John McDonnell
MP for Hayes and Harlington · Labour · United Kingdom
“It is not a laughing matter—I am sorry for interrupting the flow of the discussion. It would be useful if the review looked at NATS’s long-term investment plans, particularly since its partial privatisation in 2001, which I opposed. I thank the Minister for meeting Unite this morning and thanking the workers, who have worked so hard.”
“On a number of occasions, I have raised the case of Lee Cheuk-yan, who many Labour Members will remember was the general secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions and founder of the Labour party in Hong Kong. He was detained during the democracy movement five years ago.”
“I thank the Minister for his statement. NATS used to be in my constituency and then moved down to Swanwick. Of course, with Heathrow in my constituency, I receive—as I mentioned yesterday—a large amount of correspondence from a whole range of other MPs’ constituents, who think I am responsible for Heathrow airport.”
“I fully agree, and let me also say that wheelchair compensation is significant in this legislation. Most of us have dealt with cases like that. Going back to accountability in the process, a number of different organisations have provided us with notes on the legislation.”
“I apologise to my right hon. Friend; I should have checked this before the debate. The proposed new section 61G refers to priorities and objectives of the Secretary of State, which include a requirement for the Secretary of State to issue a document setting out those priorities and objectives for the CAA.”
“At the moment, when people in my constituency are faced with these problems, they do not know where to go; it is as simple as that. Finally, the debate that we will have on Heathrow expansion and the new policy statement will be interesting, given that we do not know what the flight paths will be. If I was a constituent of my hon.”
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“We have had seven long years of austerity from this Conservative Government, and the spending cuts have dragged our economy and society to the brink. The suffering has been immense, and it is not the Chancellor or his colleagues who have been on the receiving end. It is their victims: those parents who cannot get a school place at the moment, those young people who cannot get a decent home because of a housing shortage, those families who cannot get care for their parents. We have seen public services shredded and basic standards in public life torn up, and for what? So that this Government can add three quarters of a trillion pounds to the national debt. After seven years of austerity, and two years after it was supposed to have ended, what can we look forward to? Continual cuts in public services for the rest of the decade.”
“It is not he who is making the difficult decisions; it is the NHS manager in a hospital deciding whether someone will have a bed or a trolley; a police commissioner deciding which streets will be patrolled; or a council leader deciding which children’s centre will be closed. They are the ones with difficult decisions, not the Chancellor. He is passing the buck to others for his cuts. I think that the Chancellor lives in a world in which he is completely insulated from the consequences of his decisions. He can sit in No. 11 and delete lines from his spreadsheet without a thought for the consequences. For him, it is all in a day’s work, and it is the rest of our society who must deal with the results.”
“It is not just that provision should be made, but that the cuts have established that situation. Whatever system is introduced, that organisation will not be fit for purpose because of a lack of investment over the recent period, which my right hon. Friend has consistently pointed out. We understand the vote in the referendum. People voted to leave, but we repeat time and again that they did not vote to trash their jobs, their livelihoods or the economy. A responsible Government would ensure that jobs and the economy were protected. A responsible Budget ahead of article 50 would have shown how the Government would protect both. The Chancellor had a responsibility and failed to deliver on it. The Chancellor has dared to talk elsewhere about the difficult decisions he had to make.”
“Last week, the Government snuck out a statement on regulations denying 150,000 disabled people access to personal independence payments awarded by the upper tribunal. That was brutal. Last year, the previous Chancellor absorbed the costs when the Government were forced to halt cuts to personal independence payments to disabled people. In this case, are those disabled people being denied benefits because the Chancellor has refused to absorb the costs resulting from the upper tribunal decision?”
“One of those people contacted us. She has type 2 diabetes, fibromyalgia, depression, and anxiety. As a result of the Government’s action, she will now not be extended the support that the courts awarded her. It is clear from last night’s announcement of further austerity measures for Departments that the Government are all about forcing Departments to meet the Chancellor’s spending targets so that he can pay for further tax giveaways to the wealthy. Will he rule out further unfair tax giveaways, such as cutting the top rate of income tax to 40p in this Parliament? Otherwise, it is clear that he wants tax giveaways for the wealthy few and austerity for the most vulnerable in our society.”
“The tragedy is that all those sacrifices and all that suffering were in vain. The record of this Government in office speaks for itself: at the same time as imposing grinding spending cuts, they have added, as of this morning’s figures, almost £700 billion to the national debt. That is not just more than the previous Labour Government borrowed; it is more than the borrowing of every post-war Labour Government added together. It is equivalent to £25,600 of extra debt for every household in the country.”
