Thank you, Mr Speaker.
We have heard today that there will be more taxes, more debt and more borrowing. The verdict could not be clearer. The so-called long-term economic plan has failed. As the Treasury’s own leaked paper reveals, the Government knew it had failed before the referendum result was announced. We now face Brexit—the greatest economic challenge of a generation, and we face it unprepared and ill equipped. The new Chancellor acknowledged the failure of the economic strategy in October when he promised a reset of economic policy.
Today, we expected a change of direction after those six wasted years. Instead, we have seen further cuts to earnings for those in work through cuts to universal credit, and a living wage increase that is lower than expected under the previous Chancellor. This is a new Conservative leadership with no answers to the challenges facing our country following Brexit, and no vision to secure our future prosperity.
Labour respects the decision of the British people to leave the European Union, but the chaotic Tory handling of Brexit threatens the future prosperity of this country. The Chancellor must now do the right thing for British workers and businesses. He must insist on full tariff-free access to the single market. He and the Treasury know that that is what will get the best deal for jobs and prosperity here. It may not be in the Chancellor’s nature, but in the national interest, I urge him to stand up to the Prime Minister and the extreme Brexit fanatics in her Cabinet. If he stands up for British businesses and jobs by fighting for single market access, he will have our full support.
After six wasted years, wages are still lower than they were in 2008. Self-employed people are, on average, paid less than they were a generation ago. Six million people are earning less than the living wage. Too many people are having to worry about buying school uniforms, affording a family holiday or even just paying the rent or mortgage.
We have had a month of briefing from the Conservative party on those people who are called “just about managing”—the JAMs. To the Conservative party, these people are just an electoral demographic. To us, they are our friends, our neighbours and the people we represent. Let me tell the House why those people are just managing. It is the result of Tories imposing austerity on an economy that could not bear the strain. We have seen productivity stagnate, but there is nothing in the autumn statement on the scale needed to overturn those six wasted years.
If the Chancellor really wants to make a fairer tax system as well, he could start by bringing back the 50p tax rate for the richest in our country. We have
heard familiar hollow rhetoric from the Tories on tax avoidance, when they have cut the resources of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs—the very people who collect these taxes. The resources available to HMRC today are 40% less than they were in 2000.
The Chancellor has frozen in-work benefits at a time when food prices are rising and wages cannot be expected to keep up. We need an economy that is fundamentally more prosperous and where prosperity is, yes, shared by all. The increases in the national living wage announced today are lower than expected and leave the poorest-paid workers still earning less than they need to live on. So I ask the Chancellor to adopt a real living wage level, as Labour has pledged to do, and abandon his predecessor’s empty rhetoric.
Regrettably, the Chancellor is still going ahead with some of the cuts to universal credit. Thanks to pressure—I pay tribute to Members of all parties who have campaigned on this issue—he is offering to soften the blow. We do not want the blow softened; we want it lifted altogether. Today’s changes will leave a single parent on average at least £2,300 worse off. These are the very people who are working hard to deliver for their families, and the Government are betraying them.
As for people with disabilities, who have been put through the ordeal of the discredited work capability assessment and are trying to get themselves ready to return to work—they are “just about managing”—they still remain in the Chancellor’s firing line. He cutting £30 a week from the support that these disabled people receive. In our society, that is scandalous.
Those who are “just about managing” also rely on our public services. They send their children to local schools; they depend on their local hospital; they rely on local council services to clean their streets, tend to their parks and playgrounds and open their libraries. The reality, however, after six wasted years is that our public services are just not managing. Today, the childcare that parents rely on remains underfunded, as the Public Accounts Committee has reported—and it will remain underfunded, even after today’s announcements.
I want to pay tribute to my hon. Friends the Members for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) and for Erith and Thamesmead (Teresa Pearce) for the important work they did in bringing the issue of child burial fees to public attention. I ask the Government to do the right thing on child burial fees and reconsider making funding available for families in these desperate circumstances.
Councillors from all political parties are reporting that they are at a tipping point in the provision of social care. The previous Chancellor cut nearly £5 billion from social care, meaning that over 1 million people who need care are not getting it. They are not even “just about managing”, and they got little help today. We have called for additional support for social care, because the funding being provided today is only a stop-gap measure. Our social care system will not be secure without long-term funding. Tonight, many elderly people will remain trapped in their homes, isolated and lonely, lacking the care they need because of continuing cuts to social care—and social care cannot be cut without also hitting the NHS.
