It is, I suppose, possible that had Labour won the last election the eurozone crisis might never have happened, and I grant it is possible that world commodity prices might not have gone up. It is possible that all sorts of things might have happened, but in the real world we live in a global economy. Of course things have been more difficult than we expected. That is why we must tackle the situation, not just borrow more money.
Let me offer my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives further reassurance about what will happens if inflation rises—an important issue raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute. Our right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change is actively seeking to ensure, for example, that low-income constituents get the best energy tariff they can, rather than what they currently pay. Evidence shows that the people most likely to shop around, switch and be online are not on the whole the most vulnerable customers, so we are ensuring that the most vulnerable customers, who may not take advantage of those lower tariffs, get access to them. I believe that will make a real difference.
More broadly, my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives asks what would happen if inflation ran away, but the Government would not sit idly by and watch—we have various measures available to us to respond to that. The OBR’s forecast for CPI is lower for 2015 than it is now. It is, of course, a forecast, but we will not simply let inflation rip. If we do not commit now to firm targets on where we are going, the OBR will not sign them off, they will not appear in our spending plans and the market will not believe us. If the market does not believe us, interest rates will go up as will the mortgages of our constituents who will have less spending power—where?—in the local economy, which is exactly where everybody has said they want to see demand. There is a knock-on effect from all those things, and the failure of the Labour party to suggest an alternative is shocking.
Let me respond to one or two other points raised during the debate. The hon. Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) made a point about percentages being meaningless, but as I have said, from a £200 billion budget those percentages make a great deal of difference. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham made some powerful points. He said that we need to keep inflation down—I have given some examples of how we want to do that—and mentioned the need to get jobs going, which we agree with.
The Labour party seems to be saying that if we adopt its policies, somehow the jobs would flow, but what have we heard about that today? Funnily enough, we have heard almost nothing about the whizzo scheme that was so good when Labour tried it in office as a pilot that they never actually saw it through. Somehow it is supposed to find £3.5 billion of savings, but that is fantasy land. It was a fig leaf rushed out over Christmas so that Labour had something to say because it realised it was on the wrong side of the argument.
There has been some discussion of child poverty and it is important to address that issue in the final few minutes of the debate. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said that when looking at a Government’s impact on child poverty, we should look at their policies in the round. Clearly, the single biggest thing that we will do to tackle child poverty is the universal credit introduced by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work
and Pensions. That is designed to make work pay and to take children and adults out of poverty. As soon as we are able to bring it in—starting later this year, which is a great achievement—we will start to see its impact.
I was asked for predictions about child poverty, but let me point out the paradox that we have published a set of figures that relate to this Government. Those figures show not a rise in child poverty but a fall of 300,000 according to the measure of child poverty that is the key target of the Child Poverty Act 2010. We have not gone round television studios saying, “Aren’t we great, we’ve got child poverty down?”, because the main reason child poverty fell was a recession that meant average incomes fell. It would have been absurd for us to trumpet a triumph on child poverty when children were apparently lifted out of poverty because incomes had fallen. That is perverse.
The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) asked what the figures will be at the end of the Parliament. For a start, there has been a 300,000 improvement, for which we will not claim any credit, and the universal credit policy will help. Of course, taking money off benefits moves things in the other direction, but overall we are moving things in the right direction, not the wrong one.