16:45 - The House divided: - Ayes: 101 / Noes: 316 - Question accordingly negatived.
Sir Mel Stride
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. If we borrow more money, we pay more for that borrowing. Of course, that has fed through to inflation. We know that inflation this year, according to the International Monetary Fund, will be the highest in the G7. The IMF also says it will be the highest in the G7 next year. The consequence of that in monetary policy is interest rates being higher for longer. Of course, if we have a mountain of debt and add to it ruinously, the cost of servicing that debt goes through the roof. It now stands at about £100 billion a year, rising to £130 billion at the end of the scorecard. That is more than twice what we spend on defence every year.
Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)
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.
Sir Mel Stride
My right hon. Friend makes an extremely incisive and correct point. If a Government spend huge amounts of money, there is an opportunity cost to that and it comes through in various forms, including, as he rightly says, raising the cost of capital and crowding out labour, skills and so on. It is a fine and important balance to get right and this Government, palpably, have got it wrong.
The Chief Secretary to the Treasury (James Murray)
I thank the shadow Chancellor for opening today’s debate. It is two weeks until Budget day, and it is just over two weeks since the last motion tabled by the official Opposition that sought to debate the content of the Budget before it is announced. We know that Conservative shadow Ministers want the British people to forget the mess they left from their time in office, but surely shadow Ministers cannot have forgotten how the Budget process works. If indeed that is the case, I am sure shadow Treasury Ministers will recall that we would not reveal any details of the Budget two weeks before the Budget, and that any decisions on the Budget will be revealed by the Chancellor on Budget day.
Jerome Mayhew
I have a simple question for the Minister: does he think that manifesto promises are important?
James Murray
As a Treasury Minister, what I am very used to in the run-up to a Budget is members of the media and Opposition Members finding more and more convoluted ways of trying to work out what is going to happen in the Budget. My answer would be the same at every turn: they simply have to wait until 26 November to see what the Chancellor announces in her Budget. The official Opposition are entirely entitled to put forward what they say they would do differently.
Kit Malthouse
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?
James Murray
Despite the right hon. Gentleman’s invitation, I am not going to engage in speculation ahead of the Budget. I am not going to feed the speculation that he is trying to wind up. I understand that the Budget is an important day in the parliamentary calendar, and it is an important day for the Government. Rightly, Conservative Members and Members of all parties want to know what is in the Budget, but they simply must wait until 26 November to find out.
Kit Malthouse
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?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)
That is not a point of order; it is a matter of debate. I can calm Members’ nerves by saying that it is not many more sleeps until Budget day.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
As somebody who has been around a long time and remembers when Chancellors used to have to resign for leaking things about the Budget in advance, may I ask the Minister to explain how it has been possible for the present Chancellor to make speeches about what may or may not be in her Budget in advance with no consequences forthcoming whatsoever?
James Murray
I am very happy to remind the right hon. Gentleman and all Members that what the Chancellor set out in her speech last Tuesday were the values and principles that will guide her in taking the right decisions going into the Budget at the end of the month. The importance of protecting the NHS, bringing down the cost of living and getting debt down—those will be the guiding principles for the Chancellor going into the Budget. That is important, because it sets out to the British people the challenges we face—some of them deep scars in the economy caused by the Conservatives—as well as the values that will guide us and the Chancellor in taking those decisions on 26 November.
The official Opposition is entirely entitled to ask questions and indeed put forward what it would do differently, but the problem with this Opposition is that when it does so, it simply exposes its total lack of any credibility. Remember last year, when we took the difficult decision, referred to earlier, to raise employer national insurance to support the NHS? The Opposition claimed to oppose that tax change but have refused to say whether they would reverse it—or, indeed, whether they would cut the NHS. As the shadow Chancellor pointed out earlier, more recently, at the Conservative party conference, they said that they thought they could find some £47 billion of cuts to public spending.
Dr Ben Spencer (Runnymede and Weybridge) (Con)
The Minister just said at the Dispatch Box that national insurance contributions for employers were raised “to support the NHS”. Was that hypothecated or not?
James Murray
As I am sure the hon. Gentleman knows, the way the system works is that national insurance generally supports the NHS and pensions, but, more broadly—
James Murray
Will the hon. Gentleman let me finish? More broadly, the revenue that goes into the Treasury is not formally hypothecated. But the point is that if we are going to support public services, get the NHS back on its feet and get waiting lists down, we need to take the difficult decisions to raise the tax revenue to put into that. That was an important principle that we had to take last year in the Budget.
