The shadow Chancellor is laying out compellingly the calamitous choices that were made at the last Budget. Does he agree that fundamentally underlying them is the most calamitous choice of all, which was the strategic decision that the public sector would be expanded and the private sector contracted? The crowding out of the private sector is resulting in this doom loop that we are trapped in. We have fewer and fewer wealth creators and businesses paying for this bloated public sector, and their ability to shoulder that burden gets weaker by the day.
I hear what the Minister is saying about us waiting for the Budget. Could he reassure the House that he has not discussed anything that might be in the Budget with any journalist, and certainly that he has not authorised any members of his office or anybody within the Treasury press team to brief out some of the kites that have been flown about the Budget in the media over the past few weeks?
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I seek your guidance. The Minister has said that he is unwilling to discuss what might be in the Budget with the House. He did not, however, deny that he may have done so with journalists, or that he may have authorised others to brief to the media what may or may not be in the Budget. In the absence of that denial, are we within our rights to demand that the House be privy to what those conversations contained, in the same way that the business pages of The Times may have been?
No industrialised country has ever been able to succeed without cheap, abundant energy. As my right hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho) so rightly says, the Government must prioritise delivering cheap, abundant energy for households across the country. The plan that she laid out last month would knock nearly 20% off the average household energy bill by cutting the disastrous taxes that this Government continue to defend.
Not only do this Government plan to keep hitting families with extra taxes to fund their ideological commitment to unreliable and expensive energy sources, but they plan to make the situation even worse by shutting down energy production in this country and making us even more reliant on imports from abroad. Businesses can feel it: far too many are being forced to cut back or close their doors altogether, because the cost of doing business is simply too high. That means that pubs, nursing homes and family farms are all forced to make painful decisions because of this Government.
For industrial businesses, it is even worse. Some of the best well-paid jobs of the 21st century—in high-skilled manufacturing or in AI—rely on access to cheap energy. Those are jobs that can revitalise communities and enable people to build successful lives for themselves. Our competitors around the world understand that, but this Government do not. We need people to start new industrial businesses here, but why would anybody do so when the Government are only going to make their lives harder through their commitment to sky-high bills and intermittent, unreliable forms of energy?
Those on the Government Benches often talk of sustainability, but there is nothing sustainable about this situation. People across the country can feel it in their energy bills each and every month. Thanks to rising bills, many families simply do not have enough money left at the end of the month to save for a home, plan a holiday, or even send their children on a school trip.
I thank the Member for his intervention, but we should still be investing in storage from the North sea; that is still the best storage that we have.
The real human cost of Labour’s plans on energy is that the cost of living crisis is being made even worse. And all the while, countries such as China and India continue to open new coal-fired factories. UK emissions are the lowest they have been since the 1850s, while China pumped out more carbon between 2013 and 2020 than Britain has produced over the past 220 years. That is not just because it is a bigger country; China’s per-person emissions are more than double the UK’s, and are rising.
It is, unfortunately, a mystery to me. I do not understand why we would be making this trade. It is clearly a bad one. No matter how much we might wish it were otherwise, this Government cannot and will not make a dent in addressing global climate change. We are simply sending our emissions abroad while British businesses and families pay the price. People across the country are being forced to make hard choices because this Government will not face the facts and deliver the cheap, abundant energy that we so clearly and dearly need.
It is very tempting to ask the Secretary of State whether she is on Team Wes or Team Keir, but from the sounds of it today, she is on Team 4% Kendall. I will ask instead about one of the Prime Minister’s most cynical bloopers: mandatory digital ID. The Prime Minister says that mandatory digital ID will curb illegal migration. By how much will it do so by the end of this Parliament?
Team UK, not Team Keir—I understand. The whole mandatory ID scheme hangs on the promise to curb illegal migration, but the Secretary of State can provide no numbers on that—not a percentage or even a range. Labour has already made employing Brits harder and more expensive, and now people will not be able to get a job if they resist a mandatory digital identity that will not stop the boats. Did the Prime Minister take this project away from the Secretary of State because he has no faith in her, or because she cannot bear to repeat his guff?
The Minister seems to be telling us that we can expect debt cutting measures in the Budget. Will he also confirm from the Dispatch Box that there will not be measures to increase national insurance, taxes on hard working people, or VAT?
