but that further freeze, for another 12 months, was made possible and accepted by the SNP Finance Minister only because of an additional £1.1 billion of support from the UK Government to the Scottish Government. Kate Forbes stood up in Holyrood and said that she was able to do this only because of additional support coming from the UK Government to Holyrood, to the Scottish Government, so that is why we have the extension for a full year of business rates in Scotland.
The right hon. Gentleman mentioned that newspapers were also covered. Of course, the SNP had to be forced to include newspapers in the business rates relief. A vote by the Scottish Conservatives in Holyrood, which the SNP was against to begin with, forced a U-turn. I will leave it to others to speculate why the SNP at this time would not want to support the newspaper industry in Scotland.
Throughout the last year, in dealing with this pandemic, the UK Government have delivered unprecedented support for Scottish families and businesses: the furlough scheme and the self-employed income support, protecting 930,000 Scottish jobs; loans to over 90,000 Scottish businesses and an extension of the reduced rate of VAT for hospitality, leisure and tourism; the £20 a week uplift for universal credit to help those in our society who need it most, which is something I have been calling for since October last year; and £9.7 billion of additional funding for Scottish public services. With this Budget, the Chancellor is continuing those vital lifelines, extending furlough and the self-employed income support until September.
Just as this pandemic has gone on longer than any of us could have imagined back in March last year, so, too, has the broad support delivered by the UK Treasury to the people of Scotland. Yet this is not just a Budget to help the Scottish economy to survive the pandemic. It is also a Budget for our recovery, with investments to support the economy in the north-east in its transition towards green energy, an acceleration of the transformative funding for Scottish growth deals to bolster the local economies in Ayrshire, Argyll and Bute, and Falkirk, and a freeze on the fuel duty to back Scottish drivers, which is crucial to our remote and rural areas. Just look at how that contrasts with the SNP Scottish Government lobbying for an increase in fuel duty. It has gone widely unreported that the SNP is calling for an increase. When we look at the options for fuel duty, how will that go down with voters in rural Scotland in a few weeks’ time? And, of course, as the MP for Moray, representing more Scotch whisky distilleries than any other MP in this place, I warmly welcome the freeze on spirits duty. That is hugely important to the distilleries in my constituency and alcohol producers more widely in Scotland and across the UK.
The Budget shows that the UK Government have a plan to rebuild Scotland’s economy after the immediate health crisis is over, to create jobs and opportunity in every part of our country as we pull together to deliver our recovery. The Chancellor said that the majority of these measures apply across the United Kingdom. We have a further £1.2 billion of spending going to the Scottish Government. We need to see the Scottish Government ensuring that that gets to the services and businesses that need it most. On the stamp duty freeze, we now see that holiday continuing in England until September, but in Scotland it has now ended. We need to see action on that in Scotland as well.
Yet SNP Members cannot welcome this plan—they could not support the Budget because they would rather focus on another divisive independence referendum than our recovery from coronavirus. They say that they want to bring this referendum forward at the earliest opportunity, just when people are renewing their ties with friends and families and businesses are beginning to reopen. Their plan would damage not only our Scottish recovery, but that of the whole of the United Kingdom. That is the last thing we need right now. What families and businesses across Scotland want to hear from the Scottish Government is a full route map for ending restrictions, not a route map for separation. As I said earlier, they are looking for certainty and for hope. This Budget has delivered that by extending the vital lifelines that Scottish families and businesses are relying on. It is now time for the Scottish Government to do the same.
The Chancellor has set out an ambitious programme that will not only secure the survival of many jobs and businesses in Scotland, but provide the basis for our economic recovery in the future. There was just one point that I agreed with the leader of the SNP on. He said that Scotland has a choice of two futures—we do. In the coming Scottish Parliament election, voters will decide whether they want the focus of all the politicians and all the parties within the Scottish Parliament to be on another independence referendum or on rebuilding Scotland from coronavirus. Let us not choose more damaging division. Let us instead rebuild Scotland and the whole of the UK together. Today’s Budget will help us do that.
The speech made by David Davis, the Conservative MP for Haltemprice and Howden, in the House of Commons on 3 March 2021.