Dr Ellie Chowns (North Herefordshire) (Green)
The Minister talked about difficult decisions, but what about an obvious one? Two thirds of the British population are now backing wealth taxes. Is it not time for the Treasury to abandon its self-imposed fiscal straitjacket and commit to lifting children out of poverty, to investing in our public services and to future-proofing our communities by transforming the tax system so that it better serves ordinary people and so that those with the broadest shoulders pay their fair share?
James Murray
I point the hon. Lady to last year’s Budget, at which we decided to get rid of the non-dom tax status, to remove the VAT tax rate on private school fees, to increase the air passenger duty on private jets and to change the rate of capital gains tax and inheritance tax—all measures that will raise £8 billion by the end of this Parliament from taxes on assets and the wealthy. That is what a fair tax system looks like.
While our plans are a credible way to settle the public finances, get public services back on their feet and support the economic stability so vital for investment and growth, the Conservatives come up with numbers out of thin air. At least half the £47 billion of fantasy savings they mentioned come from a welfare plan that amounts to a menu with no prices: they say that the list of measures would raise £23 billion in total, but no breakdown is apparent.
We remember how, in June last year, just as the Conservatives were on their way out of Downing Street, they said that they could cut £12 billion from the welfare bill. Now they have doubled that, without any explanation whatever. Frankly, however he protests, the shadow Chancellor is not the person to be making that argument about welfare. When he was the Work and Pensions Secretary, he personally oversaw the biggest increase in benefits spending in decades.
Jerome Mayhew
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?
James Murray
I agree with one of the sentiments in the points that the hon. Gentleman made: we need to ensure that people get into work wherever they can and that the safety net is there for people who can never work or are unable to work. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is leading that work to ensure that we get young people into work rather than being on a life of benefits and written off as they were by the Conservative party in office.
As I was saying, it was frankly quite some cheek for the right hon. Member for Central Devon (Sir Mel Stride) to lecture about welfare spending, given the enormous increase in welfare spending on his watch when he was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. If the £47 billion came from cuts in public services instead of from some of these fantasy welfare cuts, what would that mean? It would mean 85,700 fewer nurses; cutting every police officer in the country twice; or cutting the entire armed forces. Funnily enough, none of that detail was mentioned in the shadow Chancellor’s speech.
When we took office, the Chancellor introduced tough new fiscal rules. Those required day-to-day spending to be paid for through tax receipts rather than borrowing, while protecting the long-term investment in our country. Now, I realise that fiscal discipline is an alien concept for some Members on the Conservative Benches.
Dr Spencer
The Minister has just talked about the Chancellor’s fiscal rules. Who was it who changed the fiscal rules?
James Murray
The hon. Gentleman said “the Chancellor’s fiscal rules”, so I suspect that it was the Chancellor who introduced those fiscal rules. He gave it away in how he phrased the question.
The point is that when the Chancellor was setting out her economic strategy at the Budget last year, it was on the basis of the fiscal rules: day-to-day spending to be paid for through tax receipts rather than borrowing and debt to be falling as a proportion of GDP, to enable investment in the long-term future of the country. I see that the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer) is struggling to get his head around why that sense of fiscal reality and credibility is important, but we on the Government side believe that having those fiscal rules is crucial to that fiscal stability, to ensuring that we have that responsible attitude in government and to providing the stability for businesses to invest and grow the economy.
Alex Ballinger
My constituents, of course, remember Liz Truss’s devastating mini-Budget, when those rules were not followed. That had a massive impact on not just our public services but the mortgages and cost of living that my constituents are still feeling today. Does my right hon. Friend agree that going back to that irresponsible financial management would be a disaster for this country?
James Murray
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to point out the damage that recklessness in public office can cause families right across the country—not just for one day, but for months and years beyond that. The Conservative party is desperate for us to forget what happened when Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng were in Downing Street. But the British people will not forget, and they have been feeling the impacts for many years.
The Conservative party talks about public spending but its record on public spending is abysmal. It spent years in office with money lining the pockets of dodgy PPE providers as the bill for asylum seekers’ hotels soared. As my hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen (Alex Ballinger) just said, no debate on the Conservative record on tax and spend can be complete without mentioning the mini-Budget. Conservative Members are desperate for the British people to forget what happened three years ago and what the Conservative party foisted on the country. They are desperate to forget that their reckless unfunded tax cuts crashed our economy, damaged our international reputation and added hundreds of pounds to families’ mortgage costs. While British homeowners have been living with the consequences of the Conservatives every day, Conservative Members are all too conspicuous in their efforts to sweep their record under the rug.
