My Lords, it is a pleasure to open this debate on the measures brought forth by the Chancellor in last week’s Autumn Statement. It was a Statement designed to drive growth across the country, creating jobs and giving more people more money through work. It included some big, headline-grabbing announcements—not least of which was a tax cut for 29 million working people—and over 100 other measures carefully crafted to build on the post-Covid economic recovery. Taken in combination, the measures that the Chancellor proposed could boost business investment in the UK by around £20 billion a year in a decade’s time.
I will start my remarks with some important context. The British economy has outperformed all expectations this year and has exceeded many of the forecasts. Yet in some ways we should not be surprised. When the Prime Minister took office, he set out five pledges to the British people, three of which were economic: to halve inflation, reduce debt and grow the economy—and he is a man of his word.
I turn first to inflation. At a high of 11.1% last year, it is now at 4.6%—a promise delivered. As the OBR noted, the measures in this year’s Autumn Statement are not inflationary, and inflation is forecast to continue to fall. I echo the Chancellor’s thanks to the independent Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee for its work in bringing down inflation. The Government will continue to support it to do whatever it takes until the job is done.
Secondly, I turn to debt. Before last year’s Autumn Statement, our debt was predicted to rise to almost 100% of GDP by the end of the forecast period. This is unacceptable. As the late Lord Lawson said, and as the Chancellor quoted in his speech,
“borrowing is just a deferred tax on future generations”.—[Official Report, Commons, 22/11/23; col. 328]
That is something we cannot justify.
Now, thanks to the decisions taken by the Chancellor, the OBR says that borrowing is lower this year and next, and, on average across the forecast, lower by £0.7 billion every year compared to the spring Budget forecasts. It falls from 4.5% of GDP in 2023-24 to 1.1% five years later. We meet our fiscal rule that public sector borrowing must be below 3% of GDP, not just by the final year but in almost every single year of the forecast. From a predicted rate of nearly 100%, headline debt is instead predicted to be 94%. The OBR forecasts that underlying debt will be 91.6% of GDP next year, rising to 93.2% in 2026-27, before declining in the final two years of the forecast to 92.8% in 2028-29. That is lower in every year compared to forecasts from last spring. So we meet our fiscal rule to have underlying debt falling as a percentage of GDP in the final year of the forecast, with double the headroom compared to the OBR’s March forecast. The UK continues to have the second-lowest government debt in the G7; that is lower than the United States, Canada, France, Italy or Japan—another promise delivered.
My Lords, I first welcome the noble Baroness to the Treasury Bench. She has a hard act to follow.
A couple of weeks ago, the Institute for Government and the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy published a detailed 300-page analysis of the impact of the pandemic on nine public services, ranging over health and social care, education, local services, criminal justice and the police. The study first evaluated performance from 2010 to the eve of the pandemic, meaning that any change in quality of service over the first nine years of the Conservative Government could not be blamed on the pandemic or the war in Ukraine.
In eight out of nine areas of public service studied, performance was found to be worse in 2019 than in 2010. In four areas—general practice, hospitals, adult social care and prisons—performance was much worse. Only in schools was performance rated as better. Between 2019 and the present day, nothing at all has improved and eight of the nine major services have deteriorated yet further. Finally, as far as the next five years are concerned, while some services are predicted to stay at the same miserable level, others, including schools and criminal justice, face further decline.
So, will the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement proposals turn this decline around? The answer given by the OBR is clearly no. As tables A.l and A.2 of the OBR outlook make clear, current spending will grow very slowly, while investment in public services will suffer major cuts. The Chancellor’s one big public services announcement was to set a productivity target of a 0.5% increase per year. Productivity is an issue in many services, particularly in the courts and hospitals, but nothing in the Autumn Statement will significantly improve the situation. Indeed, the real-terms cuts to capital budgets ensure that public services will be left with a crumbling estate, insufficient equipment and inadequate IT systems.
My Lords, I too welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, to her new ministerial post and I remind the House of my direct interests in local government, as set out in the register. It may not perhaps be surprising that my perspective on the Autumn Statement is somewhat different from the Minister’s.
The Autumn Statement provided an opportunity for the Government to set out a coherent strategy for tackling the deep challenges facing households, businesses and public services. It contained a package of sweeteners for taxpayers, positive support for some businesses, a welcome increment to the national living wage and increases in benefit levels. However, it was not a programme that demonstrated that the Government understood the enormity of the challenges faced by both public services and many businesses.
The Government fail to understand that a successful country depends on well-funded, reliable and resilient public services. Our NHS currently has 7.7 million people on waiting lists for elective care. The latest information from Cancer Research UK shows that 20,000 cancer deaths per year are avoidable. The Autumn Statement was the chance to use the fiscal headroom available to provide the NHS with the resources it needs to reduce waiting lists and cut avoidable deaths. The NHS was not even mentioned. The Government are ignoring the consequences for individuals who are stranded on ever-increasing waiting lists to alleviate a painful hip or hernia. These are the very people who are on long-term work sickness, which results in burgeoning demands on welfare support. A strategic approach would recognise the links and attempt to address them.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation reported in October that over 1 million children are experiencing destitution, which means that their families are struggling to provide the absolute basic needs to stay warm and have enough food and appropriate clothing. That is shocking enough, but the fact is that three quarters of those experiencing destitution are already in receipt of social security payments. The JRF recommended that universal credit should have what it called an “essentials guarantee” to ensure that everyone has a protected minimum amount of support to afford the very basic needs. The rise in benefit levels will not be sufficient to reduce this appalling picture of destitution. Maybe the Minister can say what actions the Government intend to take to substantially reduce the number of children experiencing destitution.
