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Showing every spoken contribution, including 11,997 under 12 words. Hide short remarks
May I just put it on the record that the Tour de France will be passing through my constituency twice?<span id="419" class="column-number" data-column-number="419"></span> Will the Secretary of State investigate the position on Kirkconnel station in my constituency, on the Nith valley line? Kirkconnel is a former mining community with an older population, and many people are unable to use the station because of infirmity or poor mobility.
I do not know whether you or the Leader of the House are cinemagoers, Mr Speaker, but this weekend you could visit the Lonsdale cinema in Annan for its range of Halloween films, including a 30th anniversary screening of “Scream”. I commend Alan Towers, the proprietor of the cinema, on the fact that Lonsdale has been nominated as Cinema of the Year at the British Independent Film Awards, and further commend Alan and his team for keeping the cinema going through sometimes difficult times and providing a much-valued entertainment service for people across the south of Scotland and beyond.
It is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Alec, and to be speaking on behalf of the official Opposition in this debate called by everybody’s friend, the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon)—the Member of Parliament above all others for whom the term “indefatigable” could have been coined. It is a very important debate, and I commend him on the clarity of the three asks that he has put to the Government; we look forward to hearing the Minister’s response. On an average day, air ambulances undertake 137 missions. We have heard in the debate about the great work of air ambulances across the country. The hon. Member specifically mentioned their work at Strangford lough at the end of the Ards peninsula. It is a part of the world that he knows I know well and is a very good illustration of the importance of being able to move people quickly when the roads are slow to pass. In my constituency of East Hampshire, we are very lucky to have a fantastic team at the Hampshire and Isle of Wight air ambulance, which can reach almost anyone in Hampshire or on the island within 10 minutes from take-off from its new airbase and headquarters at Southampton airport. They have flown 907 missions so far this year. In the single month of August, their doctors, pilots and paramedics responded to 250 missions. During the August bank holiday weekend, the teams were deployed eight times a day on average, coming to the rescue in the aftermath of car crashes, cardiac arrests and accidental injuries. I know all Members join me in commending the work and generosity of air ambulance charities and their supporters. The supporters are very important. As a number of colleagues have mentioned, air ambulances are not part of the national health service; they are charities. Yet, as the hon. Member for Strangford highlighted, most people do not know that they are independent from the NHS. I hope that this debate plays a part in addressing that lack of awareness. Fundraising is a vital activity for air ambulances. It costs the Hampshire and Isle of Wight service £17,750 a day to keep their vital service operational. They are particularly creative fundraisers—from the clothes recycling points and the charity lottery to “brew for the crew” coffee mornings and the “dash in the dark” and many corporate and commemorative fundraising initiatives. I commend everyone involved with the Hampshire service and with air ambulance charities right across the country for their amazing—indeed, in many cases, lifesaving—efforts. In code red cases, where there is a medical emergency such as cardiac arrest or internal haemorrhaging, the minutes saved by air ambulances can really make the difference between life and death. When a patient has suffered skeletal head, chest or abdominal injuries and local hospital facilities are not sufficient, air ambulances can fly the injured to major trauma centres that would take a long time to reach by road. Of course, for this to work, hospitals need suitable helipads for crews to take off and land, and here lies the issue that we are discussing today. Research from the all-party parliamentary group for air ambulances—I thank those who support that group, some of whom are with us today—highlights that access to safeguarded on-site hospital helipads is inconsistent <span id="234WH" class="column-number" data-column-number="234WH"></span>across the country. More than a third lack either 24/7 access or an operational helipad. When helicopter transfers are not possible, it then costs hundreds of pounds in secondary ambulance transfers, with delays to care leading to longer hospital stays and more intensive treatment. In 2019, Health Ministers allocated £10 million to nine ambulance charities supporting air ambulance services to move towards 24/7 operations and improve seven airbase facilities. During the pandemic, we provided £6 million of emergency funding to air ambulance charities to help them with the pressures they were then facing. Members often speak about postcode lotteries and it is a phrase that has come up again today. Given the nature of the incidents that air ambulances respond to, patchwork coverage really can make the difference between life and death. It is one of the most sharply important postcode lotteries to address. Since taking office, what have the Government done to reduce unwarranted variation in emergency care by place? Specifically, what are they doing to provide the reliable infrastructure that air ambulances need? A written question was posed to the Minister in the other place asking whether the Government had considered a contingency fund to secure future helipad provision. The response was that a fund was not under consideration and NHS organisations must consider competing priorities within available resources. Can the Minister confirm that the Department of Health and Social Care underspent its capital departmental expenditure limit by some hundreds of millions of pounds in the last financial year? Was any of the underspend considered for helipad projects? We talk about prioritising within available resources, but overall, people working in the health service note that available resources are reducing. Integrated care boards are pencilling in cuts to services and NHS trusts are planning to axe many jobs. Yesterday’s Budget deepened the cuts to the NHS to around £1 billion of capital cuts over the next four years. Can the Minister tell us what the impact of that will be? Which programmes will be cut and, specifically on the subject of this debate, what are the implications for helipad capital? To ensure that no good deed goes unpunished, this Government decided to reward air ambulance charities with a new jobs tax. For every employee on average earnings, air ambulance charities, alongside others of course, must pay an extra £900 to HMRC. Is the Minister willing to raise the plight of air ambulances with Treasury Ministers? Does she think it is wrong that money that has effectively come from charitable donations should have to be diverted to help pay for the cost of the previous Chancellor’s mismanagement of the public finances? As colleagues have noted, air ambulances are also suffering the consequences of soaring energy prices. The cost of aviation fuel surged more than 80% this spring, adding tens of thousands of pounds to air ambulance charities’ annual fuel bills. Earlier this summer, my right hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins) wrote to the Government asking Ministers to ensure that air ambulances are included in fuel resilience planning and recognised in NHS emergency services fuel access arrangements. Can the Minister update Members on actions taken by her Department since receiving that correspondence?<span id="235WH" class="column-number" data-column-number="235WH"></span> The Government rightly have high ambitions for the health service: reduced ambulance times, shorter hospital waits, faster discharges. We of course share those ambitions, but there is a huge gulf between where the NHS is now on some of those key performance indicators and where we all want it to be. The National Audit Office estimates that 1.2 million patients waited between 12 and 24 hours in A&E last year. NHS waiting lists have been climbing, with the number of trauma and orthopaedic cases with a decision to admit higher than at the time of the change of Government. Charities providing critical medical transport are having to cope with the weight of the extra taxes from the Government on top of those pressures from high energy prices. In this debate, Members from across the House have called on the Government to act by putting forward a clear framework and road map for hospital helipads, establishing clear standards for NHS estates and exploring options for financial support so air ambulances can afford to stay in the air and keep saving lives. Again, I commend the hon. Member for Strangford for the clarity with which he set out his three asks. I urge the Minister to listen to air ambulance charities, their supporters and all those who are delivering high-quality emergency care. We look forward to her response.
