Last week, the Chancellor came into this Chamber with great optimism, but many of us needed to hear much more than just hot air. Instead, we ended up with a Budget that the shadow Chancellor, my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), has described as offering
“no plan to tackle the growing cost of living crisis”,
and doing nothing to remove the enormous tax burden that the Government have put on working people.
More than 13,000 families in my constituency have just been hit by the devastating cut to universal credit, taking £1,000 out of their pockets. While we welcome the fact that the Government have followed Labour’s lead and reduced the taper rate, the Chancellor will know that nearly one quarter of universal credit claimants cannot work because of disability or caring responsibilities. What does he have to say to them as they face an incredibly difficult winter off the back of the biggest ever cut to our social security system?
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimated that the changes to the universal credit taper rate would fail to cover the rise in energy costs, national insurance and inflation for many families. Can the Minister tell the House how many children will be pulled into poverty thanks to his Government’s £1,000-a-year cut to universal credit? Even before that cut, one in eight working households lived in poverty in the United Kingdom.
The Resolution Foundation found that taxes on working households would increase by £3,000 or more after this Budget compared with when the Prime Minister first entered office. Yet bankers get tax relief, and the grossly undertaxed Amazon and online retailers escape again. This Government do not care about the growing cost-of-living crisis. The Chancellor gleefully boasts about how his economic policies are working, but I want him to tell that to the families in Bolton who are struggling to make ends meet after the £20 cut to universal credit, or the nurses who will be hit by a pay cut as inflation rises.
The money for local government is meagre compared with the £15 billion of cuts to local authorities since 2010 and the punishing effect that that will continue to have on social care, blocking more NHS beds as care homes close. What about the other, less visible services, such as those covering squalid prisons, delayed courts, excluded children and those children who cannot get to child and adolescent mental health services? Working families needed a plan to boost pay across the whole economy, but instead, after 11 years of this Government, they got a triple whammy of tax hikes, fast-rising energy and food bills, and a universal credit cut that was tweaked, not reversed.
I welcome the fact that the Chancellor has listened to the campaign from me and my university for priority funding to be given to the Bolton College of Medical Sciences partnership bid, which will add a huge amount to our local economy and provide jobs. However, £20 million was only half the bid. We asked for £40 million. I must declare an interest here, since the University of Bolton is in my constituency and this year awarded me an honorary doctorate, but that is not why I am pushing for the money—this is something I have been campaigning on for many years with the university. I remind the Chancellor that the towns fund gives back only a tiny
proportion of what this Government have stripped away in cuts to our councils, which has seen spending cuts of £16 million over the past 11 years for Bolton Council alone.
While we sit here in the Chamber, in Glasgow, we are hosting the world at COP26. Yet the Chancellor did not mention climate change once in his speech—neither its impact abroad nor its impact at home. Where is the commitment to funding flood defences? In my constituency yesterday, the Environment Agency issued a flood warning. These communities have suffered year on year and they live in abject fear of flooding.
I have raised this question in the House for a number of years. I brought a petition to the House, I went to the Prime Minister—to 10 Downing Street—with a petition, and I have asked Ministers in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to come to see the area in my constituency that gets flooded. To date, no Minister has bothered to attend my constituency to see that, and no money has been given. We are told that some money will be given, but when I last spoke to the Environment Agency locally, it said that there has been no firm commitment. We need £5 million to build flood defences in Bolton, and I ask the Chancellor to consider providing that.
There are many other things that I could say about the Budget, but I will end with a short plea. Many Members will know that for the last nine years I have campaigned for the victims of the hormone pregnancy test Primodos and their families. Their battle has been long, and they are often compared with the forgotten thalidomide victims. Last year, an independent review by Baroness Cumberlege, a former Conservative Minister, found that victims of Primodos, mesh and sodium valproate had all been negligently harmed by their medical treatments. The review recommended that a redress scheme should be set up to compensate the families. To date, the Government have not done that.
The Chancellor has constituents affected by this issue; many years ago, when he was not a Minister, he approached me to register his interest in the all-party parliamentary group on hormone pregnancy tests. The Prime Minister has constituents affected by it, too, as do Mr Speaker and the Leader of the House. Will those Ministers work with the Department of Health and Social Care to set aside funds for a redress scheme?
These people have suffered for decades, through no fault of their own but because of Government negligence and cover-ups—I do not mean this Government; successive Governments have failed to deal with the issue since the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s—and there is now an opportunity. The review was set up by the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May). It clearly recommended redress for these families—for all three groups of victims—yet, to date, the Department of Health and Social Care has done nothing and the Treasury has done nothing. I ask the Chancellor to consider this issue. It is time we did the right thing and supported these people.
5.57 pm