My Lords, I too congratulate the Minister on her move to the Treasury. It is a much-maligned institution, but I am confident that she will enjoy her time there. I hope that, with time, she is given a more glamourous title than Parliamentary Secretary, if only to avoid being confused with the Chief Whip, whose official title is Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury.
As a student of fiscal Statements—I reckon that I have worked on 30, including seven that can be termed “pre-election”—I rate this one as better than average. First, I welcome the cut in national insurance. This reverses the trend of the last 40 years, which has been to raise national insurance to finance income tax cuts. Over my adult life, the basic rate of income tax has been cut from 35% to 20%, while the employers’ national insurance rate has risen from 8.75% to 13.8%, and the rate paid by employees has more than doubled from 5.75% to 12%. This sleight of hand has been bad for the economy. The fact is that national insurance is a tax on jobs—it penalises working people and the young—while income tax cuts tend to favour the old, rentiers and those who live off capital. So I welcome the 2% cut to 10%; I hope that it will start a trend. Can the Minister say whether it is now government policy to prioritise national insurance cuts over income tax cuts? Of course, whether it is affordable is another matter, and one to which I shall come back.
Secondly, I welcome the focus on growth and, in particular, the full expensing of business investment. Normally, I would favour the widest possible tax base with the lowest tax rate, but Britain has a chronic problem of underinvestment, which is a contributory factor to our low growth, so it is right to try to tilt the playing field.
Finally, I welcome the Chancellor’s commitment to fiscal rectitude, if only by 2028. He did a great job in pulling the Truss Government back from the brink a year ago and in restoring confidence. Whoever governs in the coming period will need to keep on bearing down on borrowing and get public debt on a downward path in relation to the nation’s income. We may currently be benefiting from a rally in the bond market, but we cannot be sure that that will be sustained. The fact is that debt interest is eating into resources better spent on the public services people need.
My Lords, I, too, welcome my noble friend’s arrival at the Treasury, in which, a long time ago, I served as an official. I shall try to find something nice to say about the Treasury, although frankly, it is not terribly easy. I told my noble friend before this debate that I hoped to touch on three questions, and she mentioned them in her excellent opening survey of the scene which we all heard a moment ago.
The first is about the overall policy in dealing with the inflation headline, the rate of inflation and the prospects. It is a sort of mantra of the Treasury, the Bank of England and lots of experts that all cuts in taxation are inflationary: you cannot cut taxation at this delicate and fragile time without raising the rate of inflation. I am not so sure about that. I got a very interesting note from the Library—of course, these figures must be treated with caution—which pointed out that about 28% of total public expenditure, which is about £340 billion, is indexed. In other words, it goes up when the inflation rate goes up and then comes down. That is out of a total of £1,222 billion. So presumably if we can get headline inflation down by one point, straightaway we will save £3.7 billion to £4 billion; by two points, £8 billion, and so on. It is a lot of money.
One therefore asks whether there are some areas where retail taxes being reduced can have an impact on headline inflation? If they can, then you are losing revenue, but you are also saving expenditure on a very large scale. I sometimes wonder whether the Treasury has worked out some of these things. The figures are very big indeed.
That is quite distinct from the other indexing point, of course, which is that higher interest rates immediately raise the amount that the Government have to pay in debt payments for their borrowings. These were running at £116 billion a year. I think they have come down a little, but it would be interesting to know, if my noble friend can provide the figures, what a one-point interest rate fall involves in reducing public expenditure. There is a sort of swings-and-roundabout element here that we do not hear very much about. I hope that my noble friend will talk a little more about it.
4:50 pm
Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab) [V]
My Lords, reducing national insurance contributions does nothing for people on the lowest incomes. Full expensing, at a cost to the Exchequer of £11 billion a year, seems an expensive way of securing an increase in annual business investment of £3 billion.
Before the Autumn Statement, the OBR projected a fall of £27 billion in borrowing in 2027-28 compared with its forecast in March. The Chancellor had a choice as to how to use this windfall between consolidating the public finances, improving public services or making tax cuts. Bullied by his party, and with an election coming up, he chose tax cuts. He has gambled that the wafer-thin margin forecast by the OBR will enable him to adhere to his fiscal rule that the debt to GDP ratio will be falling by the end of the period.
Of course, the OBR’s projection is no more than optimistic guesswork. The Chancellor has left himself with nothing in the bank for contingency, yet contingencies always occur. If the market should take the view that the fiscal framework is fanciful, the effects could be devastating. A rise in interest rates, coming on top of the vast debt service costs that the Government’s policies have already incurred—£116 billion annually—would wreck his flimsy plan. International confidence in the UK has already been weakened, not only by the Truss-Kwarteng episode but by this Government’s cavalier attitude to international law.
A different kind of unrealism and irresponsibility is apparent in the Chancellor’s decision to withhold resources for public services. Inflation that is boosting his tax revenues is also increasing the cost of public services. He claims that his tax cuts will enable public services to be better funded; the reality is that he has funded tax cuts at the expense of public services already shredded by austerity. In his plans, public spending on government departments is due to fall by £19 billion in 2028; if this were actually to happen, it would be appalling.