The Government are very good at imposing on people things that they do not want. In Staffordshire Moorlands, the Government want to impose the end of Staffordshire Moorlands district and the end of Staffordshire police—reorganisations that will have different timeframes and will lead to great confusion. Will the Minister consider my proposal for local government reorganisation—this has been my proposal all along—which is to leave our councils and local authorities in the state they are in? The Government can give us a mayor, if that is what they want, but we really do not need any more distractions for our local government officials, who need to get on and deliver services.
It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Blaydon and Consett (Liz Twist). I join my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Sir John Whittingdale) in paying tribute to Sue Holt. I was in Strasbourg with her only a few weeks ago when she was taken ill. It was a great shock to all of us to learn what had happened to her. I want to cover measures in the Budget that relate to my constituents, the Home Affairs Committee and my constituency, but I realise I have limited time so I will race ahead. It is pretty quick on the Home Affairs Committee side of things, because there was not very much in the Budget about such matters. In fact, there was only one mention in the speech: £15 million over three years for a misogyny prevention fund. We are yet to see what that actually involves, but I worry that priority is being given to perpetrators. Where is the money for victims? A victim-centred approach to violence against women and girls is essential. The Government have already said that £1 billion needs to be spent on tackling violence against women and girls during the life of the strategy, but the Red Book states: “the government is prioritising £55 million of funding over two years to accelerate delivery of the Violence Against Women and Girls strategy.” Again, £55 million out of £1 billion does not sound too much. On issues that were not mentioned but relate to home affairs, the Committee is conducting two inquiries at the moment. I am interested in the work that the Government are doing on apprenticeships and so on, but I urge them to look at the work the Committee did with Demos—a piece of deliberative democracy—looking at the public’s attitude to work-based immigration. They will find really interesting insights on the need to prioritise upskilling UK workers to take job vacancies, not just looking overseas to fill those roles. The Committee is also doing to a piece of work on the impact of serious and organised crime on local neighbourhoods. My right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon made some really interesting comments about the high street. It is the case that we have seen the hollowing out of the high street, and the measures that the Government have taken on national insurance, business rates and so on have left a vacuum that is being filled by <span id="522" class="column-number" data-column-number="522"></span>organised criminality. That is filling our high streets in a way that is inappropriate and that we do not want, so I urge the Government to deal with that issue. Moving on to issues that affect my constituency, I welcome the £100 for A to D council tax payers. We have a disproportionately high number of properties in bands A to D in Staffordshire Moorlands, so more people will be affected by that than in some other constituencies. However, there was nothing in the Budget for those who rely on heating oil, and they will not benefit from the abolition of gas standing charges. Those people really do need help; the price of heating oil is hideous and, as we come into winter, the numbers that have been quoted to fill a tank of heating oil are astonishing. Again, I join my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon in commenting that there was nothing about hospitality and tourism. As the Member of Parliament for Alton Towers and other great local attractions, including the Peak Wildlife Park, I know how much they welcomed the reduction in VAT over the summer and how much they want to see that made permanent. There was also nothing for farmers in the Budget. It would have been very heartening if the Chancellor had mentioned something about the family farm tax, to give farmers the respite that they need. The Government tell us we need to have local government reorganisation in order to benefit from many of the measures in the Budget. As I said following the Minister for Local Government’s statement earlier, if we are going to have a mayor, we do not need to reorganise the structure of our local government as well. Let officials and councillors spend their time and effort on delivering services and let the mayors have the strategic overview. That would be a much better approach. The Peak Cluster project proposes to enable the cement industry to continue in the Peak district through carbon capture, with plans to transport the carbon to Morecambe bay. This is of great concern. How much carbon is going to be emitted in building the pipelines that will go underneath the Peak district, Cheshire and other areas to get out to Morecambe bay, where the carbon can be put into an empty gas field? Surely, it would just be better to allow the cement industry to continue producing cement in as clean a way as possible in the United Kingdom, without the need to build the pipeline, with all the environmental damage that will cause. I welcome the comments around new battery storage, and solar farms needing to be connected to the grid to start with. That is a measure that many of my constituents will welcome.
