Pre-Budget Report

I shall try to match the Chief Secretary's brevity, although I came prepared for Members of the House to be a bit thinner on the ground. Evidently not all experienced the same difficulty that some of us encountered in battling through the snow to get here. This is the first opportunity that the House has had to debate the pre-Budget report, the last important economic statement made by the Government before a pre-election Budget which markets will rightly discount. Given the critical state of the public finances, the huge borrowing requirement that must be met, and the fragility of confidence in the United Kingdom economy and United Kingdom Government debt in particular, we would have expected the Government to use this opportunity to send a powerful and unambiguous signal to investors and lenders alike of their determination to get the deficit under control. Listening to the Chancellor and the Prime Minister yesterday, and to the Chief Secretary, one would think that the global financial crisis had caused the meltdown in Britain's public finances, but that is not what has happened. According to the Treasury's figures, the economic recession accounts for about a quarter of Britain's deficit—that is the cyclical part of the deficit, which economic recovery will eventually eliminate—but three quarters of it is structural, and requires a structural response. The truth is not that the financial crisis has caused the fiscal crisis, but that for many years the global financial boom masked the scale of the underlying fiscal problem as this profligate Government spent the tax receipts that were the proceeds of a series of bubbles in financial assets, and property in particular, as if they were permanent features of the economic landscape. The real structural crisis that needs to be addressed is not caused by the Government's support for the banking system, as they like to imply. In fact, none of this year's £178 billion deficit is directly attributable to support provided for the banks. The pre-Budget report was the Government's last chance to set out a credible path to fiscal stability, to put our economy back on the road to sustainable growth and enduring prosperity, and to ensure our triple-A credit rating. They blew that chance, and now the country knows beyond doubt that only a change of Government can deliver the economic change that Britain needs. The present Government have shown themselves to be unfit for office by shirking their task in the nation's hour of economic need.