Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

There are so many of them to suggest, but I do not want to take up the whole afternoon. I would certainly start with identity cards and regional government, and the panoply of controls and restrictions placed on local councils, which create a bureaucracy in Whitehall and in each council. Many of the strategies, partnerships and those kinds of things are all bureaucracy and words. The Conservatives want to spend that money on the teachers in the schools and the nurses in the hospitals; we do not need such a vast army of people to deal with regional government and with instructions, monitoring and audit from one level of government to another. If the hon. Lady wishes to see more detail, she can find it in the economic policy review that I published for the Conservative party some time ago. She will find pages and pages of quangos to cull or slim, and areas of Government work that we do not need to do. Things have simply got out of control. The Government have put 1 million extra public employees on the payroll, most of whom are not front-line workers. We welcome the ones who mean we get better schools and hospitals, but most are not in that category, and we need to look again at that. What do the Government need to do? If they were serious about value for money, they would have a comprehensive freeze on new recruits today, instead of advertising all those non-jobs in The Guardian every week. If they were serious about controlling public spending, they would understand that they have done the job of catch-up on public sector wages—indeed, those wages, on average, far surpass private sector wages—and so would impose the pay freeze today. Surely it is better to share the work around than to get into a position later where one has to sack people because one cannot afford the wage bill. If one takes on a football club where the wages are too high, it is better to keep some of the players on while one is looking around, but to pay them realistically because that wage bill is the reason why the thing is nearly bankrupt. I fear that this is not a Budget that will be taken seriously. Most people who are looking at it know that it is a nowhere Budget from a dying Government, and they know that it contains no serious measures that are up to the task of pulling round this extremely damaged economy. More importantly, this Budget contains no measures to tackle the problem of damaged and difficult banks. If the Government really wanted an economic recovery, they would understand that the current imbalance between the public and private sectors—between the finance supplied to the public sector and the lack of finance supplied to the private sector—is their main problem. If they were serious about recovery, they would issue new instructions to the banks that they own. If they were serious about recovery, they would change the instructions through the banking regulator, because that is the main reason why we have gone from boom to bust. This Government's epitaph will be that they were the Government of boom and bust. Their boom was created by incompetent banking regulation and their bust was created by even more incompetent banking regulation. They like to say that it is people like me favouring a more deregulated world in the 1980s that has caused their problems, but they should grow up and own up. They changed the entire financial regulation system in 1997 when they came into office. They heaped far more regulatory detail on to the banks and other financial companies over their 13 years in office. The problem was that it was all bureaucracy, bumf and box-ticking, and they missed exercising control of the main thing, which Conservative Governments had always controlled extremely well; we never had banks blowing up and going bust on our watch, because we had one very important set of strong regulations that controlled the banks' cash and capital at prudent levels. The Government thought that they knew best with their regulators. They allowed them to expand the bank balance sheets massively in a way that some of us warned against and which was clearly imprudent. Unbelievably, having done that, the Government did exactly the opposite at the wrong point. They brought on the banking collapse and they brought on the recession because they switched from allowing the banks to have far too little cash and capital to demanding that the banks had far too much cash and capital for the circumstances of the time. Even worse—this is the biggest sin of all for a regulator in such a sensitive area—was that all this was done through the media, in public, so that the banks had no opportunity to sort themselves out over any reasonable time period because they were under the pressure that comes from the Government of the day telling the media and the public that the banks were nearly bust. There could not be a more perfect way of creating a violent cycle than that. We are now into punk-monetarism, money printing and an attempt to keep the public sector afloat with cheap money by creating it for the public sector's own uses. The other side of that coin has to be, I suppose, starving the private sector of money because that is not where the Government see their political interests lying. If the public want to know why we have an extremely feeble recovery and a lot of worry about our economy, I can tell them that it is because the Government have completely mismanaged the banking cycle. If the public want to know the really big numbers that have mattered over the past year, they should look at what the Government have been doing to RBS and Lloyds—the Government's policies have been very contractionary. If the public want to know what we need for recovery, I can tell them—they will understand this—that it is sorting out the public sector to give us value while protecting what matters and it is providing more incentive to the private sector through less tax and less regulation, so that we can attract and retain businesses in this country in order to grow again. We have got to earn our way out of this mess. We have got to work our way out of this mess. This Budget does not do enough for people of enterprise and people in business. It will fall to the lot of a Conservative Government to understand that, after this big a mess. a lot of stimulus and incentive will need to go into the private sector, because the private sector needs to earn a lot more to pay this Government's bills.