I did not think that the Minister could make things for people in Worcestershire even more confusing than they were. They just want their bins taken out, their roads maintained, enough school places, adult social care provision and a say in planning. But now I understand that we will have to get councillors elected to district councils again next May, that we will have to get councillors elected to a new shadow authority the following May, and that this new entity in the south of Worcestershire will now not be created until 2029. I just cannot see how that is going to benefit my residents.
I am sure both you, Mr Speaker, and the Leader of the House will share my delight at the news that the Seabirds pub in Bridlington has reopened following a £300,000 refurbishment. It coincides with my “Pub of the Year” competition in Bridlington and The Wolds, where we are delighted to be home to 114 pubs. Will the Leader of the House join me in thanking every landlord and landlady across the country for all their hard work and <span id="454" class="column-number" data-column-number="454"></span>everything that they do for local communities? After my competition has closed on Saturday, will the Leader of the House join me for a pint in the winning pub?
Fiscal responsibility means living within our means. Every household across East Yorkshire and up and down the country knows that we cannot spend more on the family credit card than we earn, racking up debt with <span id="506" class="column-number" data-column-number="506"></span>little more than the hope of a future pay rise, yet that is exactly what this Government are doing with our country’s credit card—a credit card taken out in my constituents’ names. After Labour crashed the economy in 2008, it left a deficit of 10%. It was spending 10%—£160 billion—more on the country’s credit card each year than our country earned. Only the Conservatives’ fiscal responsibility was able to fix Labour’s mess and steadily wrestle that deficit down. Even after the exceptional need to support jobs and businesses through the global pandemic and the Ukraine war, that deficit rose to 4.4%—less than half of the legacy left by Labour in 2010. Here we are again, with Labour’s fiscal irresponsibility and no plan to deal with the deficit. Labour is borrowing £308 billion more than the plan it inherited in 2024. Under this Government, the national debt has surged through the £3 trillion mark for the first time ever. This spending cannot go on. This Government need to get borrowing down, they need to get public spending down, they need to get welfare spending down, and they need to get people’s taxes down. Next year the tax burden will reach a historic high of 37.9% of GDP under this Government, and it is set to surge from there. Where is this money going? I would like to address briefly some of the issues around the mismanagement of public money in the civil service. This Government, to their credit, pledged to reduce the size of the civil service, but I have bad news: the headcount has risen by 11,000 people since they took office. Cutting the civil service headcount is not this Government’s only broken promise. Last year, they put out a press release promising that they would instruct civil servants to stop what Labour themselves called “wasteful spending”—namely, banning Government-branded merchandise and away days in externally hired venues, rather than using freely available Government buildings. However, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs spent £20,000 on an away day at the Cumberland hotel in March. In the same month, the DCMS spent £2,000 on an away day at the British Museum. The following month, in April 2026, the Cabinet Office spent over £33,000 hiring the Hartwell House luxury hotel and spa, and its swanky restaurant with a 20-page wine list, for another retreat for its top tier of civil servants. I am slightly confused that the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, the hon. Member for Gateshead Central and Whickham (Mark Ferguson), admitted that in a written answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire (Mike Wood), because when I asked the question, I got the response: “In the calendar year 2026, the Cabinet Office has not held any departmental Senior Civil Service away days.” The Crown Prosecution Service spent £37,000 on an away day at the four-star Manchester Marriott hotel. The Department for Transport managed to spend £9,000 on an away day at the Foreign Office and £14,000 on one at the HS2 offices. The Northern Ireland Office spent £4,000 meeting in a castle. The Department for Education held an away day for £27,000 at a grade II listed building in Sheffield, while the Ministry of Justice spent another £34,000 on an away day at a theatre. The Treasury—which we might hope would be holding the purse strings a little tighter—held two away days, with one at the British Museum, and spent £25,000 <span id="507" class="column-number" data-column-number="507"></span>“excluding VAT”. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero held three offsite away days, two at four-star hotels, costing a total of over £50,000. The Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade also spent £50,000 on three, including one at the Emirates stadium because no “alternative venues were available.” The MOD and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office could not tell me whether they had had any away days, as it would cost them too much to answer the question, so I dread to think how many away days they have had! Unfortunately, the Minister for Women and Equalities has not even bothered to reply to me, so I assume her staff have got lost on an away day to a nice spa hotel. The list goes on and on, but let me turn to merchandise. The Cabinet Office—which banned all of this—alone spent £4,500 on T-shirts, stickers and commemorative coins. I could move on to No. 10 North, but as we know, it is nothing more than a vanity project. In conclusion, it is time to bring back common sense and fiscal responsibility. Taxes are at a record high, growth is down, borrowing is higher, debt is up and living standards are down. We cannot keep spending more on the country’s credit card than we earn. Wealth must be created before it can be distributed, by our businesses, our entrepreneurs and those who go to work every day. There is no such thing as Government money; it is taxpayers’ money, and Labour is addicted to spending other people’s money, not creating it. We Conservatives want to see Britain richer, more prosperous and thriving. To paraphrase the excellent point made by the Leader of the Opposition yesterday, our country is overspent, overborrowed, overtaxed and drowning in an out-of-control welfare system—what a pickle we are in.
Order. The hon. Gentleman knows better than to refer to the Prime Minister by name.
That brings us to the Front-Bench contributions. I call the shadow Minister.
I thank the right hon. Member for his point of order. He will know full well that it is not a matter for the Chair, but I am sure those on the Treasury Bench have heard his point.
Order. Mr Francois, we refer to him as the Chancellor, not by his name.