The supposed £10 billion funding allocated to the NHS is a restatement of an earlier commitment, but the Health Committee described this £10 billion claim as
“misleading and incorrect”. The real amount is less than half what is claimed. As a result, we now have 3.9 million people on NHS waiting lists—more than ever—and many of those 3.9 million people are waiting in pain, and they got no relief today. Across the country, hospitals face losing their A&E units, their maternity units and their specialist units. This Tory Government are failing patients, as well as failing the dedicated NHS staff who serve us so well. This is the first time that healthcare spending per head has declined since the NHS was created, and I fear there will be a crisis in funding and care over this Christmas. The NHS cares for us, and we should care for the NHS.
Members of this Government have also overseen the biggest real-terms cuts in education for four decades. One pound in every seven has been cut from further education college budgets, and Conservative policy has saddled a generation of students with a lifetime of debt. How can a Government seriously talk about supporting a 21st-century economy when they are planning to pour tens of millions into the failed 20th-century policy of grammar schools, segregating our children at an early age?
As for housing, the Chancellor announced today that he was scrapping “pay to stay” proposals and letting agents’ fees—a U-turn that is a victory for Labour’s campaigns against both the “tenant tax” and the letting fees. The Chancellor has spoken before about the dream of home ownership for the young. Nothing that he has announced today is of the scale that is needed to suggest that that will remain anything other than a dream. The hard facts are these. The Government of which the Chancellor was a member built fewer homes than had been built at any point since the 1920s, and there are now a third of a million fewer home owners under the age of 35. Today the Chancellor could have delivered the scale of investment that is required to build the homes that we need and to create a new generation of home ownership. He significantly failed to do so.
Thanks to campaigning by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), the Wentworth Woodhouse building will be saved. I am grateful for that. The accusation was that a Labour Government had sited an opencast mine near the building and threatened it. That, I believe, was in 1947. I only wish that some of the policies pursued by Tory Governments since the 1950s could be reversed so easily.
The Government’s biggest investment failure is this: the Chancellor has failed to address properly the Government’s most consistent shortcoming. His predecessor cut public investment to the lowest that it had been since the 1990s. Rather than delivering the ambitious investment that our economy needs throughout the country, the Chancellor has failed to recognise the scale of the challenge. He also risks repeating the mistakes from last year, with the national flood resilience plan failing to provide the protection that our communities need.
Just one in five of the projects in the investment pipeline is under construction, and shovel-ready projects worth £82 billion are still being delayed. The infrastructure gap between London and the rest of the country remains unbridged. London was scheduled to receive 12 times as much public investment per head as the north-east of
England. The announcement of a £1.1 billion investment in transport is, in fact, a reannouncement. The Oxford-Cambridge rail link is significantly delayed against Network Rail’s original planned completion date of March 2019. There are no new ideas here, just a promise to deliver what the Government have previously failed to deliver. This is press-release policy-making, not provision. All that we need now is the return of the high-vis jacket.
The “fourth industrial revolution” will not be delivered on delays, old news and reannouncements. The Government have, at last, realised their mistake, and now talk about an industrial strategy—words that Ministers refused even to refer to in the past—but it is not enough to change a few ministerial titles. The Government and the Chancellor need to deliver. We have yet to see the proposed Green Paper on industrial strategy that was promised over the summer.
The same Government who now talk up high-tech investment oversaw a real-terms cut of £1 billion in science funding during the last Parliament. The OECD recommends that developed countries should be spending 3% of GDP on science. On the basis of what we have heard today, the new spending will lift our expenditure from 1.7% of GDP to a mere 1.8%.
It is the same familiar story for business. The Chancellor is continuing the race to the bottom on corporation tax, and, while continuing the cuts in public services, he is cutting taxes for big business. We know that it is not headline tax rates that encourage long-term investment by businesses. Business investment has been revised down every year under this Government. What encourages businesses to invest is the knowledge that they have access to skilled workers, world-class infrastructure and major markets.
Today’s grim economic forecasts reveal the challenge that lies ahead. The Chancellor admitted over the summer that it was time for a change of course. He has now had to abandon the Government’s fiscal charter, with its failed hard surplus target. Labour warned that a hard surplus target lacked the flexibility to adapt to economic circumstances and the capacity to allow investment. The Chancellor’s U-turn today demonstrates just how right we have been over the past year.
Only weeks ago, the Prime Minister offered the hope of change and the Chancellor offered to “reset” economic policy. Today, we have seen the very people whom the Prime Minister promised to champion betrayed. The Chancellor has failed to break with the economic strategy of austerity. The country remains unprepared and ill-equipped to meet the challenges of Brexit and secure Britain’s future as a world-leading economy. I fear that, after all the sacrifices that people have made over the last six years, today’s statement has laid the foundations for more wasted years. Only a Labour Government will deliver on the ambition and vision to rebuild and transform our economy so that no one and no community is left behind.