“It was dropped because the surplus target was never about sound management. No credible economist could be found to support the surplus target because it had no plausible economic justification. The Treasury Committee rightly concluded that the old surplus rule was not “credible in its current form”. The previous Chancellor made a political choice to impose the surplus target. Therefore, the austerity measures that the target required were not just cruel, but unnecessary. Members will recall that those measures meant that people living with disability were suddenly threatened with the loss of their independence, and those going to work, doing the right thing, looking after their children and just attempting to get by were suddenly faced with serious cuts to their income.”
“The motion before the House rewrites the rule by which the Government intend to manage their fiscal policy, as the Chancellor has set out. This rewriting is urgently needed because the Government’s previous fiscal rule lies in tatters. As we argued when the old rule was introduced in November 2015, it was a political device rather than a sound economic tool. We argued that the commitment in the previous version of the charter to reach a budget surplus by the end of the decade was unachievable. That became obvious by the Budget of last year, when the previous Chancellor had to stretch budget accountancy to breaking point simply to claim that the economy was still on course to achieve the target. That was well before the referendum. By the summer, the target had to be abandoned entirely.”
“That is interesting; I am pleased the Chancellor has raised that point. We have seen £700 billion borrowed over the last seven years as a result of economic failure. The Labour party’s policy, based on the recommendations of the CBI and others, is to spend £500 billion on investment over a decade. There would be £200 billion of mainstream direct funding and £100 billion would go to a national investment bank, which would prise from the private sector and elsewhere, on European Investment Bank rates, £250 billion. Such long-term investment in our economy has been recommended. Infrastructure investment is required to tackle the productivity crisis that has been caused by his Government.”
“We would have invested from the beginning in our infrastructure and skills, so we would have grown the economy and would not have had to borrow £700 billion for failure, rather than for growth success. Because the focus of the Government was on chasing an unachievable surplus target, they did not use the borrowing wisely. The sound policy, as recommended by international organisations such as the International Monetary Fund and the OECD, and by the CBI and the TUC here in Britain, is to put the Government to work in supporting investment. Instead, over nearly seven wasted years, the Government have cut investment to the lowest level in a decade.”
“This is the grim reality of the Conservative’s low-investment, low-productivity, low-wage economy, and it can easily get worse. For some on the Government Benches, an economy shorn of basic protections in the workplace, with rock-bottom wages and social spending provisions stripped to the barest minimum, would be a desirable goal. We have had a glimpse of that future in the Chancellor’s own threats to turn Britain into a tax haven. Even to hold out this prospect is to admit that the Government have no better plan than the steady management of decline.”
“Productivity growth has stagnated, as even the Government’s own industrial strategy White Paper acknowledged. I share the Chancellor’s concerns: every hour worked in Britain now produces a third less than every hour worked in the US, Germany and France. We have been arguing that case at least since I became shadow Chancellor, but we had no acknowledgment of it from the Government until yesterday. With that record of under-investment, it is no use those on the Government Benches talking about a post-Brexit Britain taking on the world. An economy with low productivity can compete only on the lowest common denominator, and that means, as has happened, slashing wages and salaries and hacking away at social protections, such as the NHS and pensions.”
“The right hon. Gentleman will recall my opposition to PFI and its failures, but let me be clear: to borrow for investment, to ensure that people have the skills and resources necessary to tackle the productivity crisis and thereby grow the economy and create the high skills and wages which mean that people can pay their taxes and fund our public services, is creditable; however, what we have seen over the last seven years is borrowing because of the failure of the Government’s economic policy. In the past seven years, the Government have actually cut investment, and the consequences of insufficient investment are painfully clear. Austerity measures and low investment have fed directly into what the Governor of the Bank of England has called a “lost decade” for earnings.”
“Let us look at what is happening outside in the real world. We welcome the growth in employment, but we have also experienced the biggest fall in wages among OECD countries over the past seven to 10 years—the figure of 10.4% is matched only by Greece. One in five employees in this country were low-paid in 2015. Mark Carney has called this the biggest lost decade for income growth since the 1860s. The number of self-employed people has increased dramatically, but on average they earn less than 20 years ago. So, yes, I welcome the growth in employment, but I do not welcome the growth in poverty pay, whether for the self-employed or those being exploited on zero-hours contracts.”
“That leads to an economy in which the Government are planning for more than £5,000 of investment per head in London, compared with just £413 in the north-east of England. It is an economy in which a single London capital project receives more Government backing than the whole of Yorkshire, and in which the £500 million promised yesterday for the north of England is set against £18 billion of cuts from local authority budgets since 2010.”