When we are just two weeks away from a Budget where the Chancellor is preparing all sorts of unpleasantness for families and businesses, is the hon. Member not just a little concerned that the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) is quizzing him about a Budget from three years ago? Does he not think the British people are more interested in what is about to happen in two weeks’ time?
Why is the hon. Member going on about spending decisions of previous Governments, when his Chancellor said last year that her Budget had wiped the slate clean? She said, “It’s on us now”. If she accepts responsibility for where she is today, why does he not?
I confess that I am struggling to understand the relevance of this. If it is so important to Budget setting, has the hon. Member given his mother’s note to the Chancellor for her to read?
Too many of my constituents know 26 November 2025 already. Usually, Budgets come and go without making a huge impact on the public consciousness of people living their daily lives, but this year is different. It is different because businesses and families are terrified about what the Chancellor is cooking up for them.
What the Chancellor and the Prime Minister could have done a couple of weeks ago—indeed, a couple of months ago—is to put their fears at rest, confirm the Labour manifesto and confirm the promise not to increase tax on income, national insurance or VAT. The Prime Minister was prepared to do so in the summer; he did not revert to this absolute nonsense that he is not going to write the Budget. No one is asking him to write the Budget, and no one is asking the Minister to write the Budget from the Dispatch Box today. What we are asking for is confirmation of a manifesto promise that he and others got elected on less than 18 months ago. The Prime Minister committed to that promise in July, but failed to do so two weeks ago. Either he and his Government are indifferent to the worries of my constituents and the British people, or they are cooking up plans to tear up their manifesto and increase taxes they said they would not. I suspect that it can only be the latter.
My right hon. Friend, whose constituency is just across the water from mine, is far more experienced in this place than I am. I admit to a certain naivety in not imagining that Machiavellian intention within the Government to set up such a strawman, but the point remains the same. If they are doing so, they are indifferent to the economic worries of my constituents and others, particularly hard-working families and businesses.
The question that we as the Opposition have raised today is what the Chancellor is going to do with the situation that she has created. Having sat through this debate, it is surprising to have heard so much deflection from Government Members—so much determination, in November 2025, to talk about previous Budgets under previous Governments. It is an obvious deflection technique, but in so doing, they speak against their own Chancellor. In November last year, she was very proud of herself in saying that her previous Budget had dealt with the black hole—a mystery black hole that she had identified, but let us take her at her word—and she wanted credit for having closed it off and wiped the slate clean. Her actual words to Sky News were “It’s now on us”, meaning that from that date, any problems in the economy and in future Budgets would be hers to deal with, and would have been caused by her decisions.
Last year, the Chancellor blamed the Conservatives for a £22 billion black hole. On a political level, one can understand that—why would she not? She had just come into government; she felt she could get away with it. This year’s black hole is bigger. It is £30 billion, and it is on her. That is why she is faced with the choice of raising money from hard-working families. What she could do is seek savings from the ballooning disability welfare bill, which, according to the OBR’s figures, is set to reach £100 billion by the end of the decade. She tried to do that earlier this summer, but her Back Benchers were not having any of it, so she and the Prime Minister had to shelve those plans.
We learn today that not only have the Prime Minister and the Chancellor lost the confidence of many of their Back Benchers, they have also lost their grip on No. 10, with its staffers briefing out against the Health Secretary. Today, the Prime Minister has had to admit to this place that he did not authorise any of that. In so doing, he has demonstrated that he has lost control of No. 10, his own operation. He is now having to suck up to the Health Secretary, the man who wants his job, in order to try to hold his operation together. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor could try to make savings—the shadow Chancellor has very kindly identified £47 billion of savings for them.
The reason I have not identified any doctors, teachers or police is the fact that there are none to identify. The savings of £47 billion have been listed by the shadow Chancellor. They include cuts to the civil service in Whitehall—I suspect that the hon. Gentleman’s Government may be dragged kicking and screaming to cut it, in some way at some point, by us—and they also include £23 billion of cuts in the welfare bill. It is the right thing to do to incentivise work and lift people from welfare into work, something in which the hon. Gentleman’s party used to believe. One way of doing that is making employers want to employ people, but the Chancellor, in her last Budget, disincentivised work, because she taxed work by raising national insurance contributions. As we stand today, there are 180,000 fewer people on the payroll than there were when this Government came in, and it is no surprise that the economy is grinding to a halt.