Before I call the hon. Member to continue, I would just like to say what a pleasure it is to see the Clerk of the House at the Table for his last ever Adjournment debate.
I was overseas when the tributes to the Clerk of the House were made last week, so I would just like to correct the Minister: the Clerk of the House cannot be very long serving, because he is clearly an incredibly young man and far too young to retire. I add my thanks to him for all the support and help he has given me in this role. <em>Question put and agreed to.</em>
Mr Speaker, if the Liberal Democrat spokesman is brave, I can tell you that I have a season ticket to watch Tottenham home and away, and I watched virtually every goal that Harry Kane scored for us. I only wish that he was still scoring for Tottenham rather than Bayern Munich. May I start on a sad note and pay tribute to the late Sir John Hannam, who was the MP for Exeter from 1970 to 1997? He was also the secretary of the 1922 committee from 1987 to 1997, and he died at the ripe old age of 97. I am sure that we will all join together in sending our condolences to his family. Provided that the Leader of the House allocates us time, the House will not have long to wait for the debate on the emerging risks of advanced AI, which of course had to be withdrawn because of the sheer number of Members who wanted to speak in both debates on Monday. If we are given time on 19 November, we will <span id="445" class="column-number" data-column-number="445"></span>allocate that time for that important debate and a debate on International Men’s Day, which coincides with that date. In Westminster Hall, there will be a debate on Tuesday 3 November on the findings of the Milburn review. On 10 November, when we come back after recess, there will be a debate on antisocial behaviour; I remind the House that that debate will start at 11.30 am rather than 9.30 am. On 12 November, there will be a debate on fire and rescue services’ suicide-prevention training, followed by a debate on VAT policy for the hospitality sector. Further debates for Westminster Hall will be announced in due course. In addition to Remembrance Sunday, which we will commemorate during the recess, that Sunday is also Diwali. I am sure that the whole House will join me in wishing all Hindus, Sikhs and Jains “Shubh Diwali” for the event, and also a happy, peaceful, prosperous and, above all else, healthy Hindu new year, which follows. However, any Hindus who are in Pakistan are in serious trouble at the moment. We in the all-party parliamentary group for British Hindus received a report from Insight UK just last week on the plight of Hindus in Pakistan, which makes for horrific reading. I ask the Leader of the House to get either the Foreign Secretary or a Foreign Office Minister to come to the House and tell us what the Government are doing to safeguard minority communities, not just in this country, as is right, but in countries where they are severely oppressed.
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Loughborough (Dr Sandher). The overriding question after the Chancellor sat down yesterday was, “Is that it?” Most Budgets manage to survive 24 hours before they fall apart; his Budget lasted about 24 minutes before it fell apart, as the Leader of the Opposition eviscerated it, quite rightly. The verdict this morning suggests that living standards will fall over the duration of this Government and that although over the 2010-2020 period household income increased by 12%, in this decade it is likely to increase only by 2%. That demonstrates that this Government and this Chancellor are making Britain poorer, and we have to remember as well that there are baked-in tax increases from the previous Chancellor that are kicking in now. I will look at four areas of the Budget where there are missed opportunities. First, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) pointed out, there is nothing in the Budget for young people. There are a million young people not in education, training or work. There could have been an opportunity to reduce national insurance contributions for recent graduates under 25, but there was no action. As a result, graduate unemployment is dramatically up. There could have been action on reducing the amount of interest that ex-students pay on their student loans. That was promised but not delivered. On energy costs, a lot of young people in London share houses in bands E to F, so they will get no relief from the £100 drop-in-the-ocean energy payment that is dished out. There are clearly taxes on savers, taxes on banks and taxes on landlords. That means that rents will go up, which means that young people will end up paying the price. For most landlords, the problem is they cannot sell their properties because of the inflated stamp duty that applies, and therefore the amount of supply will reduce. I note that smoking or smoking cessation were not mentioned once in the Budget. Unbelievably, smoking cessation in the national health service is being cut when there are still 4.9 million smokers out there who desperately want to quit. They will not get the support under this Government that they desperately need. That costs the economy £53.2 billion every year through lost productivity, healthcare and social care costs, and smoking-related fires. It is a big issue hitting young and old people. I welcome the extra money to enable every rough sleeper to have a roof over their head. The commitment was, of course, that they would be taken off the streets before Christmas. It has now been watered down—they will be given an offer of somewhere to sleep. At the same time, the number of people who are homeless or rough sleeping is increasing. Far from dealing with the problem, the Government are not addressing it properly. It is good news that the Vagrancy Act 1824 has been scrapped, and we celebrated that two days ago. There is much more we can do to help people in this extremely vulnerable position. As I mentioned earlier this week, we still await the implementation of the Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Act 2023 that I introduced three years ago, which would help prevent vulnerable people from being exploited.<span id="528" class="column-number" data-column-number="528"></span> There are concerns straight away on the Government’s moves to bring empty buildings back into use. The key there is who will pay the cost. Where is the money coming from when councils already have overstretched budgets? Dealing with local authorities, the £100 council tax rebate does not fix the core spending issues. For those who follow these things, the average increase in council tax last year at band D was £111, so the £100 that some people will get back will disappear when the council tax increases come in this year. The problem now at local authority level is that the demand-led services, which of course are not in the control of local authorities, continue to spiral. I welcome the fact that the Government have given a three-year settlement, but it will still not be sufficient, and in many cases it will lead to huge council tax increases and cuts in services. All in all, this Budget is a series of missed opportunities that could have been easily solved.
