Fiscal Responsibility Bill

It is a pleasure to speak on this group of amendments, which essentially brings together various ways of delaying the Bill's implementation and assessing it in the light of various matters. The hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. Browne) set out his thinking behind amendments 4 and 5, and I will say a word or two about that in a moment. The grouping also includes new clause 16, tabled by the hon. Member for Dundee, East (Stewart Hosie), and new clause 1. Amendment 4 proposes to delay the operation of the Bill. I have much sympathy with the thinking behind the amendment as it was set out by the hon. Member for Taunton, although I am not entirely sure whether it would necessarily work as he would like and allow the disapplication of the Bill for a year. I will be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about that. I was confused by the words:""beginning with the coming into force of the order."" Given that the targets and duties set out in the Bill will not apply immediately, I am not sure how effective that would be. Perhaps that can be clarified during the debate. On amendment 5, I have a lot of sympathy with what the hon. Member for Taunton said about the need to review the accuracy of the forecasts provided by the Treasury in recent years. That was a well-made point. I suspect that the Minister will say in response to many of the hon. Gentleman's remarks that the recession threw everything out; that borrowing therefore rapidly increased; that we did not anticipate the recession, or at least the depth of the recession; and that that is why we are in this position. The problem, however, goes deeper and goes back further. It is worth noting the various budget estimates of when the country would next have a balanced budget. In 2003 it was estimated in the Budget that we would have a balanced budget by 2005; by 2004 that had moved to 2007; in 2005—I do not know whether this is a coincidence, but that was the pre-election Budget—the estimate was still 2007; by 2006 it had moved to 2008; by 2007 it had moved to 2009; and by 2008 it had moved to 2011. And that was before we started to get into the real horrors of the recession and the significant downgrading in the 2009 projections. Robert Chote, of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, put it nicely when he described the Treasury's record on projections of public finances as""a sustained display of conviction forecasting"." There is a long-standing inaccuracy, and it all goes the same way. As far as the public finances are concerned, the Treasury has consistently underestimated the scale of borrowing and consistently taken an optimistic approach.