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Order. I will place this on the record: Mr Speaker deprecates prepared interventions. Interventions are supposed to be a comment on what is being said at the time. I understand that even Members from areas as far from Yorkshire and Derbyshire as Northern Ireland have constituency interests in this topic, but what you say really must relate to the debate.
On Saturday last, I was in Herne Bay on Mortimer Street, where there is an absolutely fabulous toy shop called Kids Korner. It was empty. I said to them, “How are you doing?” They said, “The shop is empty, the street is empty. Nobody is spending any money.” The hospitality industry is on its knees. The hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) and I attended a roundtable recently, where every single person present said that they were having a hard time, and some were in danger of going into liquidation. I raised this example in the House earlier this week: one chain of 25 cafés, which employs young people, had a profit of £12 over the last 12 months. That is due entirely to this Government’s policies.
I beg to move, That this House calls on the Chancellor of the Exchequer to apologise for misleading the country about the state of the public finances, rolling the pitch for raising taxes, breaking her promises and increasing welfare spending, including her claim on 4 November 2025 that the OBR would be downgrading their productivity forecast which, as the Chancellor said, had ‘consequences for the public finances too, in lower tax receipts’, when in fact on 31 October 2025 the OBR had submitted its forecast to the Chancellor that showed tax receipts would be £16 billion higher than previously thought, resulting in the Government’s current balance target being met by a margin of £4.2 billion; further calls on the Chancellor to apologise for breaching the trust of the OBR, whose forecasts are shared in strict confidence until the Chancellor has given her Budget Statement; also calls on the Chancellor to apologise for the misleading briefings and leaks from HM Treasury in advance of the Budget Statement which caused uncertainty for families, businesses and investors; and calls on the Chancellor to apologise for breaking her promise after the last Budget that the Government was not going to raise taxes again, instead raising taxes in the 2025 Budget by £26 billion. I will, of course, heed your remonstrations and remarks, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is said that astrologists are there to make economists look good and second-hard car dealers are there to make politicians look good. It is inconceivable that anywhere in the world there is any trade or career that could possibly make this Chancellor look good. Indeed, one need only look at the polls. The Ipsos poll on the Chancellor’s approval rating shows that she has achieved minus 60%. That is a record low for a poll that was first commenced in the 1970s. A recent YouGov poll stated that the Chancellor was the least trusted on the economy, even more so than Jeremy Corbyn and, yes, Liz Truss—
You are quite right, Madam Deputy Speaker; I meant to say the right hon. Member for Islington North and Liz Truss. The Chancellor is not so much the wilting lettuce as a complete liability. How could this possibly have occurred? We have a Government who came to power with one of the largest majorities in the history of our country. One could almost see their majority from the moon. This has happened because of a huge failure on their part. Let us take unemployment. Unemployment is now at a five-year high, back at a level last seen during the pandemic. The latest forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility show unemployment higher in every single year than in the forecasts from back in the spring. The International Monetary Fund tells us that inflation will be at the highest level of the G7 this year and next year too. Looking beneath the headline figures, the rate of inflation for food is at almost 5%. For a party that claims and professes to stand up for the poorest in our society, that is a disgrace. When it comes to growth, we know from the OBR’s latest forecasts that, for every year going forward, growth will be lower than the spring forecast set out. Our borrowing costs not so long ago reached a 27-year high, and we are now paying more on our borrowing than Greece.
I have had many things to say about the mini-Budget, both at the time that it happened and subsequently—and more recently too. Can I remind the hon. Gentleman that on the day of the general election, we had a near record level of employment and a near record low level of unemployment? We had the highest growth in the G7, and we had inflation bang on target at 2%. It is almost double that at present. The reason this Government have failed can be distilled to just two words: one is “deceit” and the other is “incompetence”. In the run-up to the last general election, the Labour party said that it would not put up taxes left, right and centre, and yet, within a few short months, they were to roll out £40 billion-worth of tax increases, including £25 billion by way of increased national insurance contribution taxes on employment.
How could I resist?
My right hon. Friend is right. To be more accurate, we can see it even from Pluto. He is also so right about the loss of jobs in hospitality; about 90,000 jobs have been destroyed, many of them the first opportunity to get on to the career ladder that young people would otherwise have had. That is as a direct consequence of the increase in national insurance. It was not just an increase in the rate; it was a reduction in the threshold at which that tax cuts in. That disproportionately affects those on lower income, in particular women, part-time workers and, yes, young people.
