Treasury and Work and Pensions

We have made it absolutely clear that we will properly fund public services, and that economic stability and investment in public services come before tax cuts. Let us review another aspect of the Chancellor’s comprehensive spending review. I am delighted that the Home Secretary is in his place for this bit, because before he took office, the Chancellor took the extraordinary decision, a whole year before the rest of the spending review was completed, to freeze the Home Office budget in real terms. Only two years ago, the Chancellor stood at the Dispatch Box and said in his Budget statement:"““this would be exactly the wrong time, and contrary to the national interest, to freeze expenditure on the Home Office.””—[Official Report, 17 March 2004; Vol. 419, c. 333.]" Since then, we have had the London tube bombings, the foreign prisoner debacle and the admission that the Home Office is not fit for purpose. If it was the wrong time then, why is it the right time now? What could the reason possibly be for picking on the Home Secretary? I cannot imagine. He should not be freezing the Home Office budget; he should be freezing the assets of Abu Hamza instead of letting him flick through Homes and Gardens in his prison cell. These piecemeal announcements on spending dribbled out of Budgets and pre-Budget reports—announcements that fall apart on closer examination—are the very opposite of what a comprehensive spending review was supposed to achieve. They are the opposite of what a Conservative Treasury will achieve: real value for money for the taxpayer, and government that grows more slowly than our economy. Of course, a proper comprehensive spending review would also have considered the Government’s progress on ending child poverty, which is the third issue that I want to discuss today. No one doubts the Chancellor’s genuine desire to tackle child poverty, but surely we are entitled to ask why the number of people in severe poverty has risen by three quarters of a million under Labour. The answer is that the Chancellor has relied on just one blunt instrument: tax credits. Of course he refuses to answer any more questions on his tax credits in the House. He has gone 927 days without answering a single question on the subject. It is funny that he is always there to take the applause when he launches these schemes, and scuttles into hiding when they go wrong.