I thank the hon. Member for introducing this long-awaited debate. I have a constituent, Karen Buck, whose daughter, Bridget Doyle, was born paralysed, is bedbound and suffers from autism. The reality is that there are many victims out there who suffer from a variety of conditions, as the hon. Lady quite rightly points out—not least spina bifida, which she has not mentioned. The problem here is that legal aid for the court case, which was established to try to get recompense for those victims, was withdrawn some 20 years ago. Unfortunately, although commitments have been made time and again to help these people, these mothers are now advanced in age, and the children they have supported will desperately need support when their lives end. Does the hon. Lady think there is now a need for a proper compensation scheme?
It is good news that the Minister is considering a national proposal. Will she undertake to have a meeting with the long-suffering victims of this scandal, who have been caring for their children for many years without support, in such desperate times, to show her commitment to doing what needs to be done for them? I think she will learn quite a lot from such a meeting.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Stuart. New clause 6 would require the Government to start negotiations to join the EU pact on migration and asylum within three months. Committee Members should not be surprised to hear that the official Opposition oppose this new clause. The hon. Member for Wimbledon spoke at length about the returns agreement, but it is not simply a returns agreement. At its heart is a so-called solidarity mechanism, under which member states either accept asylum seekers relocated from other states or pay contributions instead. Joining it would mean the United Kingdom accepting people we did not choose, under rules we did not write, ultimately subject to the European Court of Justice. That is the opposite of taking back control. The Conservative borders plan takes a completely different approach. We would ban asylum claims by people who enter the country illegally and remove them within a week. We would seek returns agreements with countries of origin, backed by visa sanctions on those that refuse to take their nationals back, and we would support our allies in Europe to stop illegal entry with intelligence, policing and maritime resources. That is co-operation, and it does not require us to hand control of our asylum system to Brussels. The Liberal Democrats have shown clearly during this Committee that they are not capable of being serious about controlling immigration. They will say that the pact will let us return people to the EU, but the price is relocation quotas and EU jurisdiction, and the evidence from the pact so far is that returns between member states remain very limited indeed. I hope the Minister will confirm today that the Government have absolutely no intention of seeking to join the pact or its solidarity mechanism.
I was surprised to hear the hon. Member for Wimbledon be so supportive of rejoining the EU—I think we have all learned something this morning. We have also learned that the Liberal Democrats feel that that would be a silver bullet to fix all these issues. Yet still the hon. Member comes forward to ask for a cost-benefit analysis to prove it. His statutory duty to benchmark every bilateral agreement against the EU pact is designed to build a case for joining the pact, not to improve returns, and for that reason, the Conservatives oppose it.
I caught the Minister just in time. She described the one in, one out scheme as a “pilot”. I do not recall it ever being described as a pilot when it was launched. Can she unpack what the expectations were, what was delivered and why the scheme has been cancelled?
The hon. Member for Wimbledon has described the real pressures on councils across the country. When people are granted protection and leave asylum accommodation, many present as homeless, and local authorities across the country pick up the cost. However, in our view, a statutory taskforce will not solve that. The root of the pressure is the number of people arriving and the time that they spend in the system. Fewer arrivals and faster outcomes would do far more for councils than any taskforce. We will not support the new clause, but let me ask the Minister a question, building on the one that the hon. Member for Wimbledon asked. What is the current move-on period after a grant of protection, and what assessment have the Government made of the cost of refugee homelessness to local authorities throughout England?
The Liberal Democrats’ new clause 10 would give asylum seekers the right to work after three months, and the Green party’s new clause 24 would give them an automatic, unrestricted right after six months that lasts through every appeal. We oppose both new clauses. People who enter the UK illegally should not be able to claim asylum here at all. The new clauses go in the opposite direction. They would make the UK a more attractive destination for people deciding whether to pay a smuggler to cross the channel. Everybody wants to reduce pull factors so that we can reduce dangerous crossings, and I am afraid that the new clauses would introduce additional pull factors. I will keep my remarks brief and just ask the Minister a question. How many asylum seekers currently have permission to work, and what assessment have the Government made of the effect that earlier work rights would have on the number of claims?
New clause 11 would require the Government to restore refugee family reunion within six months, but I understand that it also widens definitions to include children up to the age of 25, which was not in the hon. Member’s opening remarks, so I hope I am not mistaken. We oppose this measure. Family reunion, as proposed in new clause 11, would add a further reward to a successful illegal crossing. Every grant would bring the prospect of encouraging a wider family member, and it would create a well-known incentive for families to send one member ahead, sometimes a child, on the most dangerous journey of all. We all want to stop and limit dangerous journeys. Safe and legal routes should be for people from regions of conflict who we choose to help, as we have done for Ukraine, Hong Kong and Afghanistan. There should not be a reward for illegal and very dangerous crossings. We will not support the new clause, but can I ask the Minister to tell us when the Government intend to publish their replacement for the suspended family reunion route, as I think she intimated they would in the previous debate, and whether the intention is for it to be capped?
There seems to be some confusion on both sides of the House about the next steps for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough; perhaps the Minister can clarify. He said that the process was in its early stages, so Cambridgeshire will still receive written confirmation of what the options are. He also appeared to confirm that despite the fact that the four options tabled will be selected, they could later be modified by councils, if they saw fit, and taken forward. Could he clarify that that is the process, and clarify the criteria under which that decision will be taken?
Will the Secretary of State give way?
I just wanted to bring the Defence Secretary back to his comments about the defence investment plan and its being fully funded. According to the Red Book, there is a reallocation of capital spending that is £145 million this year and £2.1 billion next year. Can the right hon. Gentleman outline where that reallocated capital spending will come from?