In fact, the Government are doing worse through the Department for Business and Trade, by introducing an Employment Rights Bill that will further disincentivise work. It has disincentivised people, young people in my constituency, from finding a seasonal summer job, because it has lowered the hourly threshold at which national insurance contributions come in, so it is less beneficial to employ people for fewer hours and, indeed, younger people, who used to be cheaper to employ while they were between education and full-time work.
As was explained so eloquently earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage), it is the unintended consequences that have really damaged the economy and made it harder to employ people—although she was, I think, generous in describing them as unintended consequences, given that the Chancellor, the Treasury and the Government should know the consequences of their policy decisions. It makes me wonder whether they were in fact reckless, and were quite happy for businesses to soak up the additional cost and come back to the taxpayer for more money.
I urge those on the Government Benches—very few of whom are present today—to maximise all possible pressure on their Chancellor to do the right thing by their constituents and the British people.
My hon. Friend was seeking an intervention—from the Opposition Benches, I think, but I thank him for taking one from me. Is not the tragedy that we are stuck for the rest of this decade with this Government? They are clearly not going to hold a general election while they are bombing in the polls. The country is in their hands for the rest of the decade, but all they want to do is talk about previous decades. What must our constituents and their constituents be thinking when they hear this sort of stuff?
I appreciate that this is the end of a debate and the Minister is trying to be funny, but a lot of constituents I speak to do not find this period particularly funny, and would like the Minister to confirm that his Government will stick to their manifesto pledge. Please can the Minister not respond with the word “bingo”? This is a really serious matter.
The Chancellor often talks about taking difficult decisions and tough choices. Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is not a tough choice to raise taxes on other people; the tough choice is cutting spending?
I am grateful to the Minister for giving way again. He wonders why the ability to cut more money from the welfare bill has been identified by the Opposition. Does he not recognise that more than 5,000 people a day are joining long-term disability and incapacity benefits? That is how he can save more money from welfare. Why does he not do it?
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for saying that he does not want the Government to break their promises. If he looks at the Liberal Democrat amendment, that is exactly what it does: it takes away the injunction to control public expenditure in order to keep the promises made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Does he now accept that it is right that the Government should keep their promises and not follow his amendment?
I quite understand the hon. Member’s philosophical approach: he wants to spend more money on public services. He knew of all those issues before the last general election, yet when he stood for election, he said to his constituents, “Vote for me because we will not raise income tax, national insurance and VAT.” Will he stick by his own promise?
I know that the hon. Member cannot pronounce that word. I quite understand the points that he makes—he is heartfelt in making them, and he thinks there should be Government spending on those issues. However, he was aware of every single one of those issues before the 2024 general election, when he stood on a manifesto commitment not to raise income tax, not to raise national insurance, and not to raise VAT. Does he accept that if his Government resile from those promises, it will be a huge breach of trust with the British people?
If the hon. Gentleman is looking for ideas about how to cut spending, he could do worse than to look at the proposals set out at the Conservative party conference, in which we identified £47 billion of public sector cuts that would not require any of the cuts that he suggests.
As we are looking for clarity, what the shadow Chancellor was saying was that if he was in the Chancellor’s position, that is, if he could not cut spending and had to raise tax, perhaps that is what he would do, but that is not what his intention is. His intention, very properly, is to control spending, as any responsible Government would. Why will the hon. Gentleman’s Government not do the same?
This will be a very simple speech, because it has only a single fundamental point, which is that honesty in politics matters. That should not be a controversial statement. In debates in this place, we are advocates for a political philosophy, and for certain political tactics, and yes, we should put forward our case as attractively as possible, perhaps using statistics that make our case more effectively than others, but if we downright mislead the public, a line is crossed. That is wrong, because it is taking the public for fools.
In the election of 2024, the Labour party had a manifesto on which every single one of its Members was elected. There was an identified £7 billion that they intended to raise through tax rises, but a core promise at the very heart of the manifesto was that apart from that, there would be no tax rises—in particular, no increases to national insurance contributions, income tax or VAT. That is the very basis of their electoral mandate, and even then, they only managed to secure 34% of the vote. The first breach of those promises came in October last year: the tax rises were for not £7 billion, but £40 billion. That was justified by a wholly fictitious £22 billion black hole, a figure that the Office for Budget Responsibility refused to support, and that the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Financial Times, among others, could not identify.