The Chancellor made the bizarre claim that we deliver world-class education. That is not so for those who are threading their way through our chaotic and underfunded FE system, nor for the generality of children who have seen the discrepancy in funding per pupil widen vastly between state schools and private schools. Faced with the crisis in the justice system, bound up with inadequate education—cut by 20% after 2010—the Chancellor offered nothing.
With the Home Office budget also unprotected, how are the Government going to control immigration? The Autumn Statement showed a wilful evasiveness about the challenges to the British state. To court popularity with the pensioner vote, there is an 8.5% increase in the state pension—way above the 6.7% indexation of social security benefits—yet the Chancellor knows that the triple lock is fiscally unsustainable. He ought to recognise that it is socially damaging as well, widening the gulf between generations. The defunding of universal credit over the years has widened the gulf between the affluent and the destitute. On average, the Chancellor’s measures will give £1,000 a year to the top 20% of earners but only £200 to the bottom 20%.
My Lords, I pay tribute to and welcome my noble friend the Minister to her new place on the Front Bench.
It is a great privilege to speak once again as a Back-Bencher. To minimise anxiety on the part of my noble friend the Minister, let me say that I intend to be very well behaved, a house-trained and biddable Back- Bencher. I shall not indulge in a meandering, auto- biographical valedictory exposition of how I was short-changed as a Minister, because I was not; of how senior colleagues failed me, because they did not; or of how the Government have lost their way, because they have not. My short letter to the Prime Minister made clear that being a Defence Minister requires reserves of energy and resilience that this old bird was finding it increasingly difficult to muster. The time had come to pass on the baton to another incumbent, who I am delighted to say is my noble friend Lord Minto. My letter also made clear my pride in serving this Prime Minister and that I would continue to support him in every way I can. The Autumn Statement is the affirmation of why I offer that support. Let me explain.
I am an old-fashioned kind of girl—a sort of political response to Eartha Kitt. I know why I am a Conservative: you do not come from Scotland and not know that. I know what kind of conservatism I believe in: a free society where everyone is encouraged to optimise their individual talents; a free enterprise economy which can flourish when supported by the state but not obstructed or oppressed by it—my noble friend Lord Howell eloquently explained why that is so important; a society where the state and its offshoots are enablers and facilitators, not a resource-sapping monolith, as is sadly the case in the devolved governance of Scotland; lastly and most importantly, a society where the privileges of these essential freedoms are balanced by a responsibility and a compassion which protects and supports those who, for whatever reason, are vulnerable. So, you will not find me in the tent of ideology and dogma; I am much more interested in pragmatism and delivery of the broad tenets I have outlined.
My Lords, that felt more like a speech about a future Autumn Statement from a Labour Government than about the current one before us.
I too welcome the Minister to her new role and look forward to hearing from her often in this House. However, I suspect that, even if you are a Treasury Minister, every Autumn Statement feels like a missed opportunity. There are always things that each one of us would have liked to have seen given a higher priority and areas of spend to which we would have wanted greater resources allocated. There may also be things on which we think too much money is being spent, although they may be a little less common.
I begin by being grateful for a number of items announced this time. I am not sure that I can sustain that congratulatory perspective all the way through my remarks—your Lordships know me too well to expect that—but I will at least start in a positive direction. The uprating of working-age benefits by 6.7% and the 9.8% increase in the national living wage will go some way to stemming or slowing the growth and deepening of poverty among households who are striving and struggling with low-paid and insecure employment. My belief is that the money made available to our lowest-income households should not, however, be subject to annual political whim. More than a triple lock for pensions, we need an independent mechanism to ensure that benefits always cover the basic essentials of living.
To that extent, I would, as the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, urged, encourage support for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Trussell Trust proposal for what they call an “essentials guarantee”. This would provide long-term certainty that benefits would be enough to live on for all families. It would mean that the rate of universal credit is set by an independent body which takes the cost of essentials into account. But that is for the longer term; this year’s announcement is a step in the right direction.
5:12 pm
20 of 97 shown
Finally, I turn to economic growth. There are one or two in your Lordships’ House who remember the economic recession that accompanied the Second World War. When this Government came to power in 2010, the UK was facing the worst recession since that era of terrible conflict. From 2010 until the pandemic, this Government presided over faster growth than many of our major competitors, including Spain, Italy, France, Germany and Japan. When the pandemic hit, followed in quick succession by an energy crisis, our economy, like so many around the world, faced a shock. As a result, last autumn, just a year ago, the OBR forecast a recession, in which the economy was expected to shrink by 1.4% in 2023. Instead, it grew. Revised numbers from the ONS now say the economy is 1.8% larger than pre-pandemic.
Looking ahead, the OBR expects the economy to be larger in every year of the forecast, compared to March. It is expected to grow by 0.6% this year and 0.7% next year. After that, growth rises to 1.4% in 2025, 2% in 2026, 2% in 2027 and 1.7% in 2028. This Government are delivering on growth. We have an economy that is bigger and stronger than people thought and, as I have already said, with double the headroom that the OBR predicted. This is where our leeway comes from, and a large part of the reason why we can introduce generous tax reforms, including cutting taxes for 29 million working people.
