Clearly, what hon. Members do not understand and have not worked out yet is that, even with the higher national living wage that the Chancellor has announced, it will not be enough for a family to live on because of the cuts in tax credits. That is the actual situation.
When it comes to tax cuts, we support the rise in the higher rate threshold and in the personal allowance, but we will look at the detail to make sure the Chancellor is not up to his usual trick of giving with one hand and taking away with the other. When it comes to tax, the
burden of deficit reduction should be borne by those with the broadest shoulders. Instead, he has chosen to put the heaviest burden on low-paid working people. He is claiming to have found £12 billion in welfare cuts but is aiming to get only half that amount from tax avoidance, and most of that is from our tax avoidance policies.
On welfare, we back measures to get people into work to achieve full employment and thereby get the social security bill down, and in our manifesto we committed to a benefit cap. However, the Chancellor promised to protect the most vulnerable and disabled from his welfare cuts, and if he goes to break those promises, we will oppose him every step of the way.
The Chancellor has now accepted a slowdown in his original pace of cuts. We will look at the details, but we will want to be sure that all this amounts to is not just hitting working families one year later. We have said we support pay restraint in the public sector, but it should be based on a fair process that is not casually disregarded but is fair to those on lower incomes. In 2010, the Chancellor made that promise to the lowest-paid workers in the public sector, and he did not keep it.
On the NHS, people will take Conservative promises with a pinch of salt when they come from a Government who have cut funding for GP services, cancer services and mental health services.
The Chancellor has talked about the surplus, which no one would disagree with when economic circumstances allow. We will look at the detail of the Chancellor’s proposed new fiscal rule, but simply legislating for it has more to do with politics than economics. Anyone can legislate for a surplus; the question is whether it can be delivered, and he has signally failed to keep his promises on that in the past.
The Chancellor claims that this is a Budget for working people, but it does not put working people first; it ducks the big decisions on infrastructure and fails to give businesses the productivity boost they need. In the light of the measures set out in the Budget, let us look at what the Office for Budget Responsibility says about productivity. It says that his Budget will not improve productivity. True to form, what this Chancellor says and what he does are two very different things. That is why it is down to us to ensure that when he says it is fair, it is fair, and that when he comes up with some new proposal, he consults in good faith to make sure it is workable.
Before the Chancellor makes more promises, he has to deliver on those he has already made. He says that he stands up for working people; what he does is make them worse off. He says he has a long-term economic plan; what he does is duck the big infrastructure projects. He talks one nation, but many of the measures announced today will make this country more divided. The hopes of millions of working people are more important than his hopes of being the future Tory leader. This Chancellor is personally ambitious, but when the economic recovery is still fragile, he should be ambitious not just for himself, but for the country.
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