I will in a moment. We have seen the consequences of that up and down our country. I have spent a lot of time speaking to employers—from the large employers down to those on the high streets. They are all struggling and they do so because of the decisions that were taken by this Chancellor.
I thank the hon. Lady for that passionate intervention. The best way to get people out of poverty is through work. To the point made by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell), the record of the last Government was exemplary. We had 4 million more jobs, and 800 new jobs every day under the last Conservative Government.
I just ask the hon. Gentleman what he thinks the effect of increasing taxes on hard-working people does for poverty. Any economist will say it drives poverty up. There is also the question of the farm tax, with the changes under the inheritance tax regime. In the run-up to the general election, the Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, then in his shadow position, looked the National Farmers Union president Tom Bradshaw in the eye and said that, at least on that count, farmers had nothing to fear from a future Labour Government. Well, that lasted about five minutes before they changed and the Chancellor changed her position. That will cause untold misery to farmers up and down our country. It will mean that farms that have been passed down generation to generation over many years will now fall into the tax net and potentially have to be broken up.
The hon. Gentleman makes excellent points, and I will come to the issue of the market-moving effects of some of the comments made by the Chancellor. On the point that he rightly raises about the impact on people’s lives, these are real jobs. These are people struggling with real businesses. These are farmers getting up early in the morning, going out, working and doing what they know to be right, yet they are weighed down by the decisions taken by the Government. Labour said that it had no intention of means-testing the winter fuel payment. There was no mention of it in its manifesto during the last general election, yet within a very short period of time, that is precisely what it did. Before Labour Members get excited about excluding millionaires and multimillionaires from those payments, the reality is that about 80% of pensioners living below the poverty line were impacted by that decision, which would have only entrenched and driven up poverty.
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Government talk a good game on poverty, but when it comes down to what they do, we see something entirely different.
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. There is another change to the inheritance tax regime that will be equally as destructive as the agricultural property relief changes, and that is the business property relief changes—the tax changes relating to family firms up and down the country. I have met many of them. These are sometimes substantial businesses that have gone from having a bright outlook under the last Government to suddenly being concerned about the provisions they will now have to make to avoid being broken up as a consequence of the ruinous changes to the inheritance tax regime for those businesses. This is destroying investment, jobs and growth. That is the story of the Labour party.
I invite the hon. Gentleman to look back a bit further in time, before the triple lock was introduced by the Government of my party, to the time when his party was last in office. Under the last Labour Government, pensioner poverty was the fourth highest in Europe. That is why we brought in the triple lock—to clear up the mess that his party had created. Labour also said, during the run-up to the general election, that unlike all socialist Governments in the past, it would not borrow and spend massively, yet the plan set out in its first Budget last autumn was to spend around half a trillion pounds more across the Parliament than under the plans it inherited. That was added to further in the recent Budget. Billions of pounds more are to be borrowed and spent. The consequences of that are that inflation has been stickier and higher for longer, as I have set out. It will be the highest in the G7 this year and the highest in the G7 next year. The consequences of that are that the Bank of England has had to keep interest rates higher for longer than it otherwise would have. The consequences of that—[Interruption.] Yes, there should have been more reductions—if the Government had not fuelled inflation, we would have seen interest rates coming down faster. The reality is that increased borrowing costs have heaped pressure on people with mortgages and on businesses, and have added to the cost of servicing the huge national debt, to which the Government are readily further adding such that we are now spending £100 billion a year just to service our national debt, and that will rise to £140 billion, according to the latest Office for Budget Responsibility forecast. That is more than double what we spend on defence. If debt servicing were a Department, it would be the third largest in Whitehall, but not one looking after public services or providing the additional teachers, which, apparently the Prime Minister does not realise are not there. This is money being spent simply on paying for the profligacy of the Labour party.
May I give the hon. Member a basic lesson in economics? In 2010, when my party came into office, we inherited a deficit at over 10% of GDP—as any economist will say, that is the amount of money being added to the debt every single year. It was over 10% on the watch of the Labour party, and that is the story of increased debt. The debt pile as a percentage of GDP was coming down just before covid. Along with just about everybody else in the political firmament at the time of covid, the Labour party urged us to spend ever more to support the economy and to support jobs. That is precisely what we did, and of course that came with a fiscal cost.
Three times might be a bit too much—we will come back to the hon. Gentleman later.
