I am afraid that I have to start by disappointing you somewhat, Madam Deputy Speaker—and no doubt the whole House—but because of a throat infection, I am unlikely to last 10 minutes.
I will come on to say a few words on productivity, but I was stunned by the comments made by the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) earlier this afternoon. He talked about the Budget being a highly moral one, with a great moral imperative behind it. His comments reminded me that today is the 131st anniversary of the formation of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the very day the Government are bringing in a Budget that attacks tax credits for children.
I was going to leave my remarks on that there, but I will refer to something my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) raised. I will re-read, for those who were absent at the time, a small sentence on page 88 of the Government’s Budget. It read thus:
“The Department for Work and Pensions and HMRC will develop protections for women who have a third child as the result of rape”.
Where is the morality in that? What on earth is moral about dragging women in to talk about the fact that they may have been raped, so they can get some decent treatment from the benefit system? What can possibly be moral about that? I appeal to the Government: for goodness’ sake, they may seek savings in many other parts of welfare, but they should not punish children and not force women, who have gone through the trauma of rape, to have to justify themselves to the taxman.
I shall move on now to productivity. The Government make great play that they have a plan for productivity, but any search for it in the Red Book will be in vain. Let me pick up on one or two matters that have been referred to by Members who are no longer in their place. Mention was made of science. Why is science and research important? If we are to stimulate investment, innovation and enterprise, one of the key things we need is the production of knowledge. In 2010, the Government chose to freeze the budget—or ring-fence it, as they grandly called it—for science and research at £4.6 billion a year. By the time we got to the Budget of
March 2015, it had degraded in value by £900 million in the succeeding five years, yet they still proclaimed in the Budget that they had ring-fenced the budget for science and research. When I received the Red Book for today’s Budget, one of the first things I did was to search for the core budget for science. Surprisingly, the table produced in the March Budget is entirely missing. There is no comment about the retention, even in cash terms, of the core science and research budget. Perhaps that was a slip, but surely it cannot be justified in any way by any Government who claim they have a strategy for productivity.
Let me pick up one other matter—I am pleased that my throat is holding out. Mention has been made of a return to the 1950s by the bringing back of a levy for apprenticeships. Of course I welcome employers making a bigger contribution towards skills and development, but the problem in terms of productivity is not a general one about access to apprenticeships. We have had a structural weakness in the UK for more than 20 years in intermediate and higher intermediate skills—in other words, the technicians in science laboratories and the manufacturing sector, for example. I am not so much talking about the people at what might be traditionally called the pure craft end or at the higher professional end; OECD figures tell us that we have a worse record on producing higher intermediate skills than most of our competitors. I see no mention of that in either this Budget or the March Budget, so what are the Government going to do about it?
Madam Deputy Speaker, I feel myself in need of a Macallan 12-year-old, because of my throat, so I shall have to leave it there.
6.35 pm