“That shows the grotesque levels of inequality that result from the economy that has been created over the past seven years. Yesterday’s Green Paper seemed to recognise the failure of previous policy, and there has certainly been a change of rhetoric. The Prime Minister has suddenly been won over by the merits of an active industrial policy. The recognition that the six previous years have failed badly is welcome, but nowhere is it clear that the Government recognise the scale of the problem. The weaknesses and inequalities in our economy stem from decades of underinvestment, when decisions about what and where to invest have been taken by too few people at the top and to the benefit of that tiny handful.”
“What we now have in our economy is a scandal of bogus self-employment. A lot of the growth in self-employment has happened on that basis, and it includes the most exploitative aspects. The hon. Gentleman mentions inequality, so let us look at some of the figures. If we use an index other than the Gini coefficient, which does not take into account the real outstripping of the super-rich, such as the P90/P10 ratio—this looks at the 10th and 90th percentiles of income distribution—we find that inequality has risen every year over the past five years. Let us look at what has happened out there in individual companies. If we compare the average total pay of FTSE 100 chief executives with that of their employees in 2015, we find a ratio of 129:1; in the mid-1990s, it was no more than 45:1.”
“At a time when the capital costs for the Government are close to their lowest in history, that choice makes little sense. As we face Brexit, the challenge for us all is to think boldly about how this country can respond, and the amended rule falls far short of that.”
“It makes sense to attempt to provide an objective assessment of the real needs of the NHS to help to prevent the real-terms funding cuts that have taken place under this Government. Let me say to the Chancellor again that he can and must take action now to ensure that both health and social care are properly funded in this period of crisis. I am afraid that the charter represents only the smallest improvement on the previous dire fiscal policy. Unbelievably and, I think, contrary to all advice, it still attempts to keep investment spending within the spending control framework. That has already been criticised by experts from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Keeping the investment spending cap inside the overall spending cap means that every pound delivered for investment comes at the expense of possible spending on public services.”
“That is unacceptable in the sixth richest country in the world, and it is the result of a failure to address underfunding in the autumn statement. I have written to the chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility to ask whether it will look into providing an assessment of healthcare funding against expected need. In the last month, the British Red Cross has described the ongoing situation as a “humanitarian crisis”. The Government’s response has been to play down the situation, despite the volume of continuing complaints from frontline NHS staff. I strongly believe that this is leading to widespread public distrust of the Government’s presentation of funding and support for the NHS and social care.”
“I deeply regret, however, that he failed to take that option at last year’s autumn statement. His failure to act on both NHS and social care funding has contributed to the worst funding crisis in the NHS for decades and a social care system pushed beyond breaking point. An image can sometimes capture the plight of a particular situation. A couple of years ago, it was the image a child’s body on the shores of the Mediterranean that brought to our attention the plight of people in the refugee crisis. Last year it was that photo of a child in an ambulance, covered in blood and dust after being pulled out of the debris in Aleppo. Two weeks ago, the image that put the NHS crisis into focus for me was that of a child below the age of five, in a hospital corridor, being treated on two plastic chairs that had been pushed together.”
“Don’t worry, Madam Deputy Speaker; I was enjoying that. The reality is that this is Government investment, and those figures are just not acceptable. Investment of £5,000 per head in London compared with £400 in the north-east is an unacceptable level of inequality that has to be challenged. The right hon. Gentleman is usually fair, so I am sure that he would accept that, no matter how much we are both champions for our capital city. While the shift in rhetoric is welcome, it must be backed up by meaningful action, and that is where the revised charter still falls short. It is good to see the Chancellor taking on board Labour’s recommendations and ditching the surplus target. In doing so, he has held out at least the possibility of lifting some of the burden of the austerity measures that have led to crises in health and social care.”
“They could have ditched the failed existing fiscal rule and put in place a new fiscal mandate that would grant the space needed to rebuild and transform our economy as we prepare for Brexit. Instead, they have handed more powers back to the Treasury while the Chancellor has insisted on maintaining austerity spending cuts. No part of the Government’s new fiscal rule can be supported and we will be voting against the charter as a whole.”
“It could mean that once again Conservative Chancellors would be tempted to ease off on or tighten up their spending not because of the economy, but because an election is due. In other words, it largely defeats the purpose of having a fiscal rule in the first place. Instead of breaking with the short-term thinking of the past, it bolts it more firmly into place. How can the rule be taken seriously when it is so obviously open to being undermined? In other words, the revised charter leads us dangerously close to the worst of both worlds. It is excessively tight on Government investment when building a post-Brexit economy should demand Government intervention, yet it is excessively loose on the Government themselves, handing too much power back to the Treasury. The Chancellor and the Government are squandering an opportunity here.”