This Budget must be bewildering to members of the Prime Minister’s party. He promised them a “circuit breaker”, an end to “40 years of neoliberalism” and a “new political model”. Instead, it is all gherkins and aubergines. The Defence Secretary, who is sitting on the Front Bench, is probably wondering the same as everyone else: was that it? To be honest, he is probably thinking he would have done a better job, and he might be right. It is not too late: if he resigns again, he might get his chance to be the Chancellor. All the while, Britain has a debt problem, Britain has a defence problem, Britain has a growth problem, and apparently, as we learned yesterday, there is nothing the Chancellor can do. On the big challenges, what has this Budget actually done? It does not reduce borrowing; total debt has gone up. It does not properly fund defence; the Government still have not set out how 3% will be funded. It does not cut taxes to get the economy growing; instead, they are putting up taxes again.
If time allows, I will be very happy to go into great detail about our record on defence. When Russia invaded Ukraine, we were proud to stand with the people of Ukraine, and to reboot the funding for defence. The test that the Chancellor failed was not my test; it was his own test. It was the Chancellor who resigned because the previous Chancellor and Prime Minister would not give our armed forces the proper funding for our defence. Yesterday we needed decisive action, and all the Government delivered was a Budget of ducked decisions. The Chancellor has taken to heart the idea of, “Why do today what you can put off to next year or the year after?” Let us be clear that, as a result, Britain will be less secure, less fair and poorer for it.
Madam Deputy Speaker, I should make some progress, and we have got plenty of time to talk about defence—
No, no. I have a very good answer. In 2010, the Defence Secretary’s party wanted to reduce and cut further our armed forces. We were the party that will always stand behind our armed forces.
Let me make some progress, because this debate is about the whole Budget. There will be plenty of opportunities to talk about defence, which we can come back to. Let me give the Government some credit for some of the few positives in the Budget. The Chancellor was right to U-turn on his party’s manifesto commitment to equalise the youth rate of the minimum wage. One in six young people under this Government—shame on them—are looking for a job and cannot find one. Equalising the youth minimum wage would have made a desperately tough situation harder. He should have gone further and halved the jobs tax for young people as we would have done. The Chancellor was also right to ignore those on his Back Benches who wanted to raise capital gains tax. In fact, it was not just the Back Benchers; the Defence Secretary was also calling for that. Thank goodness the Chancellor did not listen to him. It would have meant many more wealth creators joining the thousands who have fled our country under Labour. The public were not asking for much from this Budget and yet even their lowest expectations have not been met. Ordinary people wanted the Government to get a grip on out of control welfare spending. They wanted a Budget that properly funded defence. They wanted the Government to tackle the deficit, with tax cuts for their families to be better off. That would have been real breathing space. Against all and any of those tests, the Budget has comprehensively failed. It could have been a moment when a Chancellor resolved to live within our means. Instead, this Government will have added—do they know the number?—more than £300 billion-worth of borrowing over the course of this Parliament. Borrowing is up in every single year of the forecast. The national debt now stands at the equivalent of £100,000 for every household and it is set to grow by a quarter in the next five years. Britain is walking along a fiscal cliff edge and the Government have decided that this is the moment to close their eyes. Yesterday, the OBR confirmed that the Government are spending £124 billion a year on interest alone—up £14 billion and more than the Government spend on defence, policing and prisons combined. That money goes straight out of the door to our creditors. It was so out of control that the Bank of England, in the run-up <span id="486" class="column-number" data-column-number="486"></span>to this Budget, was forced to make an extraordinary £200 billion intervention to try to reduce the cost and still the 30-year gilt rates rose above 6%. It is not fair, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is not fair to our children or to their children. We cannot continue to kick the can down the road for future generations of taxpayers. Instead of getting a grip, the Chancellor doubled down. He repeated his predecessor’s mistakes and cut the fiscal headroom to just £15 billion, the equivalent of just three-and-a-half days of public spending. Is that recklessness why the Defence Secretary want us all to have three days’ worth of stockpiled food? The Chancellor said in his conference speech that “these levels of debt are an assault on our common sense, they are an affront to our values.” That was just a month ago, so what has changed? He is now raising debt in every single year of the forecast. A month ago, it was an affront to his values; now it is front and centre in his Budget. The Prime Minister may not care about the debt we hand on to the next generation, but he really ought to. And so should Labour’s faithful little helpers, the Liberal Democrats, who are so enraptured by Europhilia, so desperate to crawl back into the clutches of Brussels, that they have not noticed a glaring problem: the nation’s figures are so poor that we could not rejoin the EU even if we wanted to. EU rules say that a member country’s national debt should be under 60% of GDP, yet the UK is approaching 100%. The EU’s deficit limit is 3%, yet the UK’s is one-and-a-half times that. Despite all that debt, the Chancellor still has not found the money to properly fund 3% of GDP on defence. We welcome that the Government are finally funding their own defence investment plan, but it is not good enough.
The Labour Whips have clearly been doing their history lessons, but history lessons are not going to defend our country. The threat is real. The Defence Secretary is running around telling us to put food under our beds and to store water. The issue is now and that is why the Chancellor himself resigned as Defence Secretary, saying that funding below 3% was inadequate. Nobody challenges that.
I will give way one last time.