True leadership is about not ducking the difficult decisions but confronting them head-on with a clear focus on priorities and values. That is what the Chancellor has promised to do in this Budget. As she set out last week, we will secure this country’s future with a Budget for growth led by this Government’s values of fairness and opportunity. We will do not what is politically expedient but what is necessary to protect families from high inflation and high interest rates; to protect and strengthen our public services, rejecting the austerity that Conservative Members seem keen to impose on our country once again; and to ensure that the economy that we leave to future generations is secure, with debt under control.
Our focus on cutting debt is crucial. We inherited a national debt of about 100% of GDP and since the spring the cost of borrowing has risen for Governments around the world. Today one in every £10 of taxpayers’ money in the UK is used to pay the interest on our national debt. That money should be going to our NHS, our schools, our police and our armed forces. Instead, it is going to our creditors. That is not what people pay taxes for.
Stuart Anderson (South Shropshire) (Con)
The Minister talks about the building up of debt. Does he understand that when Labour was last in power, debt went up from 36% of GDP to about 76% of GDP? That massive increase built the foundation of the debt that we have today.
James Murray
I am very aware of the foundation of debt that we inherited at the election last year—of around 100% of GDP. That, combined with global borrowing prices, leaves us in this position. We are determined to change that because we know that the less we have to spend on debt interest, the more we can spend on the priorities of working people, the more we can invest in our infrastructure and industry, and the more resilient we can make our public finances, building the headroom to withstand global turbulence while giving businesses the confidence to invest.
Joe Robertson (Isle of Wight East) (Con)
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?
James Murray
We are back to questions about what will be in the Budget. The answer, again, is very straightforward. The Chancellor set out the values that will guide her in taking the decisions at the Budget on 26 November. She set out the challenges that we face, being straight with the British people about that. The details will all be announced by the Chancellor on Budget day in the normal way.
We know that there is much more for us to do as a Government, but we can see the tough choices we made last year showing early signs of progress. We are set to deliver the largest primary deficit reduction in both the G7 and the G20 over the next five years. Our stewardship of the economy has helped the Bank of England cut interest rates five times, meaning lower mortgage payments and cheaper borrowing for families and businesses; real wages rose more in the first 10 months since the election than in the first 10 years of the previous Government; and the average person’s disposable income is now £800 higher in real terms than just before the election, meaning living standards have begun to rise. We have increased public capital investment by £120 billion over the Parliament and supported the NHS to achieve a reduction in the total elective waiting list of more than 206,000 since July 2024.
Dr Luke Evans
We on the Conservative Benches have been struggling to get an answer on the question of the 50% reduction in integrated care boards, for which the expected redundancy bill is about £1 billion. Today, the Government have issued a press release that says that they have dealt with that. Yet in response to my written question on the subject, the Health Department said that it could not provide an answer because it does not know the numbers, so I have received a holding answer. How much will the redundancy payments cost, and will it come from the Health budget or the Treasury budget?
James Murray
It is for the Health Department to set out the details in response to any questions that the hon. Gentleman has tabled. The point about the merger between NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care is that it is a way of cutting costs and ensuring that that money is reinvested in frontline services. Rather than having duplicative structures within our system, we want to ensure that we are merging NHS England and the Department of Health to make those savings, which we can reinvest in patient care.
As I said, there are still many challenges ahead and we are impatient to see things improve. Globally, inflation remains high and confidence is low, deterring investment and hindering growth. As geopolitical uncertainty grows, we are also faced with a critical need to invest in our defence spending. Domestically, we must continue to cut NHS waiting lists, lower the cost of living and improve our country’s productivity. We must invest in our roads, transport, housing, infrastructure, public services, towns and cities and the businesses for which the last Government failed so completely to provide.
Conservative Members will see the Budget two weeks from today. They will have plenty of opportunity to scrutinise it and participate in a serious debate about it later this month. We will, of course, oppose today’s motion, which speculates on what the Budget might contain. The effort of rebuilding a country requires the contributions of everyone in that country. Together, we can renew the UK and build an economy that is fair and thriving. That is what this Government were elected to do and that is what the Budget in two weeks’ time will play its crucial part in achieving.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)
I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.