As I have said, this Autumn Statement is focused on economic growth, and the Government have set out a raft of measures to support long-term sustainable increases in economic output. For large businesses, full expensing has been a game changer. The likes of the CBI, Make UK, BT Openreach and Siemens, and indeed 200 other businesses and trade bodies, called for this measure to be made permanent. They all agreed that it would be the single most transformational thing we could do for business investment and growth. Full expensing means that, for every £1 million invested, a company will get £250,000 off their tax bill the very same year. That is cashflow that can be used to buy a vital new machine, expand premises, test a new product, or hire a new team to begin work on a new project.
For investment, growth and employment, that is game-changing. It means that we will soon have both the lowest headline corporation tax rate in the G7 and the most generous plant and machinery capital allowance anywhere. Once again, the OBR says that this measure will achieve our aims, and will make a huge contribution to our economy, increasing annual investment by £3 billion a year, totalling £14 billion in the forecast period.
Alongside this, the Government will provide £4.5 billion over five years to our strategic manufacturing sectors—those where we already have, or can have, a competitive advantage, and which have tremendous potential for growth in the years ahead. This will encourage the manufacturers of zero-emission vehicles, green energy solutions and aerospace and life science technologies to set up or expand in, and stay in, the UK—again, creating more jobs and more income.
As we move down the business scale, from the very largest to small and medium enterprises, we continue to provide support. The Government are extending the 75% business rate discount for retail, hospitality and leisure businesses for another year, and will freeze the small business multiplier, saving an average independent pub more than £12,800 next year.
Then we come to the smallest businesses of all—those consisting of self-employed people. The Chancellor illustrated the importance of these people in his speech last week, and it was an elegant description that I would like to repeat:
“These are the people who literally kept our country running during the pandemic: the plumbers who fixed our boilers in lockdowns, the delivery drivers who brought us our shopping and the farmers who kept food on our plates”.—[Official Report, Commons, 22/11/23; col. 333.]
Without these people, I simply cannot imagine how we could have got through the pandemic. They already give so much of their time and effort to their work that it has always seemed an unnecessary burden to ask them to fill in all sorts of tax forms, and then pay all sorts of different taxes, before they can enjoy the fruits of their labour.
So the Chancellor made two interventions: first, the abolition of class 2 national insurance, saving 2 million self-employed people an annual average of £192; then, the reduction of class 4 national insurance, down from 9 % to 8%, saving those 2 million people more again. From April next year, 2 million self-employed people will save an average of £350 a year.
Finally, the Chancellor offered one more major tax cut—a 2 percentage point reduction on national insurance for employees. That saves someone on an average salary over £450 a year, and that saving will start from January, once the legislation is passed.
I now turn to labour and welfare. The Government want to make work more available, more appealing, and more rewarding. That is why we are delivering on our commitment to end low hourly pay for full-time workers on the national living wage. Last week, the Chancellor announced the largest ever cash increase in the national living wage, increasing it by 9.8% to £11.44 an hour for workers aged 21 and over. This is worth up to £1,800 for a full-time worker. This follows a series of increases dating all the way back to 2010, when this Government first came to power. In 13 years, we have increased the national living wage by 30% in real terms.
As the Chancellor said in his speech last week, the best way to tackle poverty is through work. For tens of thousands of parents, the Chancellor’s spring announcement of 30 hours of free childcare for working parents of one and two year-olds will help them return to work without having to worry about their career prospects, or about being able to afford childcare while they are at work.
The focus of the Autumn Statement is on those with long-term health conditions and disability, and the long-term unemployed. Every year, 100,000 people are signed on to benefits, with no requirement to look for work, because of sickness or disability. Some of these people are unable to work and it is perfectly right that we support them with the uprated benefits that the Chancellor announced last week.
But for a large number of sick or disabled people, the issue is that they are not given a clear route back to work when they are ready for it. That means they are not even given a chance to reach their full potential. We should not be comfortable with that. Everyone should have the opportunity to make the most of themselves and to experience the benefits of work. So, over the next five years, the Government will commit £1.3 billion to help nearly 700,000 people with health conditions to find jobs. Over 180,000 more people will be helped through the universal support programme and nearly 500,000 more people will be offered treatment for mental health conditions, and employment support.
At the same time, there are many people in this country who have been unemployed for a long time—over a year—not because of any conditions that they have but rather because of the conditions that they find themselves in. Perhaps a surprising redundancy has left someone in their 50s, who has worked in the same role for 30 years, adrift in a modern job market for which they are not entirely equipped. Perhaps the kind of work someone in their 20s really wants to do requires qualifications which they just do not have the means to attain.
There are numerous reasons for long-term unemployment, but there is one basic truth: work lifts us up, so the Government will provide a further £1.3 billion of funding to offer extra help to the 300,000 people who have been unemployed for over a year. But if, after 18 months of intensive support, jobseekers have not found a job, the Government will require them to take part in a mandatory work placement, through a new work programme or other intensive activity, to increase their skills and improve their employability. In addition, if they choose not to engage with the work search process for six months, their case will be closed and their benefits stopped.
Other Benches may try to argue that this lacks compassion. I say that is wrong; that the inverse is true and that this is a fundamentally compassionate approach, because it prevents those who choose not to work siphoning off the finite resources that those who sincerely want to work, or those who genuinely cannot, desperately need. It protects our most vulnerable, and the people who most want and need our support, from those who would seek to exploit them by hiding among them—and the OBR says that this will work. Taken together with the labour supply measures the Chancellor announced in the spring, the OBR says that this Autumn Statement will increase the number of people in work by around 200,000 at the end of the forecast period, permanently increasing the size of the economy.