The steps, as the hon. Gentleman terms them, that his party is taking to get the deficit down are to borrow ever larger sums of money—half a trillion more than was laid out in the plans that his party inherited, and that has been added to further by the Chancellor at the last Budget. You will recall, Madam Deputy Speaker, that after her first Budget, the Chancellor said that she would not be coming back for more tax, which brings me to the issue of her being misleading. That was clearly a misleading statement, because the recent Budget sets out that £26 billion more will be raised in tax in the year 2029-30. But £26 billion is not the extent of the increased tax rises. Because the Government have fuelled inflation, for the reasons that we have been discussing among ourselves, fiscal drag has dragged in a total of £38 billion of additional taxation in that year. The Labour party must start to understand that if it taxes and taxes and taxes the economy, it will get less growth, less productivity and less employment, and that is precisely what we are seeing. The Labour party also said—if you recall, Madam Deputy Speaker—that the Chancellor would not be taxing hard-working people. Well, that simply was not true. By freezing the income tax thresholds for those extra years, the Chancellor is increasing taxes by £7 billion, which is a direct contradiction of what she said—with great gusto—in the previous Budget. She said that she would not do that because it would hurt hard-working people and that she would stick to her promises. Clearly, she did not mean it when she said it.
I thank the right hon. Member for that observation. I have been cautioned by the Chair as to the language—“misleading”—that I use, but it was clearly misleading for the Chancellor to come to the House and say that she would not be putting up taxes and that this was a one-off, as she used the expression “wipe the slate clean”, and yet be back for £26 billion more only a matter of months later. The Chancellor also said that she would control welfare spending. Well, how did that go? The first thing that Labour did was to scrap the reforms that we had brought in—in fact, from when I was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions—that the OBR had scored as 450,000 fewer people going on to long-term sickness and disability benefits with a multibillion pound—
I think I have a jack-in-the-box over there. A jack-in-the-box is great to observe, isn’t it? I am not sure that is the case with the hon. Gentleman, but I might take what is probably the fourth intervention from him momentarily. The Government scrapped our plans, with the result that 450,000 people who would not have gone on to those benefits are now heading exactly in that direction. They U-turned, of course, on the botched attempt to bring in their own reforms because perhaps some Labour Members sitting here this evening refused to back them. That cost about £5 billion. We have seen that the terms of reference for the Timms review, which is looking at reform of personal independence payments, make it explicitly clear that there will be no attempt to manage down any of the forecast numbers for that benefit within the OBR’s forecast. Labour has given up on welfare reform.
Momentarily—I assure the hon. Gentleman that I will come to him. What Labour has done in the meantime with this Budget is to take entirely the wrong decision, which is to tax all those hard-working people to the tune of £7 billion—a high proportion of that to transfer straight across to those who are on benefits, including scrapping the two-child cap. Those are the wrong priorities. They are about the socialist obsession with redistribution, and nothing to do with driving the incentives in the economy that grow it and make everybody better off.
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. In her heart, I do not believe that the Chancellor really thinks the right decision was to scrap the two-child benefit cap—I genuinely do not. This is a case of the political or fiscal tail wagging the welfare dog; it is as simple as that. The Front Bench has given up on any serious welfare reform. Of course, the Chancellor has reassured us by telling us that she has rebuilt her headroom. She has doubled the headroom against her fiscal target, though it should be pointed out—
I will in a moment. It should be pointed out, of course, that that is a fiddled fiscal target. It is not the fiscal target that we were working to—the same definition of debt. It is not net public sector debt at all; it is something different. In fact, if we were to apply the targets that we were running to, which were much more stringent, to the figures in the forecast that we see from the recent Budget, those targets would be underwater in every single year of that forecast. We should acknowledge that there is now real risk to the stability of our economy, even with an apparently doubled fiscal headroom. The first risk is in defence spending. Although within the numbers, there is the ambition to reach 2.7% of GDP by 2027, there is nothing beyond that. Of course, the Government know that they will have to spend more on defence, and that every increase of 1% of GDP in defence spending is about £25 billion—more than the entire fiscal headroom that the Chancellor has set aside. The Chancellor knows that part of the problem she had with the forecast—although other things moved strongly and positively in her direction—was the productivity growth downgrade by the OBR from 1.3% to 1%. The trend for productivity over the past 15 years has been just 0.5%. If the OBR decides in a couple of years’ time to return to an assumption of trend growth in productivity, that will wipe out £28 billion of headroom. It will destroy all the headroom and more. Similarly, on the path of interest rates, a 1% increase in interest rates across the forecast would cost £16 billion. In relation to particular spending pressures, such as special educational needs and disabilities, there is of course a £6 billion cost pressure, because that spending will be taken from local authorities and put on to the Government’s books in 2028. How that additional cost will be met is not in any way accounted for. Similarly, apparent efficiency savings of £4 billion in 2029-30—the target year—are very handy if one is trying to hit a fiscal target, but there is no explanation whatsoever of where or how those efficiency savings will be found. My final point is that the tax increases set out by the Chancellor are all back-ended. That is when the frozen thresholds kick in. We are expected to believe that, in the run-up to a general election, a party that has shown no resolve, backbone or capacity to take difficult decisions will suddenly find some backbone, stick to its guns and deliver those tax increases. That simply will not happen.