“That meant that the Treasury had excessive power to determine fiscal policy, and that in turn meant Governments would have the power to favour short-term quick fixes at the expense of longer-term action to rebuild the economy. A credible fiscal rule should not allow that to happen. It should be bolted into place, compelling a Government to act for the longer-term good. Labour’s fiscal rule does that by handing power to recognise economic shocks over to the MPC, yet the new charter for budget responsibility appears to hand the power to recognise economic shocks straight back to the Treasury. It returns us to the bad old days when short-term Treasury thinking would be allowed to dominate economic policy making.”
“Getting the balance between these two points is difficult so, following the best available economic advice, Labour’s fiscal credibility rule places the power to determine when we are outside normal times in the hands of the Monetary Policy Committee, which can declare under the terms of the fiscal rule that it is necessary for fiscal policy to adjust in response to an unanticipated shock. The freedom to determine the fiscal stance is a significant power for a Government, so it has to be used responsibly. Labour does not believe that it is desirable to return to the days when Governments would produce their own economic forecasts and then decide on their own terms where the business cycle was and how much extra fiscal leeway they were allowed.”
“Labour’s own fiscal credibility rule follows the recommendations of world-leading economists, business organisations and trade unions by keeping day-to-day spending entirely separate from the Government’s plans to invest. In contrast, this Government’s fiscal rule is excessively tight on Government investment at the same time as being excessively loose on Government control. The primary reason for introducing a rule is to show that a Government’s fiscal plans are consistent and planned well in advance. That allows businesses and investors themselves to plan, and reassures markets that a Government will not attempt to spend excessively. An ideal rule should be the basis of the strict enforcement of borrowing limits—we accept that—but it should also contain the flexibility for Governments to respond when unexpected shocks occur.”
“What we will not get is a serious commitment to delivering the economic transformation that we now need, because that would require the Government to take on a few too many vested interests. Such a commitment would involve a serious attempt to clamp down on tax avoidance, reversing handouts to giant corporations and the super-rich, and ending—in reality, not just in rhetoric—the colossal imbalance in investment between a few favoured places in the south-east and the rest of the country. In changing the rule, the Government are admitting their prior failure, but then failing to address its causes seriously. Investment is too low, productivity is too low and wages are too low.”
“That is clearly not the case. If the Chancellor had looked carefully at Labour’s fiscal credibility rule— [Interruption] —and, indeed, adopted it, he would have seen that what we would actually be doing is reducing debt in the lifetime of a Parliament as a result of ensuring that we invest properly in tackling the productivity gap, in bringing people back to work and in ensuring that they have the highest skills. Those skills will produce the high wages that will make it possible to fund the economy through a tax regime that is fairer than the existing one. It simply will not be possible to deliver the scale of support and investment that is needed to rebuild our economy within the strictures of the rules that the Chancellor is proposing. We will get half-measures and rhetorical commitments.”
“I do not want to interfere in private banter, but I draw the hon. Gentleman’s attention to the fact that, in 2009, the person who is now Chancellor—he was then shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury—condemned any concept of rules. In the rule that he eventually helped to develop in opposition, and that eventually came into force, there was a welfare cap that has now been completely disregarded. The deficit was meant to be not reduced but eliminated by 2015, with a reduction in debt. The rules seem to have gone out the window very early for this Chancellor.”
“At the weekend, the Chancellor told a German newspaper—not this House, you will notice, Mr Speaker—that he is prepared to turn this country into a tax haven. If that means competing with the likes of Ireland on a 12.5% corporation tax rate on top of existing Tory tax cuts it means, according to the House of Commons Library, giving away more than £100 billion to corporations over the next five. That is equivalent to almost 5p on the basic rate of income tax. How then does the Chancellor ever propose to solve the funding crisis in the NHS and social care, given that this morning the Office for Budget Responsibility thinks that public finances are on an unsustainable path?”
“The threat is there on the record: this country will be a tax haven, according to the threats the Chancellor has issued today. We know from what the Prime Minister is saying right now that she is intent on pulling up the drawbridge and leaving the single market, and possibly the customs union, cutting us off from one of the largest markets on the planet, threatening jobs and public finances. This is not a clean Brexit; it is an extremely messy Brexit. We can already see the consequences in the rise in the rate of inflation. With real living standards squeezed by this policy announcement, is it not time for the Chancellor—I appeal to him—to reconsider his cuts to in-work benefits and withdraw them in full in the Budget in March?”