May I start by associating myself with the comments of the Father of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley), on ExcludedUK and helping them, and on the leaseholder issue, which also requires help? I also associate myself with those on both sides of the House who have called for the uplift in universal credit to be rendered permanent, which I think in due course will prove sensible.
When I applied to speak in this debate a few days ago, given the headlines in the press I thought that I might be challenging head-on the Chancellor’s strategy, in view of my concern that sudden tax increases would crush any recovery. It is therefore a pleasure today to find that that is not the case, and that I can be much more supportive of my right hon. Friend.
Obviously covid-19 has led to incredibly difficult economic circumstances. The country has suffered the worst peacetime economic shock ever. Indeed, we have the worst outcome in the G7, and the deficit is the worst since 1944—a date that I will come back to—which, in and of itself, is extraordinary. The Chancellor faces quite remarkable economic problems that are worse than any Chancellor has faced in peacetime history, and he has handled it with remarkable sensitivity in the way he has put his policies together. I have a question about one or two, but broadly speaking, he has met this economic challenge of enormous magnitude with great skill.
What do these numbers mean? These billions and trillions that are casually thrown about by supposedly expert commentators are incredibly difficult for ordinary people to understand. In my view, they are best understood when looked at in terms of the impact by household or by wage earner, because that gives a better idea of what they mean. For example, the latest deficit figures published before today were £394 billion a year. That is £14,000 per household—that is the size of the black hole we have to fill. Just looking at the size of the number tells us that no tax policy can solve it. The idea of imposing £14,000 per household of taxes is nonsense; it would be designed to destroy any economic recovery. Only a recovery policy designed to restore the tax base and remove the need for subsidies will close that gap, and I am pleased to see that the Chancellor has essentially adopted that strategy.
The most recent estimate of the debt is well over £2 trillion and may be £3 trillion. Some £2 trillion or thereabouts amounts to £77,000 per household. I remember only a few days ago a BBC commentator talking about paying off the overdraft. I do not have an overdraft of £77,000. This is a big mortgage that is not paid off in one year. To pay off such a debt rapidly would be crippling. Again, the size says it all. It has to be paid off in the very long term—as the Chancellor said, over decades.
Since this is the worst debt and deficit combination since 1944, we should treat it in the same way as they did then: with a 50-year time horizon on the loan—a war loan, if you like. Both the world war one and world war two debts were paid off this century, within the last 20 years, so that gives us an indication of what needs to be done. I have heard a number of people say, “The interest rates might go up.” To a large extent, two things are happening here. Every single country in the world has this issue, and therefore every single Government in the world has an incentive to hold interest rates down, and they now have the mechanisms to do it—they have done it time and again with quantitative easing, even before today.
To close that £14,000 per household deficit, we need to increase growth, increase employment and increase wages. All those things will increase the tax base. The Chancellor said—and I am glad to hear him say it—that his first priority is employment. That is the centre of those aims, and that is exactly right. That requires higher domestic investment to achieve it. It requires higher foreign inward investment to achieve it. It requires higher new company formation and higher research and development, and it will, in turn, generate higher aggregate demand. Tax increases help none of those things.
The issue of tax increases is not a Tory ideological issue; it is about what delivers the recovery. Income tax increases, whether direct or stealthy, reduce aggregate demand; they reduce the amount of money people can spend. Corporation tax increases suppress investment. Capital gains tax increases deter both domestic investment and foreign investment. The one thing I am worried about in this Budget is the proposal to go to 25% corporation tax in a couple of years. That will have precisely the deterrent effect I worry about with respect to inward investment. I am looking at my Northern Irish friend the right hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson), who is nodding at me, because of course in the Province that is absolutely a central issue for us all. We have to worry about tax increases from that point of view.
I was very pleased to hear the Chancellor’s emphasis on what he called the science superpower strategy, and, as he said, it is not hubristic; we are the country with the highest number of Nobel prizes per capita in the world and should be able to marshal something out of that. We have already had an announcement on setting up our equivalent of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—the Advanced Research and Invention Agency; we have new strategies and new funding for science, and new tech visas. All those things will help as all—the whole kingdom—in improving our growth rate.