This is a wide-ranging Autumn Statement which includes bold measures to get our country growing: the largest business tax cut in modern British history over a five-year period; the largest ever cash increase to the national living wage, paired with the largest ever cut to employee and self-employed national insurance; the biggest set of welfare reforms in a decade; one of the largest ever increases to the state pension; and a focus on investment that could see business investment in the UK increase by £20 billion per year in a decade’s time.
I have outlined only some of the numerous measures announced by the Chancellor last week. There is much more to cover but, for now, I welcome this debate and look forward to hearing the views of your Lordships’ House.
But of course, the main focus of the Autumn Statement, as the noble Baroness made clear, was not public services but private sector growth. If significant economic growth is indeed achieved, the positive impact on public services might be considerable. The Autumn Statement commitment of £4.5 billion-worth of support for new industries sounds impressive—until you compare it with United States funding for green investments of $360 billion and European Union plans in excess of €200 billion.
Of course, the Government deserve congratulation that taxpayers’ money has secured the new Nissan investment, and we all hope for similar encouraging results from the investment summit held on Monday. But just as when unemployment rises, some people find new jobs, so these welcome investments must be viewed not as isolated events but in the context of the overall investment picture. The Chancellor’s primary measure to stimulate investment was his decision to make so-called full expensing permanent—a positive step. According to the OBR, this is expected to increase long-run potential output by “slightly below” 0.2% of GDP per annum. However, this positive impact is, according to the OBR, offset by the reduction in
“the public capital stock as a share of GDP”,
which
“would likely also have a material, negative impact on potential output”
over the forecast period.
Here, the OBR has, sotto voce, identified a fundamental error in the Government’s approach to investment and growth: their failure to recognise that public services are complementary to the efficiency of private sector investment. Private profitability requires a thriving public sector. For example, the deterioration in the health service has been a major contributor to the record 2.5 million people out of work due to ill health. If just half these people were in work, this would add a full 1 percentage point to GDP—five times greater than the impact of full expensing. Similarly, the lack of additional support for local government will impact spending on local infrastructure, transport and skills, increasing private sector costs of production, particularly for SMEs. The complementarity of public and private investment was very clear in 2010.
George Osborne’s austerity Budget killed a growing economy stone dead. This was not the immediate effect of his expenditure cuts, which took time; it was the immediate effect of his clear declaration of intent to cut public investment and cut the growth of demand. It was the vision of austerity, together with the reality of cuts, that killed off so much private investment. The Chancellor’s 110 measures to stimulate growth may be successful, but a fundamental problem is that they do not add up to a coherent policy. They are, in Churchill’s famous phrase, “a pudding without a theme”. An economy and society in which the popular estimation is that nothing works is not an attractive place for businesses to invest.
That is why Rachel Reeves’ commitment to large-scale investment in green technologies—the undoubted technologies of the future—is so important. This defining commitment will provide the theme and coherence this Autumn Statement lacks. It is also a long-term policy, a commitment to at least one Parliament—so different from the persistent chopping and changing of the last 13 years, and providing the stable policy confidence investors need. Of course, given the public sector scorched earth that a Labour Government will inherit, an ambitious green growth investment strategy will be a considerable challenge. But it is as nothing compared to the challenges faced by our parents and grandparents in 1945, when, in far worse circumstances, a Labour Government laid the public sector foundations for the next 25 years of transformative growth, under both Conservative and Labour Administrations.
A component of Reeves’ green growth strategy is a long-term commitment to investment in and reform of the public services—reform that recognises not only service to the public but the support the public sector provides to business investment. The green investment programme will be a catalyst, defining Britain’s profitable investment future. It will herald a fundamental change in the way the British economy is managed: a fundamental reform that, as illustrated by the failure of this Autumn Statement, is desperately needed.
Increasing numbers below the breadline has consequences for other public services, particularly for local government. Yet another important piece of the jigsaw that provides for the needs of communities and families is under severe pressure, but was not referenced at all by the Government, who nevertheless expect local public services to pick up the pieces in times of stress and distress.
Local Government Association analysis shows that councils are facing funding gaps of £2.4 billion in 2023-24 and a further £1.6 billion the following year. This amount is equivalent to all local government spending on waste collection, libraries, and recreation and sport. The Institute for Fiscal Studies demonstrates that my own council of Kirklees is underfunded relative to its need by £13 million a year. Across local government there has been a reduction on average of 22% in real-terms spending, which for councils with higher levels of deprivation rises to 26%. In my own authority, this equates to a loss of £536 per household per year.
It is therefore not surprising that one in four councils are right on the brink of declaring what amounts to effective bankruptcy—this includes Conservative-led county councils, as well as Labour-led metropolitan authorities. Indeed, Nottingham City Council has this very day issued a Section 114 notice because it is unable to issue a balanced budget. Can the Minister provide any assurance that there will be funding support for councils to enable essential services to continue? For example, will councils be provided with additional funding to pay the increase in the national living wage? Many employees in councils will be affected, as will partner organisations providing essential care for adults and children.