The reality is that back-loading tax-paying and squeezing spending, as the Government are doing, simply pushes off the inevitable. The evidence shows that, despite its huge majority, Labour does not have the backbone or a plan to control spending and take difficult decisions, even on tax. The Chancellor is like Mr Micawber in Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield”, who was just waiting all the time for something to turn up. Mr Micawber, as those who are familiar with the story will recall, not only ruined himself through his inability to manage his own finances, but ended up ruining another person, too. The Chancellor, with her inability to manage the public finances, will, I am afraid, be the ruin of our nation. For most of us, Christmas will be not so much a question of “Great Expectations”, but one of “Bleak House”. I give way to the hon. Member for Southend West and Leigh (David Burton-Sampson), who has been very patient.
Well, no. The reason there is the obsession with fiscal headroom is that this is the Chancellor who set up too little back in the day, blew it all, had to rebuild it, blew it all, and has had to rebuild it again. That is why the markets are so sensitive to fiscal headroom. The fact that the Chancellor is now saying that she needs £22.5 billion as fiscal headroom against her primary current Budget target is evidence of the fact that she had woefully too little back at the time of the first Budget, when she had £9.9 billion. That is the moral of the story.
I think the less said about the socks the better, Madam Deputy Speaker.
Yes, not bad, but I have to say that the tie runs in a close second—that is pretty shocking too. I now turn from the substance of the Budget to the chaotic pantomime that we had in the run-up to the Budget? We had every possible kite flown by the Treasury as to which taxes were potentially going up. We had so many kites that they blotted out the sun, and the long shadow of all that chaos swept across businesses who stopped investing, and consumers who stopped spending. Members should not take my word for that; Andy Haldane, the former chief economist at the Bank of England, observed that all that speculation made businesses and consumers “hunker down”. It had real economic consequences.
I will take one final intervention, and there is none better than my right hon. Friend.
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right, which is why that behaviour was so irresponsible. There are people who would have drawn down on their pensions because they were extremely concerned about what was being briefed out by the Treasury as to what changes may be coming down the line, and about their ability to do so after the Budget. We also had people leaving the country because they were worried about an exit tax, which was another kite flown by the Treasury. That grossly irresponsible behaviour had real-life impacts in the real economy. When it comes to misleading, there is much to consider in the complete mismanagement of the run-up to this Budget. That is not just my view. Indeed, a member of the Cabinet was quoted in the press saying, “the handling of this Budget has been a disaster from start to finish.” The impression that has been given is that there was a deliberate attempt to paint an inaccurate picture of the public finances, designed to give political cover for Labour’s plans for more taxes and more welfare spending. The Chancellor delivered a pre-Budget statement in Downing Street on 4 November in which she said that the OBR would be downgrading its productivity forecast, meaning lower tax receipts, but she failed to mention that in reality the OBR’s forecast had already shown her four days earlier that overall tax receipts were £16 billion higher—not lower—than previously thought. To quote the OBR’s Budget report: “In isolation, the reduction in productivity growth could have lowered revenues by around £16 billion in 2029-30. However, the boost to receipts from higher inflation and changes to the composition of nominal GDP growth…more than offset this.” Ministers have pointed out that there was a need to increase headroom, but that was not the justification for tax rises that was being made before the Budget, and it is an admission that the headroom that the Chancellor left in her first two fiscal events was inadequate and irresponsible. Crucially, it also fails to acknowledge that a significant proportion of the increase in taxes was used to fund policy decisions to spend more on welfare. On 14 November, the media were briefed that a plan to increase income tax rates had been dropped following an improved forecast from the OBR. We now know that that was simply untrue. The finalised pre-measures forecast came weeks before this, on 31 October. That is why it is vital that the Financial Conduct Authority investigates the briefings and leaks that went on, and I have written to it again this week on that matter. Even after the Budget, in a Guardian interview, the Chancellor said that income tax rises had remained on the table well into November, “because we didn’t know the size of the downgrade, the productivity”. Again, that is simply untrue. We now know that at no point was there a deficit of the scale suggested to the media. We know that because the OBR felt it necessary to take the unprecedented step of publishing its forecast rounds in full. The question remains as to why Ministers seem to have been so unconcerned about what was appearing in the press, when the OBR has now revealed that the alarm was being raised before the Budget. The reality is that the briefings and leaks were a smokescreen designed to distract from the real reason that taxes were going up, the utter weakness of this Labour Government and the need to buy off their Back Benchers with yet more welfare spending. In the process, the uncertainty and speculation fuelled by the Treasury had an impact on families and on growth. As my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison) rightly pointed out, people made decisions about their finances. They locked in higher mortgage rates, and businesses put off making investments and hiring workers. The British public have been left worse off and they have been misled. They deserve an apology, and they deserve much better than this weak and irresponsible Government.