Labour Members try so hard, but the hole in their Budget is gaping wide open. The problem is that it is not just us on the Opposition Benches who can see that hole, but our adversaries around the world, leaving ourselves open. Not properly funding our armed forces is not going to scare anyone in Moscow and it will not deter Tehran. The Defence Secretary has resigned once before, so we know he is not against resigning. Perhaps he could resign again on principle today. We on this side of the House are used to Labour breaking their promises, but to break the promises they made to our armed forces is a new low. If the Chancellor had any dignity, he would have resigned yesterday. Despite their failure to fund defence, the Government have still raised the tax burden to the highest level on record—higher than in the aftermath of world war two and higher than even the right hon. Member for Leeds West and Pudsey (Rachel Reeves) raised it. Who remembers how this Government had no plans to put up taxes? How is that working? For the third Budget in a row, the tax burden is set to rise. All told, taxes are going up by a total of £75 billion a year: higher next year, higher the following year and higher in every single year of the forecast. Even the Prime Minister’s former economic adviser, Andy Haldane, now says that Britain is “taxed out”. He also called the Chancellor “penny wise, pound foolish”. I am not even sure about the penny wise bit, to be honest. And where will that money come from? Families, small businesses, the self-employed, farmers, the people who work hard and want to get ahead. Why? To pay for those who do not—those who could work, but choose not to. The damage does not just stop with the tax bill itself. It is the disincentives in the economy that do the most harm. Two years ago, the then Chancellor stood at that Dispatch Box and raised taxes on jobs. Now, we are in a jobs crisis, with over 170,000 jobs lost since July 2024, all because Labour does not understand that if you tax something, you get less of it. Now it is raising taxes on the banks, which provide mortgages, loans to small businesses and pay interest to savers. The Chancellor might think it is just a bank tax, but we know that, like every tax, it will end up being paid by ordinary working people: higher mortgages, lower returns on savings and bank branch closures in every constituency and every high street, and fewer jobs in this country. The Budget also contains a vindictive tax rise on people who have done the right thing, those who have done what Governments have always told them to do and what this Government want them to do: save money. Yet for many, up to 49p in every pound of interest on hard-earned savings will now be taken by the Chancellor. It is the same story with landlords, who have already come under attack from this Government, and the OBR says that rents will go up as a result. Of all that the Budget was missing, the lack of welfare reform stands out the most. Or at least, so we thought—because this morning the Chancellor told the BBC that there will be welfare cuts before the election. Perhaps a Treasury Minister could come to the House and clean up the Chancellor’s mess. His Budget has not even survived 24 hours. Last week, the Prime Minister called the benefits bill a moral outrage; he was right then, but he is not doing anything about it now, because Labour Members are <span id="488" class="column-number" data-column-number="488"></span>too afraid to say, “Enough is enough.” They do not have the courage to get a grip on welfare, because they are worried that it would cost them their jobs. Thanks to the TaxPayers’ Alliance, we know that for more than half of all Labour MPs, the number of benefit claimants in their constituencies is larger than their majority. It is true for the Chancellor, it is certainly true for the Defence Secretary, and it is true for the Economic Secretary to the Treasury. They will not get welfare under control because it would cost them their seats—they are putting their own interests before the country’s. <em>[</em><em>Interruption.</em><em>]</em> I am making progress. Don’t you worry—I am doing very well, Madam Deputy Speaker.
I read that the Budget had the most measures in it of any Budget, but also that they were the most inconsequential. I will try to crack through a few other things. <em>[</em><em>Interruption.</em><em>]</em> Labour Members are all chuntering, but I will tell you who else’s interests they are putting first: the trade unions. While the Government are raising taxes on everybody else, they are handing out more than £40 million over the next two years to a union learning fund. I cannot even begin to imagine what they will be learning: how to run rings around the Health Secretary; what to do with those extra days off from working a four-day week; how to keep public sector pay rises twice as high as the private sector—<em>[</em><em>Interruption.</em><em>]</em> The Defence Secretary says, “How to keep the Conservatives out.” That is probably about right—that is probably exactly what they are doing! It is a political bung to their political allies. It is ridiculous. While families face tough choices in a cost of living crisis, this Government use their Budget to tax people and hand money to the trade unions. It was not just the Budget we heard yesterday; we also heard the figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility, and they really do show us just how bad things are. For the first time ever, the Government are planning to spend over 45p in every £1 in the economy. Government spending goes up every year of the forecast, debt is up every year of the forecast, and it is official: living standards are down. Real household disposable incomes are set to be lower next year than when Labour took office—£1,500 lower at the end of this Parliament than they were forecast to be under the Conservatives. It is not hard to understand why: inflation is up, interest rates are soaring and unemployment is up again. The one-off £100 that the Government are putting into bank accounts will not touch the sides for most people, given the cost increases. The only thing that will put us on a path out of decline and deficits is growth. The Conservatives understand the value of growth. The Prime Minister has got his history entirely wrong. The mistake this country made was not to choose markets over socialism in 1979—it was not electing Mrs Thatcher—but giving up all that we achieved in the ’80s and ’90s. In conclusion—Madam Deputy Speaker is very firm, so I will conclude—this Budget will go down as one of history’s great missed opportunities. It was an opportunity to undo not 40 years of neoliberalism, but the damage of the first two years of this Government—the mistakes <span id="489" class="column-number" data-column-number="489"></span>made by the right hon. Member for Leeds West and Pudsey, who is now busy job hunting and discovering for the first time what it is like to receive rejection after rejection. Yesterday was a chance to put Britain back on the right track, and the Chancellor blew it. Higher taxes, higher spending, higher borrowing; lower growth, lower living standards, fewer jobs—I hope the Chancellor kept the receipt for the Budget, because I think he is going to want to return it. The British people know that this is not the Budget we need. This is a great country whose potential is being held back. We have a Chancellor who ducks his choices, and a Prime Minister who wants to take us back to the 1970s. We cannot tax and regulate our way to growth. National security really does matter more than social security, and only by tackling the deficit can we back away from the fiscal cliff edge and do the right thing by future generations.