Local authorities in more urban areas are spending around 30% of their core spending power on children’s services. Increases in central funding nowhere meet that justified level of demand, which leaves local authorities making desperate decisions. Over 70% of councils are considering scaling back leisure services. In my own council, there are current proposals which will result in the closing of swimming pools, leaving just two swimming pools for a population of 500,000 people. Again, this has consequences—for example, for those with arthritis who depend on swimming for exercise. The closure of sports centres means that the social prescribing of, say, yoga, dancing or badminton, becomes impossible, and those same people are then reliant on an already overstretched NHS. Perhaps the solution to the loss of swimming pools is to use our rivers, but the only action in the Autumn Statement in relation to tackling sewage-filled rivers is to slash the funding of the Environment Agency by 11% per year.
No doubt the Minister will respond by saying that there has been an increase in funding for adult social care, but what is never acknowledged is that over a quarter of this additional funding comes from the pockets of hard-pressed council tax payers in the form of the social care precept, which in my council amounts to £200 per household per year on top of the council tax.
Levelling up is the Government’s answer to the dire state of local services, yet the investment provided is, according to SIGOMA,
“a drop in the ocean”
compared to what councils have lost, alongside the bidding regime that requires councils to spend £30,000 per bid to the various levelling-up pots. Therefore, it is not surprising that people say that they are losing a sense of pride in the place where they live and feel that the country is going downhill. Those were the sentiments that were crying out for action in the Autumn Statement; what we were given was the equivalent of a few deck chairs being moved on the “Titanic”.
That brings me to what I see as the problem with the Autumn Statement: I fear that the public expenditure projections are simply unrealistic. The National Health Service and the state pension are accounting for an ever-increasing proportion of public spending. The triple lock is a luxury that the country can ill afford, but all our parties seem to be committed to it. Of course, there is more the Government can do on the productivity and efficiency of public services, starting with the Civil Service, but the so-called unprotected programmes, such as criminal justice, housing and local government, have already been cut too much—as the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, mentioned—and the results are beginning to show.
Moreover, as the international security situation deteriorates, we need to spend more on defence, diplomacy and intelligence. Demographic pressures will only increase over the next 20 years. Much of this was set out in the OBR’s fiscal sustainability report, published in July. Can the Minister assure me that that report is informing Treasury policy and will inform the Budget come March?
I fear that, sooner or later, the Government will have to grasp the nettle and reintroduce a health and social care levy. When they do so, it should be based on the income tax base, rather than that of national insurance. The better-off elderly—I should declare an interest as the possessor of a free bus pass—should pay their fair share.
My other concern is that the Government are not going far enough on growth. Here I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, that more private investment needs to be combined with more public investment. Yet the Government are projecting that net public investment will fall over time from some £72 billion this year to £56 billion by 2028. When inflation is taken into account, that is a cut of at least 30%. One of my biggest regrets as a Treasury official was recommending the cancellation of what is now called the Elizabeth line in the early 1990s. Of course, we need to focus on investment projects with the biggest economic return— to that end, I am no fan of HS2—but we also need to ensure that infrastructure gets sufficient resources. That means consuming less and investing more. I welcome the Chancellor’s words on planning reform, but I fear they do not go far enough. We need to make it easier to build houses and to make progress on infrastructure. Only yesterday, a telecoms industry veteran told me about the planning obstacles to delivering infra- structure in Scotland, and I see little evidence to suggest that the planning system is much better in the rest of the UK.
Finally, the Autumn Statement does not go far enough on skills. Many of Britain’s problems with immigration stem from our inability to develop a labour force for the 21st century. We used to rely on the Polish and central European taxpayer to train our workforce. If on the day after the 2016 referendum the Prime Minister had said we were going to prioritise further education and vocational skills and then relentlessly focused on the problem, we might just, seven years on, be beginning to see some results, but she did not, and her successors have shown even less interest in the subject. It is not too late to put that right. If we do not rise to the productivity and growth challenge, the public finances will only get worse. This Autumn Statement represents a small step forward, but whoever forms the next Government is going to have to do a whole lot more.
The cost of debt servicing is 5.2% of total public expenditure, which is a lot. That is 3.8% of GDP, so any increase in interest rates, which the Bank of England firmly says is to cut inflation, has a big inflationary element built into it as well. These things are not straightforward. Does the Bank of England take this into account? We never hear any statement of the kind that recognises that raising interest rates, which is said to be the necessary medicine for curbing inflation, has a huge inflationary punch in it. I have been given a figure that indicates that every 1% on the inflation rate and every 1% on interest rates costs the Treasury £26 billion. That is inflation, not deflation. These are very complex matters that tend to be pushed out of the debate.
Long ago, in the time of Ted Heath, he used to get very annoyed because he felt that the Bank of England and the Treasury were playing a “one-golf club game”. All they had in their golf bag was this one club which said, “Push up interest rates and push down all forms of government expenditure and that will somehow solve the inflation problem”. It does not work out quite that way. These things are not straightforward, so anything more on that would be very helpful.
My second point is that it is rather curious that missing from the Autumn Statement and the Green Book, which we have all been given, is a rather serious item. The Green Book says that the Government are focusing on five important areas, including education, rewarding hard work—we all want that—backing British business, world-class education, building domestic and sustainable energy, and other desirable aims. That is all very nice, but one enormous thing is missing. This is where our history gets a little distorted. In the Thatcher times, it was said that Mrs Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe were very keen on balancing the budget, and certainly Geoffrey Howe—my dear friend and a wonderful man—ran a very tight ship. However, that was not our priority. Our priority was trying to restore the balance in an unbalanced economy, which was grossly overweighted on the state side. Most of our giant industries were nationalised. Half of British industry was in the state sector, and we wished to pull the pendulum back to the middle and get a better balance between the state and the private sector. To that end, we concentrated on enormous efforts that had considerable success. We succeeded in rebalancing the economy in a less socialised way. We still wanted an efficient state sector of course, as the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, said we must have; but we did not want a greedy public sector. That was the danger right from the start: that we were being sunk again and again by a huge, overexpanded and constantly growing public sector. The mechanism for bringing that down is a very important part of the story and, at the moment, it does not appear to be there.
