I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend. The irony of some of the swingeing cuts of the past seven years is that although on a scorecard the cuts to civil service jobs represent significant savings, when we look at the roles and responsibilities of some of those civil servants, it does not take a rocket scientist to work out that cutting the number of tax inspectors may
well mean that the Government will lose on tax yields and will lose revenue. There is a cost saving on the one hand, but on the other hand there is a direct cost to the Government in lost income.
I had the same experience in local government. Before I was elected to the House, I was the deputy leader of the London Borough of Redbridge. There is a continuing debate in local authorities about, for example, enforcement officers. There are huge pressures on local government budgets, and staff job losses can represent some of the biggest savings because staff are the biggest cost. If a council cuts its pool of parking enforcement officers, that will certainly help it to balance the budget when it comes to the budget council meeting, but it can end up losing revenue if enforcement officers are not out slapping penalties on cars. In addition to the loss of revenue, there are also worse outcomes for citizens, because such a policy encourages the bad practices that make our communities in the case of parking, or our society in terms of effective tax revenues, a lot worse off.
I hope that Ministers will turn to some of these issues when the Budget is next before us, because as well as being pretty thin on substance, the summer Budget did not deliver against the challenges of the time. At the opening of my speech, I quoted William Beveridge’s words about this being “a time for revolutions”. I have been struck by the interim report of the IPPR commission on economic justice, which has been launched today. In a succinct and effective way, the IPPR has summed up a number of the issues involving the great central planks of Government economic policy that have caused me great frustration, but it has also captured the sense of injustice felt by many of our constituents.
We could go on about this ad nauseam: I have sat in the Chamber many times listening to Conservative Members talking about their economic record, but I could spend much of the time available to me this afternoon cataloguing the broken promises of Conservative Chancellors. In fact, we could spend quite a lot of time talking about the broken promises of just one Conservative Chancellor. Our SNP colleague, the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden), is new to the House and was not here to listen to George Osborne’s commitments, so I had better tell him about them. We were told in 2010 that the Conservatives would eliminate the structural deficit in one term, and they attacked the Labour party for lacking ambition and for not having a serious economic policy when we promised merely to halve the deficit over the course of a Parliament.