The Minister’s job was clearly to drill down into the technical details, rather than focus on the big picture of the Budget and the Finance Bill. [Interruption.] There is heckling already. It would have been nice to see a bit of life from the Minister during the debate. How to draw the sting from a Finance Bill? Send for the Exchequer Secretary. It is true that he is less provocative than the Chief Secretary to the Treasury; I will give him that.
It is true that the Government wanted to kill off any interest in the Bill and put it on the back burner. Towards the end the Minister tried to arouse the enthusiasm of his colleagues on the Back Benches for the Bill by saying that it was about building a fairer society and energising Britain, but it is not a Bill for building a fairer society or energising business. It is not a Bill for the economy. It is not about what is best for the country at all. It is a Bill totally designed around what the Chancellor thinks is best for him. As the weight of evidence mounts that his plan is failing, he flails around desperately to justify his strategy, casting around constantly to blame everyone and everything else for the fact that everything is going so badly wrong.
The Bill gives us a glimpse of just how desperate things must be getting inside the Treasury. For the Treasury team, it is all about the politics, but what about the
economics? Let us be clear. There is no positive impact on economic growth from the Bill. The Government’s own Office for Budget Responsibility on page 46 of its report on the Budget states that it will have
“no impact on the level of GDP at the end of the forecast horizon.”
The OBR also says that
“these measures reduce GDP growth”
in 2013. After all that effort by the Chancellor, culminating in the Budget and this weighty Finance Bill, what is the impact on economic growth in this calendar year? It is negative.
It is no wonder that the Treasury’s plans and the OBR forecasts are on a slippery slope, constantly and continuously downgrading their projections for the economy while upgrading the size of the deficit. Those grandiose plans and supposedly tough decisions that the Chancellor set out three years ago have seen economic growth of just 0.8%, compared with the 5.3% that they forecast and promised at the time. All the while, our international competitors are moving forward, leaving us behind. Only two other G20 countries have grown more slowly than the UK since the 2010 spending review—Japan and Italy.