The Government raised taxes on employers; it was a tax on jobs of fully £25 billion. The IFS said that was a “straightforward breach” of their manifesto. We were told that this was a one-off, and that the Government had “wiped the slate clean”. The Chancellor of the Exchequer’s words were that they were
“not coming back with…more taxes”;
they had fixed
“the foundations of our economy”,
and she said, “It’s now on us.” Those are not my words, but the words of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
The second Budget is in just two weeks’ time, and no global event has blown this Government’s plans off course. There has been no pandemic, and there has been no European invasion sending electricity and energy prices through the roof. If things have changed, it has been as a direct consequence of the political and economic decisions of the Government.
My hon. Friend is entirely correct. The Prime Minister tried—half-heartedly, admittedly—to save £4.5 billion from the welfare budget. He put his Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in the ridiculous position of starting a debate arguing for £4.5 billion of savings from long-term disability and health benefits, only for her to end the very same debate advocating for a £300 million increase in those same benefits. The Prime Minister has lost control of his Back Benchers, and he has lost control of his Government’s spending.
We have had no global event, but we do have Government policies that have been economically disastrous. Labour is truly the tax-and-spend party. It has raised the tax burden to the highest in history—certainly since the second world war. As for spend, it raised £40 billion in tax, borrowed a further £30 billion, and increased spending by £70 billion. According to the Government’s own plans, they intend to borrow half a trillion pounds extra during the course of this Parliament. And for what? Has there been reform of public services? No. Public sector productivity has declined. We are getting less for our money—even more so in healthcare, where the decline in productivity is fully 8.3%. What they have done is increase wage inflation. For public sector pay, it is more than 6%, whereas in the private sector, it is a third less.
The Government are coming back for more. They intend, we are told through multiple briefings to newspapers, to breach their core election manifesto pledge and raise taxes, because they cannot reduce spending.
One quick clarification: waiting times have actually increased in each of the past three months, so they are not going down at the moment. If we hose enough money at a system, we can get increased results, but what we get per pound spent has declined by over 8%. That is a very serious point.
I could not have put it better myself. These are not statistics made up by my researchers; they are from the Office for National Statistics.
The decisions that we are told the Chancellor is about to make in two weeks are not inevitable. There is another choice. She can grow a backbone—so can the Prime Minister—and impose some control over public spending. We have set out a plan to reduce spending by £47 billion. I have heard the criticisms and challenges from Labour Members. They have a budget of £1.3 trillion to work with; are they seriously saying that they cannot find £20 billion of necessary savings from a £1.3 trillion budget? If they cannot, then they do not deserve to be in government.
The motion is not a sleight of hand. It is a simple, short motion, which merely asks Government Members, when they choose which Lobby to go through tonight, to decide whether they will stick with their promises—their manifesto commitments. Will they treat their constituents as fools, or will they vote with the Opposition and defend their, albeit shaky, democratic mandate?
We have talked about the fear that our constituents have, but there is another fear held by businesses. My hon. Friend will know that business confidence has plummeted to the worst level on record, and investment decisions taken by businesses have been delayed because businesses are worried about the impact of this terrible Budget that we are facing. Does my hon. Friend agree that the speculation fuelled by the anonymous briefings from No. 11 are already damaging our economy?
Does my hon. Friend have any idea why the Chancellor has changed her mind or what it is that has affected her decision? Just a year ago, she said that she did not need to come back for more, but now she says she does. Has there been any great global shock, or does he think the problem lies closer to home?
I have heard what the Minister says and I do not ask him to comment on the Budget, but can he confirm whether he thinks that manifesto pledges are important?
I am encouraged to hear that the Minister wants to link increased funding with productivity increases. In that spirit, why was the resident doctors’ pay rise not linked to any productivity increases?
My hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) asked the Minister a specific question. In October last year, the Chancellor said, “We are not coming back for more. We have wiped the slate clean. From now on, it is on us.” What has happened between then and now? What has changed?