Thirdly, my noble friend Lord Maude is reported to be advocating that, in order to get a tougher approach on public spending, we should split the Treasury between its various functions of being a bureau of the Budget and the ministry of economics. I would be interested to hear the Government’s view on that proposition, particularly as, if we are talking about public sector capital investment, that is always the orphan. If the investment comes from the public sector, it tends to be a leftover from current pressures and political demands on the budget. That is why a great deal of the infrastructure needed in this country is going to have to come from the private sector.
That was the third matter. I have a fourth one, in my last few seconds. Please can we pay serious attention to more democratic capitalism—that is, wider share ownership and wider involvement by everybody, rather than just the few, in the growth of assets? This is not a good advertisement for capitalism. Capitalism does work but it works best of all when it is democratised, even socialised. I note that the Chancellor is trying to expand people’s involvement in the stock market and asset ownership; we need a lot more of that. Can I have a comment from the Minister on that as well?
Who are the employers who will provide all this work at home for people with mental health and mobility problems? Although the Nuffield Trust calculates that the NHS faces a £1.7 billion deficit, the Chancellor made no significant health funding announcements. Moreover, he provided nothing to support local government to pay for better social care and public health to ease pressure on the NHS. Demographic developments mean that, with an ageing population and a deteriorating dependency ratio, the Government will be faced with reduced tax revenues from people of working age and higher outlays on health and social care. The demands of the NHS, year after year, exceed the rate of growth of the economy. The days are gone when, to pay for the welfare state, the Government could raid the defence budget, which they have now said they want to increase.
Aside from his douceur to people who live near new energy infrastructure, the Chancellor showed no recognition of the scale of public expenditure that will be required to meet our commitment to a green transition. The Climate Change Committee and the OBR estimate that the Government must spend £25 billion per year between now and 2050 to achieve net zero. Where is the provision for that? His arithmetic assumes that he will index fuel duties next spring. We shall see. What is sure, though ignored by him, is that with the phasing out of petrol and diesel-powered vehicles, fuel duty—currently raising about £25 billion—will evaporate. VAT at 5% on domestic gas and electricity use, like the freezing of fuel duty and the tax treatment of air travel, subsidises fossil fuel consumption while we struggle towards net zero.
This Chancellor shows no interest in tax reforms such as introducing a progressive carbon tax and road pricing. There is a whole agenda of tax reforms that would be beneficial to the economy. The Government should at least extract the best value they can from the existing tax system, whether by merging national insurance and income tax into a properly progressive system, tackling the chaotic complexity of VAT, addressing the damaging effects of the stamp duty regime or removing the anomalies and injustices of council tax, but the Chancellor shies away from all this. Following the Statement, he said:
“I hope we are able to reduce the tax burden still further in the future”.
Instead, he should have told the truth—that low taxes are a fantasy. We are heading towards a tax take of 38% of GDP. That will still leave public services threadbare and the great challenges I have mentioned unaddressed. He said it was
“an autumn statement for a country that has turned a corner”,—[Official Report, Commons, 22/11/23; col. 337.]
but we have not. To transform productivity so as to achieve the growth that will improve living standards and fund decent public services, far more needs to be done on education and skills, NHS waiting lists, infrastructure, availability of capital, tax reform and rejecting the lobbying of vested interests.
The legacy that this Chancellor and his Conservative predecessors will leave is dire. We need a Labour Government to grapple with it. For the next Government and for our country, the road ahead will be arduous.
One of the benefits of getting on a bit is that you have at least seen a lot in life. Experiencing what the big dipper of life can sling at you can be excoriating, but it can also be instructive and enriching. This brings me to context. When I read some of the commentary on the Autumn Statement and listen to predictably partisan criticism from opposition politicians, there is one gaping void: context. When the global financial crash happened in 2008 and a UK bank had to be bailed out, there were consequences. In 2010, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition had to deal with the worst recession since the Second World War. Remember the notorious note from the outgoing treasury Minister—there is no money left—something to which the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, did not refer in his analysis. And when there is a pandemic, apart from the human cost, for the economy it is the equivalent of another war. The economic cost is high, and thanks to the decisions Rishi Sunak made as Chancellor there was a functioning economy when we came out of Covid. But the measures to ensure that was the case have consequences.
This has all been compounded by the illegal invasion by Russia of Ukraine, which created inflation and a massive hike in energy charges. The Government rightly stepped in to help households, to the tune of nearly £40 billion, but there are consequences. Then there is driving down inflation: absolutely the right thing to do. Some people may never have known inflation running at 25%, as it did under Labour in the mid-1970s; I shall never forget it. It is the most pernicious impoverisher of people’s incomes. So, since 2010 we have had cumulative, not isolated, challenges and all of that is context. A lot of the commentary about the Autumn Statement looks at it in a bubble—there have been echoes of that today —as though it is some semi-detached lacuna with context miraculously airbrushed out. For me, the Autumn Statement was a reassuring manifestation of my conservatism: rooted in pragmatism, demonstrating compassion and in short, doing what you can with what you have got.