On the matter of picking and choosing, the right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that on 4 November, the Chancellor did point out that there was a downgrade in productivity; we now know that to be £16 billion, and she knew that at the time. Does the right hon. Gentleman accept, however, that she did not mention—it was omission—the upgrade to the number, which was twice as much as that £16 billion, and that she thereby gave an inaccurate reflection of the state of the public finances at that time?
rose—
The right hon. Gentleman is being very generous with his time. Does he accept that on 4 November, the Chancellor knew that there was an upgrade to the state of the public finances of around £32 billion due to additional tax, inflation and other factors? If he does accept that, could he explain to the House why no mention whatsoever was made of that fact by the Chancellor?
I find it rather shocking that when the Secretary of State for Health has offered the BMA leadership an opportunity to strike a few weeks later, they have turned it down, presumably because they prefer to strike at Christmas, when, frankly, lives will be lost as a result. Am I missing something here? Why is it, according to the Secretary of State, that the BMA leaders seem to be so determinedly militant? Does he think that in reality, they simply do not represent the views of their own membership?
The political reality is that this Government have been dead in the water since they failed to get their very modest reduction in the rate of growth of the benefits bill through Parliament earlier in the year. We saw the ridiculous nonsense in the Budget when, having sacked and suspended Back Benchers after the previous Budget because they voted to end the two-child limit, the Chancellor came back with this great triumphal announcement that she was going to do it for them. May I entreat my right hon. Friend to give way one more time to the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) so that he can give us an explanation of his socks?
Matt Allum, who runs the Cricketers and two other pubs in my constituency, is devastated by this Budget, having been clobbered last year with the NIC increases, but thinks that our policy of relieving smaller businesses and high street businesses of business rates would make all the difference. Could my hon. Friend persuade the Government to adopt that policy during this debate?
The Globe Inn in North Petherton is a fantastic local pub. This financial year, its business rates bill is zero. By 2029-30, it will be £5,000, thanks to this Government. That is an extra 10,000 pints it will have to sell to meet that extra cost. How is the Government’s strategy helping?
Will the hon. Lady acknowledge that under the last Conservative Administration, the minimum wage rose at the same time as we created 4 million new jobs and left unemployment at a record low? The difference now is that in only 17 months, unemployment has risen by 280,000 as a direct result of her Government’s policies. Our caution on the minimum wage is that it is now at a level, with their economic policies, that means they are pricing younger people out of work.
