I will pick up some of those points later.
The reality is that meanwhile, the Government have presided over the slowest recovery since the 1920s—stubborn fact. The OBR has revised down GDP growth, and business investment is now falling. Those are not my figures; they are the OBR’s figures. What about wages? I will touch on the points that the hon. Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean) raised. Real wages are still lower than they were a decade ago, and according to the OBR,
“average earnings growth remains below the rates typical before the financial crisis”.
These are real people’s real lives—real wages are not going up. For many workers who have seen their wages stagnate, borrowing and debt has plugged the gap. Household debt relative to income is forecast to increase over the next few years.
What about transparency in Government spending? Long gone are the days when Tory Ministers hailed their Government as the most transparent in history—replaced by a culture of secrecy and a disregard for parliamentary convention that saw the Government held in contempt of Parliament for the first time in history. It is not a proud record to have.
Even on transactional issues, such as the regular and timely release of figures for departmental spending of over £25,000, the Government seem to have quietly backslid, in some cases releasing data series late, incomplete, or not at all. The question is: what are they hiding? The Chief Secretary has made much of the Government’s
record on the deficit, yet the reality is that on her watch, and that of her predecessor, they have simply passed deficits on to our schools, our hospitals and our local councils, with departmental spending cuts of over £40 billion since 2010.