The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (Dan Tomlinson)
I thank all right hon. and hon. Members for their contributions today, as well as my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Treasury for his opening remarks, and the hon. Member for Grantham and Bourne (Gareth Davies) for summing up for the Opposition. He was Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury for a time under the last Government, and he will know just how busy the period two weeks before a Budget can be for a junior Minister in His Majesty’s Treasury. I imagine that when he was in my position, 14 days out from a Budget or autumn statement, with officials rushing in and out of his office with advice on various measures, and a day full of meetings trying to get the details right, there was nothing more he would have wanted in the world than be called to the House for an Opposition day debate. I thank him and the shadow Chancellor for calling this debate at such a crucial time in the Budget-setting process.
I expect some interventions during my remarks over the next 10 to 15 minutes, and I encourage Members across the House to play what I will call Treasury Minister bingo. If I am asked questions about the upcoming Budget, I intend to respond with, “The Chancellor will make all decisions on tax and spend at the Budget, and I will not comment on speculation.” We can see how many interventions we get, and how many times we get to play Treasury Minister bingo. That is just to forewarn those who, like me, perhaps enjoy a game of bingo—
Joe Robertson
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.
Dan Tomlinson
I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. The Chancellor will make all decisions on tax and spend at the Budget, and I will not be commenting on speculation. I have said that is what I will say if people continue to intervene. We are two weeks out from a Budget, and I will not be commenting on speculation from the Dispatch Box today.
Jerome Mayhew
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?
Dan Tomlinson
If the hon. Gentleman wants to ask questions about the manifesto, I am glad that he is interested in the change that this Government are bringing through their manifesto. We have invested in our NHS and introduced new taxes on non-doms. We have introduced free breakfast clubs, and invested in HMRC to reduce tax avoidance—we will come on to talk about that, after the contribution from my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Chris Vince). We have set up Great British Energy, and we are implementing the National Wealth Fund.
Several hon. Members rose—
Dan Tomlinson
Let me make a bit of progress if I may—I will happily take a further intervention in good time. It is a sorry fact, but it is true that Conservative Members squandered their time in power, just as they squandered much taxpayer money. After 14 years of failure they left people paying more for less, and enforced a policy of austerity for too long, which my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Northfield (Laurence Turner) spoke about in his contribution. That policy brought public services to their knees—something we needed to fix—and saddled us with so much debt that we now pay £1 in every £10 of public money in debt interest payments alone. I agree with the contribution from a Conservative Member who said that that is not a morally acceptable situation, but that is the situation we inherited, and one that we intend to change. Over the course of this Parliament the international comparisons bear out, and we are on track to reduce the deficit that we inherited faster than any other G7 economy. That is the stability that the Chancellor is returning to the public finances.
Laurence Turner
The Minister has just spoken about public services and touched on productivity. At the start of the debate, the shadow Chancellor talked about the importance of timely public sector pay settlements to productivity increases. Having been a union official in the aftermath of the strikes by ambulance workers, I have some insight into this issue. Ministers in the previous Government said that they wanted productivity increases, but negotiators for the Government had nothing to suggest on productivity links and they were asking the trade union for ideas.
Dan Tomlinson
I thank my hon. Friend for his comments and for his years of work and experience supporting public sector workers and our proud trade unionists.
Conservative Members have mentioned the statistics that have been published of late. There is much that we need to do to ensure that the investment that we make in the NHS comes with improvements in productivity and output. The Health Secretary was talking about that today in reference to our reforms to NHS England, and about ensuring that we are not duplicating spending in both the Department for Health and Social Care and NHS England. I thought that Conservative Members were against quangos, but it turns out that they are against that reform.
Jerome Mayhew
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?
Dan Tomlinson
In the end, in order to sort out the strikes we needed to give public sector workers a fair deal. The situation that they were left in was not fair, with their wages going up significantly less than prices over the 14 years that the Conservatives were in power. The Health Secretary has been clear about not wanting to go as far the pay settlement demanded, but the situation that we reached last year is right and proportionate, and we hope that we can continue to invest in reform of our NHS.
Several hon. Members rose—
Dan Tomlinson
Let me make a bit more progress—I am only on page 2 of a six page speech—[Interruption.] I am taking many interventions, but I will take fewer.
The previous Government saddled us with much debt, as we have talked about, with £1 in every £10 of public money going towards debt interest payments, perpetuating a stop-start cycle of public investments that left us with roads full of potholes, train lines that cannot even make it between London and the north of England, and an unpredictable business environment, with business taxation going up and down all the time. All that gave us an incredibly narrow base for regional growth, with few parts of the country forging ahead, while too many in the rest of the country fell behind.