The Autumn Statement was also part of an established and carefully calibrated approach to the economy by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor. It was back in January this year that the Prime Minister set out his three economic priorities: halve inflation, grow the economy and reduce debt. We have made progress on all three of these. So, what the Prime Minister and the Chancellor had already created to give us a meaningful “What we’ve got” was the springboard for the next step of doing what we can, which, in reality, has translated much more excitingly into “Look at what we can do!” I find this invigorating, and I could not disagree more with the noble Lord, Lord Howarth.
So, we have a serious approach to keeping inflation falling, a consistent resolve to reduce debt, and a coherent and credible approach to economic growth, building on positive progress through a laser focus on higher productivity. One hundred and ten growth measures in the Autumn Statement, boosting business investment by £20 billion a year—that is what I wanted to hear; but then rightly recognising how searing the cost of living has been, particularly for those most vulnerable and on the lowest incomes. They will benefit from our approach to universal credit and other benefits, 1.6 million households will be helped with rent, and we have honoured the triple lock for pensioners in full. For this Conservative, the Autumn Statement has delivered not just for the moment, but for the future and for the country. It is part of a journey.
Interestingly, the political challenge this poses to the Opposition is already clear. The shadow Chancellor can try to dissect the Autumn Statement in the abstract, but that approach is not credible or rooted in reality. When she embraces the reality, she is confronted by three demons. Demon 1 is a persistent Labour record of economic mismanagement whenever it has been in government. Demon 2 is that the shadow Chancellor says she will do it differently and control inflation, but with no mention of how. Instead, she is going to increase borrowing by £28 billion a year. That is bad news for the economy, flinging petrol on inflation. We need neither and the public will work that out.
Demon 3 really has got pointy ears and big horns, but she has to agree that the Conservatives are taking the correct decisions, so she cannot disagree with much in the Autumn Statement. This poses a lethal question for the shadow Chancellor: what is the point of Labour? This is a question that others may have asked in the past, but I expect more voters to be asking it in the future.
In conclusion, I know the point of being a Conservative. I shall fight the next election as a Conservative and, based on the Autumn Statement, I look forward to winning that election as a Conservative.
The uprating of local housing allowance back to the 30th percentile is also something I welcome wholeheartedly. Freezing this figure during a period when private sector rents have risen rapidly busts any myth that holding LHA down would help keep private rents affordable. Instead, we have seen rent levels become one of the principal drivers of homelessness, now including homelessness among people who are in steady employment, especially in major cities such as my own. In inner Manchester, these new rates will provide an additional £41 per week or over £2,000 per year. This uprating will go some way to addressing the worst of the problem.
However, given that the national insurance reductions will take immediate effect, I fail to see why this is being delayed beyond the coming winter months, when homelessness wreaks its greatest toll on the health and lives of our fellow citizens. I would welcome a commitment, ideally from both Front-Benchers today, to not letting this level fall back below 30% in future years.
Taken together, these changes are a welcome step in the right direction. However, the parish of St Barnabas in Oldham, which serves one of the poorest communities in Greater Manchester, now finds itself operating a free laundry service for local people—people who cannot afford a washing machine or dryer, and for whom commercial laundrettes necessitate an expensive and difficult journey. We all know what happens when you try to dry clothes in a cold house: you get the kind of damp that we have seen wreak such havoc on people’s health. I applaud that parish’s initiative, but I deplore the need for it and I do not see measures in this Statement that are sufficient to render it no longer necessary.
However, there are several areas where I feel opportunities have been missed. As time is brief and other noble Lords have, and no doubt will, refer to many of them, I will focus on one in which I have a particular interest. From my work as co-chair of the National Police Ethics Committee, as set out in the Register of Lords’ Interests, I am deeply concerned as to how much police time is wasted by officers sitting in hospital A&E departments waiting to hand over people with mental health issues to the medical professionals who can properly assess their needs and then offer treatment. One of my right reverend friends on these Benches recently observed four officers spending six hours on such duties each. This was time that could and should have been spent preventing and detecting crime.
I applaud the Right Care, Right Person initiative, which seeks to divert people with health needs from inappropriate and wasteful periods of engagement with police. However, timely handovers will not be achieved without a more significant increase in funds for mental health in our hospitals and communities. We need an increase beyond what is in the Statement, at least commensurate with the dramatic growth in levels of need we witnessed through the pandemic years and beyond. We have a mental health crisis. I would be grateful if the Minister could give this House a commitment in principle for funding in mental health care, even if it is not possible to make money available today.
Finally—and I depart here from the from the noble Baroness who spoke before me—I suspect that many of us here feel that this Autumn Statement reflects a tiredness and a lack of ambition. It may speak of
“long-term decisions for a brighter future”,
but the reality feels somewhat different. Early in my years as a parish priest, I learned that one of the saddest signs of human decline and the approach of life’s end is a narrowing of horizons, physically and metaphorically, until they barely reach beyond the bedroom walls. I hope that, when we next hold an Autumn Statement debate, whichever party is in power after the forthcoming general election, it will feel able to bring us a bold and long-term vision for Britain’s future—not, as we have before us today, a whispered croak from a governmental deathbed.