What is a growth strategy worth? It is very difficult sometimes, particularly dealing with the Treasury, which is very difficult about dynamic taxation and indeed does not seem to understand it, despite the fact that the British Treasury under Nigel Lawson created the best dynamic tax demonstrator in history.
The speech made by Christine Jardine, the Liberal Democrat MP for Edinburgh West, in the House of Commons on 3 March 2021.
It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for South Ribble (Katherine Fletcher). I think we all appreciate that the Chancellor’s statement today comes at a time when the covid-19 virus has had far-reaching and, in some cases, life-changing and even life-ending consequences for far too many of our constituents. People have seen the well-planned, well-financed future they had built for their families swept away by the virus. Businesses are now on the brink because they followed responsibly the rules laid down by the Government. While there are some steps in the Budget that I am sure will be welcomed, it does not go far enough for the many who have suffered the most, such as those on lower incomes, for whom the freeze on the tax threshold will mean a real- terms loss in their income.
Today, a million small businesses and small-business owners who have been fighting desperately to stay afloat and protect jobs and livelihoods were looking to the Chancellor to extend a lifeline—something to get them through the next few months and out on the other side of this pandemic. While there will be changes to corporation tax in two years’ time, that is two years’ time. What about tomorrow, next week and next month? I am sorry, but what we have heard today falls far short of what those small businesses needed. We need to get shops, tradesmen, hairdressers and florists, who are the backbone of our economy and the heart of our communities, through the next few months and they needed changes now. They have lost income and revenue to pay the rent costs, which are building up, and they are accruing debt.
Five billion pounds for small businesses is not enough. What the Chancellor has announced does not even touch the sides of the problem. What we need, and what Liberal Democrats have been calling for, is a £50 billion recovery fund to help small businesses meet their costs and replace their lost revenue until they are able to trade properly again, until the economy is open—£25 billion over three months, totalling £50 billion. We have seen in Germany that it can succeed.
We have also called on the Chancellor to implement a zero business rates policy for all small businesses in 2021-22. While maintaining the VAT cut for hospitality is essential, we would have liked to see that stay in place until the end of the financial year, not just until September, and not just for hospitality but for all businesses. VAT deferral would allow them to free up capital to invest in their business.
The extensions to furlough, to self-employment support and to the universal credit uplift all needed to go much further. Furlough should be extended for as long as we need it, and all the self-employed and excluded should be brought into it. Too many people who have been left out will remain so after this Budget. There are 3 million people who have had no financial support at all in this crisis, and only 600,000 of them, according to the Chancellor’s own figures, will be helped. The gaps in support all-party parliamentary group gave the Chancellor a plan that would have helped those left out. Why did he not take it?
As for the universal credit uplift, even with it, the UK still has one of the least generous social welfare systems in the OECD, and one that we all know is seriously flawed. The uplift is due to end when unemployment could rise again, as the furlough scheme, which has kept it down, comes to an end. Therefore, when will the Government listen to the voices across the country, and from all political parties, that are calling for pilots and trial schemes of a universal basic income, which would have meant that nobody fell through the cracks during this crisis?
Now we all look to September and wait for the Chancellor’s next batch of patches. I am left today with far too few answers and too many questions. Why is our economic performance so much worse than those of other countries? Why is support for small businesses and the self-employed so little, especially for those so hard hit by Brexit? There is no long-term reform of business rates. Why is there nothing on social care and carers? Why so unambitious on our future green industries? There are no tax incentives for transitioning away from a carbon economy, and there is nothing to replace the green homes grant. But there is a tax hike on the lowest paid, by freezing the threshold next year. Simply mitigating the problems caused by covid will not repair the economy or provide the investment for the growth that we need for recovery.
Small businesses, families and self-employed people up and down this country were watching today, hoping for something to repay their commitment and their sacrifice in fighting this pandemic—a fair response from the Government, not self-congratulations on having done so well. The Chancellor, at the beginning of his statement, promised us a Budget to meet the moment. I am afraid that I do not think he has fulfilled that pledge.
The speech made by Katherine Fletcher, the Conservative MP for South Ribble, in the House of Commons on 3 March 2021.