<strong>Q</strong><strong><QNum HRSContentId="{79413C6E-1A22-46A6-B394-4A0C709B7A65}"> </QNum></strong> To continue the conversation on the ORR, as shadow Rail Minister, I am struck by the fact that in the Railways Bill, the role of the ORR is significantly downgraded, but in this Bill, the balance seems to tip the other way. What is the right balance to make sure both that the ORR has the independence we talked about and that we get the right results for consumers and road users? <em><strong>Steve Gooding:</strong></em> I worked at the ORR back in the day—
I used to work at RAC. <em><strong>Steve Gooding:</strong></em> As somebody who worked there, I think there are two key things: one is independence, and the other is capability. We are talking specifically about growing and making sure that the ORR has the requisite capability to undertake the tricky and, in a way, very public task of setting that. It would need to build that up. As you say, a lot of the expertise in the ORR today is on railways. Yes, that is engineering, construction and all that, but I would certainly like to see a significant strengthening in the capability of the ORR around some of the specific things about this project and its relationship with the existing crossing. <em><strong>Edmund King:</strong></em> I agree. I believe the ORR is looking to bring in new skills, particularly in economic regulation and the broader issues, which will be needed. There are similarities between road and rail, but there are also differences and some of the consequences in regulation are quite different, so it will need to be beefed up.
<strong>Q</strong><strong><QNum HRSContentId="{ECE26A25-546F-47FB-ACAA-17ED6F122184}"> </QNum></strong> This is predominantly for Mr Whelan, but Ben and Declan, if you wish to weigh in, please do. For the M6, have the economic and operational outcomes that have been delivered over the last 20 years been what was envisaged? On the role of the ORR, does the regulation outlined in the Bill provide sufficient certainty for private investors? <em><strong>Michael Whelan:</strong></em> In terms of economic benefits, the best way to look at the M6 toll is to consider the fact that 50,000 vehicles use it every day. If it was not there, the M6 and surrounding network would be quite a mess. As a result of the M6 toll, we have seen significant investment into the region. Numerous businesses have invested in logistics sites up and down that corridor—for example, there is a massive Amazon site near us. That also creates jobs for the region. I will not go through it all; please refer to the pre-reading that I know you all have. In terms of part 7 of the Bill, which we are specifically interested in, as we see it, as it is an existing road, the ORR regulations do not apply. If they were to apply, that would have a significant impact on our concession agreement, on investors and, in particular, on lenders, who have all invested into the roads. Having this conversation is important, but for us it is a separate issue. <em><strong>Declan Pang:</strong></em> On the RAB model in particular, we are supportive of any measures that will be brought forward to increase road building and capacity, and efforts in that regard. We think that RAB gives some certainty to the market around providing investment opportunities. In addition to my comments around the stakeholder group, the ORR has been heavily weighted towards rail regulation and currently has a much smaller role in highways monitoring. As a proportion of what it does as an organisation, its role from a roads perspective is smaller than the rail element, and that is probably reflected in its level of engagement with the sector as it stands. The Bill would reflect quite a significant change in its level of responsibility, and we would want to be sure about the capability and capacity for it to take on that responsibility. <em><strong>Ben Garratt:</strong></em> I want to expand on something Michael said about the wider benefits. Understandably, the logistics sector invests where there is transport capacity and junctions, from where it can then access the rest of the country. Particular parts of the road and rail network have a lot of logistics clustered around them. It is also about having good journey times between large conurbations. We can definitely see, in other parts of the country, what we would say is artificially less logistics investment than there should have been, because of transport constraints in parts of the network. It particularly affects the north-west, where it is more of a rail issue. A lack of capacity on the west coast main line leads to more modern logistics being clustered further south than maybe it otherwise would be. There is a real economic benefit for the country in getting the capacity right.
<strong>Q</strong><strong><QNum HRSContentId="{88ADAA3B-40DD-467C-8591-8DC6B6663F00}"> </QNum></strong> I will build on some of what the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Buckinghamshire, said about tipping points. My question is to both of you, so please feel free to answer in whichever order you prefer. The shadow Minister was referring to things such as fuel duty, I am acutely conscious that the cost base of the lower Thames crossing project is going up and is as yet unknown, and we do not know what the toll will be. In a situation such as we have at the moment, where diesel is at £2 a litre and the sustainable version another 50p on top of that, costs are going right up not only for <span id="34" class="column-number" data-column-number="34"></span>the build, but for the corporate budgets of the haulage companies and for everyday individuals, who have to manage their household budgets. If the cost goes up to a level beyond the right balance of pricing that is commercially viable for the operator, or absorbable for the family or the business, what happens? At the moment, I am worried about a white elephant across the Thames. In such circumstances, in the end all the costs would get absorbed by the taxpayer and this model goes up in smoke. I am keen to hear from you how concerned I should be about that and what alternative models there are elsewhere. <em><strong>Ben Hopkinson:</strong></em> The ultimate backstop is the Exchequer. Already the Exchequer has had to bear the cost of bringing the lower Thames crossing through planning. I think it is expected to spend about £3.1 billion on the lower Thames crossing even before private investment is brought in. If we have a circumstance where the toll is not paying back what is necessary and the private body that has financed the road falls into difficulty, the Bill states that the Exchequer is able to top up or provide payments, guarantees or low-cost loans. The backstop is therefore ultimately the taxpayer, combined with higher charges for motorists on the road.