“(Urgent Q uestion): To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer to make a statement on the National Audit Office report, published today, on the Government’s management of the HMRC Estate.”
“Even the Government now accept that there is a tax gap of at least £36 billion, yet these plans will do nothing but hinder the effort to tackle tax evasion and avoidance. Some 73% of the staff surveyed said that the plans would undermine their ability to provide tax collection services, while 50% said they would actually undermine their ability to clamp down on tax evasion and avoidance. Will the Minister now call a halt to the planned office closures, end the job cuts at HMRC and come back with a realistic plan to resource HMRC fully in its vital tax collection role?”
“In reality, the report is damning of the Government’s plans to close 170 offices. We on the Opposition Benches have warned consistently that the Government’s proposals will have a detrimental impact on HMRC’s ability to provide advice and to tackle tax evasion and tax avoidance. The NAO report confirms our fears. First, it called the original office closure plan unrealistic. The estimates of the costs of the move increased by 22%, which is £600 million extra. It forecasts a further 5,000 job losses and finds that the costs of redundancy and travel have tripled from £17 million to £54 million. It also says that HMRC cannot demonstrate how its services can be improved and has not even produced a clear programme business case for the planned closures. As we predicted, this is an emerging disaster.”
“The other issue on which we need to work on a cross-party basis is how to align our taxation policies with our development objectives. As we have heard in the discussions so far, there is a need for greater work with the Department for International Development and the Treasury to consider the development of tax policy in this country so that it is more in line with our development policies for tackling poverty across the world. Having made those few remarks, I thank the hon. Gentleman for introducing the Bill. He certainly has our support. If there is another parliamentary opportunity to enable the Bill to proceed, we will support it. If not, I hope another Member of the House will bring forward a Bill at some future date to achieve the objectives that he set out so eloquently.”
“Concerns have been expressed about the drafting and development of such treaties. There is criticism of the lack of openness and transparency, and that almost follows from our parliamentary procedures. In the American system for scrutinising trade deals and agreements of this sort, there is an open committee process through which evidence is provided in advance of the legislation being agreed. In this House, the deal is brought before us following its agreement. I realise that there may well be issues about confidentiality in the negotiations, but when the Bill comes back or there is another Bill on the same subject we should reform the parliamentary procedure to make the process more open and transparent and to allow more engagement with interested parties.”
“I will be extremely brief because, as the hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Roger Mullin) has said, we want to hear the Minister’s response, which I hope will be constructive. I congratulate the hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath and ActionAid on the campaign they have waged to bring the Bill to fruition. The thrust of the objectives he has set out is to ensure a fairer balance between wealthy countries and source countries in such negotiations, and we wholeheartedly support that. I regret the way in which the Bill is timetabled—unfortunately, it may fall—but I hope there will be an opportunity for it to be brought back. The Labour Opposition will support it if it is brought back. I will sit down shortly, but we need to address a couple of issues.”
“Will the Minister now provide some clarity by inviting the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility to undertake a full assessment of the public finance implications of the range of policy options associated with Brexit, including access—or not—to the single market, being in or out of the customs union and the potential for transitional arrangements?”
“Last week’s autumn statement should have been about providing answers to meet the challenges of Brexit and at least information on the options available. Instead, it appears that the only information we can glean is from photos snatched of the notes of a senior Conservative official in Downing Street. We know now, in the light of that leak, that many of the Chancellor’s senior colleagues in the Government are reluctant to pursue the transitional deal being called for by businesses when we leave the EU.”
“I take that as a no. Last week, we learned in the OBR report that the OBR was denied any information in respect of assurances provided to Nissan. The OBR said: “On this occasion we asked specifically whether any contingent liabilities had been created in respect of assurances provided to Nissan and the Treasury declined to say.” This level of opaqueness on an existing deal undermines the certainty businesses need to invest in any future deals. Will the Chancellor now provide the OBR with the information it has requested, so that it can provide a more accurate forecast, rather than being left in the dark or, as it put it, “none the wiser”?”
“This morning, we heard the verdict from the trial, following the tragic murder of Jo Cox. That murder robbed this House of a fierce advocate for social justice and a passionate campaigner. Her killing was an attack on democracy itself. Our thoughts are with her family. Today’s statement places on record the abject failure of the last six wasted years, and offers no hope for the future. The figures speak for themselves. Growth is down; wage growth, down; business investment, down. [Hon. Members: “Sit down.”] The Government’s own deficit targets are failed; the debt target, failed; the welfare cap, failed.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 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’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. Instead of 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.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“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.”