Last year, I asked the Prime Minister, on behalf of the good people of South Ribble, to throw the kitchen sink at supporting the British people through this awful pandemic. Today, this Conservative Chancellor has continued to do just that: kitchen sinks are being thrown. The scale of the financial support that we are offering is massive. We are extending our spending to help people and businesses right through to September and beyond, which is much further than many expected. We are helping businesses to survive with furlough and VAT cuts and supporting them to get back on their feet with restart grants. Costing £407 billion, it is a lot of money to help this country in its time of need.
It was the Conservatives who spoke a decade ago of getting the nation’s finances sorted. We were fixing the roof while the sun was shining. Well, this once-in-a-century global pandemic is the weather equivalent of it raining stair-rods. Cats and dogs have fallen from loaded dark grey clouds on the British people during this pandemic. Businesses have been forced to close, or to work in different ways, to save our lives. Our existential British right to talk a load of nonsense down the pub on a Friday night with friends and strangers has been curtailed, not to mention what has happened to the brilliant people who run these businesses. This Chancellor and Government know what they are doing. We get that we could not have a situation where people lost their jobs or their hard work for businesses just because some bat in China got a nasty cough a couple of years ago. That is not their fault, and this Government have done eye- wateringly massive things quickly to protect people, their families and their work from the consequences of bats and biology.
It is also honest to say that this help has cost us a fortune. This Conservative Government have been fair in protecting people when the awful things happened, but the sums of money required are—wow—massive. It is our money. When I say that it is costing us a fortune, I do mean “us”. It is not Government money or some nebulous concept; it is our money raised by our taxes on our hard work and our business innovation. At some point, we will have to pay this massive support back— not all in one go and not at any price. I commend the Chancellor’s honesty today in setting out two broad themes on how to keep us on an even keel with our money and the nation’s finances.
As individuals, we will have to push back some potential gains to future years, such as freezing salaries, paying a bit more tax, and asking the bigger businesses to contribute a bit more without making us as a country too different from our international peers in the G7. As the Government, we will have to continue to be careful about how we spend our money, but when we do spend money, we should spend it to invest. This statement shows that we will focus on areas that will help us grow our businesses and our communities. We are putting in place the foundations for a future economy to boing back, never mind bounce.
Today’s announcements of investments, super deductions and capital investment plans will boost business investment by enormous sums with world-leading measures. This Government are supporting people to invest to grow their business, creating good jobs across the country. Measures today such as the UK infrastructure bank in Leeds—it is the wrong side of the Pennines, but still amazing—and the levelling up fund will make the UK and Lancashire the best place in the world for innovative businesses to set up and grow. Freeports will help us get our goods to the world, and Help to Grow is brilliant. It will give everyone access to new skills and technologies and boost their businesses, no matter how small they are. I would have run with open arms to these measures when I was running my business.
On a personal note, the people of Leyland want me to thank the Chancellor hugely for the announcement today of the £25 million investment in our town. For too long, Leyland has not seen its fair share of investment. Recently, local businesses, local officials, elected people like me and experts from the Government have been working really hard together in the town board to put a bid together to transform our town centre. I am so chuffed it was successful. Thank you. We cannot wait to get spades in the ground and get started.
It is also important to note that I have the honour in today’s debate of following the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), if only to point out where his crazy spending plans would have put us in the middle of this crisis—in short, a mess. The plans, which the Opposition Front Benchers supported in their manifesto, would have dug a black hole bigger than this pandemic has done in our nation’s finances, which the pandemic would have then deepened. The Labour party is just not being honest or straight with the public when it suggests we can just borrow our way out of this. When Labour Members are a bit vague about what they would actually do to fix this problem, that is because they are not being honest about the consequences of having too much debt for the safety and security of our country.
Not committing to anything and being a bit vague is fine as a political strategy, but it is not the way to do the right thing by the great British people. This Chancellor and this Government are doing the right thing to support us—responsible, grown-up, practical and fair. They are being honest about what we have been facing and are still to face. They are looking to the future and investing for growth in Leyland’s town centre, in Lancashire’s businesses and across the nation. It is what we need to build back better, and I support this Budget wholeheartedly today.
The speech made by Jeremy Corbyn, the Independent MP for Islington North, in the House of Commons on 3 March 2021.
