Maybe they are away celebrating other people’s birthdays. [Laughter.] Maybe the hon. Gentleman, having had so many interventions, can now safely go and celebrate his. We all know he was here and not somewhere else. In the provisions on the national living wage and some of the other early clauses, the Chancellor seems to be doing exactly what he decried his predecessors for doing: passing legislation to put restraints or constraints on himself. He is advertising in legislation his own behavioural discipline. It is the ultimate political selfie to put oneself into legislation. Some only last for the life of the Parliament, yet are being put into legislation. How gratuitous a political exercise is that? Perhaps that is why other hon. Members cannot see fit to indulge the Bill too much.
Government Members have said that the charter for budget responsibility is a key issue, which it is, but a key aspect of the charter is the welfare cap. In yesterday’s debate, we heard references to the benefits cap—there has been much discussion about the benefits cap, which affects households—but less attention has been paid to the overall implications of the welfare cap, which was first introduced as part of the charter last year. If we look at what the summer Budget, as opposed to the March Budget, does for the welfare cap over the next four years, we find some revealing figures. In the March Budget, the overall welfare cap for the UK for 2016-17 was £122.3 billion; in this Budget, it is £115.2 billion. For 2017-18, it was £124.8 billion in the March Budget; it is £114.6 billion in this Budget. It was £127 billion for 2018-19 in the March Budget, ahead of the election; it is £114 billion in the summer Budget, after the election. For 2019-20, it was £129.8 billion in the March Budget; in this summer Budget, it is £113.5 billion. Over those four spending years, that is a cumulative cut of £46.5 billion, as a result of the charter for budget responsibility and the welfare cap.
Many Opposition Members—or perhaps not many of us, as I think only 20-odd of us voted against the welfare cap when it was introduced—said that what
the Treasury was bubble-wrapping as a neutral budgetary tool would turn into a vicious cuts weapon, and now we see it, in the name of the welfare cap. When there is so much discussion about the benefits cap, people forget that the real story is the welfare cap, and that will bear on people in my constituency and lead to more conflict around the next wave of welfare reform when it comes to the Northern Ireland Assembly.
We heard earlier from the hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) and we heard yesterday what he thinks the implications of the cap will be. If he was still here, I would be saying to him directly that on this issue he and his party need to catch on; they have been wrong in the past, and it is a bit late to be scrambling now, when they have invited this very situation. Many of us told them that their support for the welfare cap, on top of their support for the last wave of welfare reform in the Assembly, would lead to this very situation, but they told us to forget about those concerns because there was nothing we could do about it.