I am fortunate to represent a beautiful part of the Somerset coast. Burnham-on-Sea, Berrow and Brean all have lovely sandy beaches and are visited by many holidaymakers every year. Seasonal tourism is not just part of the local economy; it is the bedrock of those communities. Our motion regrets the many measures introduced by this Government that hit both the economy at large and have had a particularly bad impact on those areas that are dependent on hospitality and tourism. The effects are even worse for businesses that employ seasonal workers. I have said before that, although the Government were elected on a promise to go for growth, most of their actions over the past 17 months seem designed to achieve the opposite. Before the election, many businesses backed this new Government. They believed the Chancellor’s prawn cocktail offensive. They thought this Government would be a reincarnation of the Blair Government, who, at least in their early years, managed to control public expenditure. Instead, they seem to be the very worst of Wilson, Callaghan and Healey. The reality is that, rather than implement the modest tax rises and spending increases contained in its manifesto, Labour increased taxes by £40 billion last year and a further £26 billion this year. That is a huge increase in taxes on businesses and hard-working families to pay for more welfare spending. All the businesses I speak to in my constituency are suffering. They have lost any faith they ever had in this Government, and who can blame them? The Globe Inn in North Petherton is a fantastic local pub. This year, it will not pay any business rates, but it will pay £5,000 a year from 2029-30, so it will have to sell 10,000 extra pints just to pay the Government’s higher taxes. That might not sound a lot to Labour Ministers, but I can assure them that, for a small business with a tiny profit margin, any additional cost can have a hugely negative impact. It is not just business rates that are going up.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point, which I agree with. The Globe Inn is not a husband-and-wife team but a mother-and-daughter team, and those extra costs bear heavily on the business. It is not just business rates that are going up. There is also the hated jobs tax, which we heard about earlier, and the consequences of the anti-jobs employment Bill. On paper, guaranteed hours and scheduling rules sound as though they would protect workers, but for seasonal workers whose livelihoods depend on flexibility, immediate availability and quick uptake of short-term work, the measures risk doing precisely the opposite. Let us take some examples. Forcing employers to offer guaranteed hours after a short reference period will make businesses reluctant to take on seasonal staff at all. I know this from experience: in Burnham-on-Sea, the number of visitors who turn up very often depends on the weather. If there are two or three weeks of very good weather, businesses will need lots of seasonal workers. In this great country of ours, that could be followed by many weeks of rainy weather. What would the Minister say to employers who are contractually bound to offer work to employees who are not required because tourists are not there?
My hon. Friend is correct. In fact, what will probably happen is that many businesses will offer less work. That tells us that these regulations have been drawn up by people who have never run a business. When a farm, holiday park or festival operator knows that it might be legally required to provide fixed hours even when demand disappears with a change in weather or tourist numbers, the safest option will be not to hire so many people. It should not surprise the Government when that is what businesses decide to do. Seasonal workers could see fewer opportunities, shorter seasons and more competition for every shift. Secondly, the strict advance notice rules and penalties for changing shifts might offer security for longer-term part-time workers, but seasonal work often depends on rapid, last-minute scheduling. If a grower cannot schedule pickers until they know the fruit is ready, or an events company cannot bring in extra hands until bookings spike, they may be forced to reduce the number of workers they engage at all. The added liability on agencies will shrink the pool of temp placements, on which many seasonal workers rely. It is natural that agencies will become far more cautious about taking on temps. No doubt some will pull out of short seasonal contracts altogether. That means fewer people will be in short-term work, fewer people will be building experience in their first jobs and fewer people will have the stepping stones to full-time employment. The Bill will act as a hammer blow to seasonal work. Employers will hesitate to hire, and workers will lose the very flexibility that makes seasonal work viable.
My right hon. Friend makes a powerful point with which I agree. The combination of extra costs and extra regulations means that it becomes incredibly burdensome for small businesses to afford to take on staff. The above inflation increases to the minimum wage add further pressure, and that all has a disproportionate effect on industries such as hospitality and tourism. My constituent Kathy owns a shop in Burnham-on-Sea, which she has run for 20 years, but the recent changes imposed by the Chancellor are making it harder and harder for her to operate. Kathy currently employs three 16-year-olds. Increases in the minimum wage and future changes to employment law will force her to stop the practice of giving youngsters their first job. There are only so many tasks someone of that age can be given, but now the salary increases and other changes will be prohibitive. Two of the three will be leaving, and Kathy tells me they will not be replaced. Is it any wonder that youth unemployment is rising? Many businesses will think, “Why risk it?” Every Labour Government leave office with unemployment higher than when they started. Last July, unemployment was 4.4%; it is now 5%. That 0.6 percentage point increase may not sound like much to Labour Members, but it is an extra 282,000 people out of work and claiming benefits. I fear we have not reached the peak because while unemployment is rising, business confidence is falling. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor cling to their jobs, telling their nervous Back Benchers that it is them—and only them—who the markets trust. I have to say that that boast is not all it might appear. What it really means is that the alternatives are so awful that they would tax, borrow and spend even more if Keir and Rachel disappear—