I am delighted to be able to speak in this Budget debate, but sadly this Budget does not reflect the reality of people’s lives. Just this morning I have come from a local food bank where people were queuing up to try to get enough food to get by. They are people who thought they would always be okay and have enough money to live on, but they do not and they therefore rely on food banks. To the tens of thousands of people who have volunteered in mutual aid groups all over the country, I think we should say a huge thank you. They have contributed, in a way that the Government have not, to the lives of so many people who would be in such great difficulty if those food banks were not there.
The Chancellor talks about extending the furlough scheme and protecting people on those wages. I point out to him that the scheme includes no floor and that 80% of minimum wage is a lot less than the money people need to live on. It was my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) who proposed a year ago that we should have a furlough scheme. He sent substantial papers to the Treasury in order to bring that about. Sadly, I do not believe that the Chancellor read all of them.
The scheme proposed by my right hon. Friend would have guaranteed everybody’s income and jobs, it would have had a floor, and it would have gone on to protect people’s conditions and wages, as well as those of people in all aspects of self-employment, including in the artistic sector. There are many people in work at the moment who are being threatened with fire and rehire, and there are companies trying to dismiss the whole workforce and rehire them on lower wages and with worse working conditions. British Gas and British Airways tried it on, and so many other companies are trying to do the same thing. Where is the protection for people’s living standards and jobs in this Budget? Sadly, it is desperately missing.
On public sector pay, many are going to be hit by the pay freeze and by a stealth income tax rise through the freezing of the tax allowance. I remind the Chancellor that a previous Government—a Labour Government in the 1970s—came a cropper on that one when the Rooker-Wise amendment was passed to prevent the Chancellor from the freezing the tax-free allowance.
Millions of public sector workers have contributed so much to dealing with the covid pandemic. Those working in our national health service, our care services and our local government have made super-human efforts to try to help people get through a desperate time, helping people through the mental health crisis and so much else. Their reward is going to be frozen pay and, for those working in local government, a continued underfunding of local government services.
For pretty well everyone across the country, there will be a 5% rise in council tax, as local councils desperately try to balance the books and deal with the increased demands on their services because of the covid pandemic. I hope that the Chancellor will recognise that we need a proper funding formula for local services across the country, and not just claps for the NHS, the care service and delivery workers, but actual pay increases to recognise the massive contribution that they are making to our society.
The Budget said a great deal about corporation tax and other business taxes, but it did not say very much about tax evasion or tax avoidance. From the Government’s statements, they propose to raise around £2.2 billion between now and 2025—in the next four years—from tax avoidance and tax evasion, yet the real figure is that something over £30 billion a year is lost to our public services through tax avoidance and tax evasion. If the Government were serious, they would have included measures in the Budget to deal with tax avoidance and tax evasion.
I hope, by contrast, that the Government will recognise that not increasing statutory sick pay while at the same time doing nothing about tax evasion and tax avoidance says it all about Tory priorities. Statutory sick pay is £95 per week. The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care himself said he could not live on that; I do not think that any Member would want to try to live on that, so why are we expecting anybody else in our society to do so? It has to be increased, and we need a guarantee of at least the £20 rise in universal credit, which at the moment is still a temporary measure.
The Chancellor had obviously read quite a lot of the proposals made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington before the last election, in which he pointed out that he wanted to move jobs to the north and ensure that the increase in public spending that we were proposing would help people across the north. The Chancellor made a big deal of about 750 jobs going to Darlington. Sadly, all that is cancelled out by the huge number of job losses in transport authorities across the north of England, particularly in Greater Manchester and Merseyside City Region. That is because the Government have not provided them with the funding package to support transport systems that they have in London and other places. This degree of unfairness between the north and the south will continue, and the degree of unfairness between the richest and poorest in our society will increase under this Budget.
Towards the end of his speech, the Chancellor managed to provide a great deal of greenwash for his proposals. Of course, we all support a green industrial revolution. It was central to Labour’s manifesto at the last election, but where is the commitment to net zero emissions by 2030? Where is the commitment on protection of biodiversity to protect us all for the future? This Budget is such a lost opportunity. At the end of it, our society will be more divided than it is at the present time, there will be greater stress and uncertainty in so many people’s lives because of this Budget. We can, should and must do much better than this.