Levelling up was a Conservative slogan, not a solution. Instead, this Labour Government are growing the economy and lifting living standards in all parts of the country, investing in infrastructure to get Britain building again, and working with local leaders and Members of Parliament to build pride in place and revitalise communities. That is the change that we are bringing. The Conservatives had the opportunity to invest in our public services, to upgrade rail, roads and connectivity, and to protect our NHS, but instead they threw money around with little regard for its value.
A key factor in our stalled productivity is that, time and again, the Conservatives had the option to choose economic responsibility, but they chose political convenience instead. The austerity that they pursued after the financial crisis, when interest rates were at record lows, was a sledgehammer to our economy, gutting public services and cutting the essential flows of investment that would have aided a faster recovery. As the hon. Member for Witney (Charlie Maynard) said, and as Liberal Democrat Members are wont to mention, they then went ahead and implemented a rushed and ill-conceived Brexit deal that brought extra costs to businesses and extra disruption to trade. When the pandemic arrived, our country was not ready. Our public services and our economy have been severely weakened.
Gregory Stafford
As I told the hon. Member yesterday, he has the second worst job in Government, which I think he is feeling today. Even if what he has just said is true—I do not agree with him—after the Budget last year, the Chancellor said that the slate was wiped clean and that no more tax rises or borrowing would be needed. What has changed between then and now?
Dan Tomlinson
I was glad to attend the hon. Member’s Westminster Hall debate last night on wine producers across the UK. I am impressed by his close reading of all the words of members of the Cabinet; I hope one day to be as diligent as him in following the utterances of the Chancellor, the Prime Minister and all Ministers.
When it comes to the inheritance that this Government and the British people are dealing with, let me say that if wage growth since the financial crisis continued at the pace that it had before, it is not that families in my constituency, in the constituency of the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) and across the country would be £1,000 or £2,000 a year better off; they would be £12,000 a year better off. Imagine the difference that that would make to the businesses and communities across our country if we had not had that productivity stagnation.
In the end, we will see at the Budget that the OBR is implementing its review of productivity. I will not pre-empt that review, but it is right and proper that we ensure our fiscal forecasts are based on accurate understandings of what has happened in the past to our productivity, because the past is a guide to the future. I hope that this Government will continue to beat the outcomes that happened under the previous Government, when productivity almost flatlined, and that is exactly what this Budget will be about.
Jerome Mayhew
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?
Dan Tomlinson
One of the things that has changed is that Conservative Members seem to have found £47 billion down the back of the sofa and are coming forward with plans that are not deliverable, just like they did when they were in government. They have done the job of a losing Opposition—we have been there in the past—whereby numbers used in opposition are not serious or credible. We all know where that ends up.
The Conservatives said recently that they would slash taxes and pay for it with £47 billion of fairyland spending cuts. For context, that is the equivalent of firing every police officer in the country. Of course, I am not saying that they will do that or that they have joined the “defund the police” brigade, but what would they do? We do not really know, because all we have is a menu without a price list.
Josh Fenton-Glynn
One unexplored area we could look at to raise some of the money we need is selling the brass neck of the Conservatives on the commodities market. Having cheered when Liz Truss delivered her mini-Budget, they now have the gall to lecture us about fiscal responsibility.
Dan Tomlinson
And the Conservatives have the gall to lecture us about managing the public finances well. They say that they want to cut civil service numbers. Between 2016 and when the Conservatives left office, there were 130,000 more civil servants. The former Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip and former Prime Minister said that he would cut civil service numbers by 91,000; they then went up. In October ’23—when the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Grantham and Bourne (Gareth Davies), was in my role—the right hon. Member for Godalming and Ash (Sir Jeremy Hunt) unveiled an immediate cap on civil service numbers and pledged to cut them by 66,000; they then went up. Between May 2022 and July 2024, the numbers went up in every single quarter. I am not sure that the public would leave the Conservatives’ restaurant at all satisfied if they bought the items on their menu, because everything they have promised does not seem to turn into reality.
I will conclude, Madam Deputy Speaker.
Dan Tomlinson
Hon. Members want more! Okay.
If this debate has taught us anything, it is simply this: not only do the Conservatives need to stay in opposition for longer, but I am sure that they will do so. So far, they have learned nothing from their time on the Government Benches. There is no humility for their mini-Budget, no plan for giving Britain a brighter future, and no grasp of the realities that the country and the world face. They also have no will to face up to reality, to show leadership or to make choices that will support our public services, businesses and citizens.
Meanwhile, this Government have given the country the fastest growth in the G7 in the first half of the year. We have raised wages and living standards, and the Bank of England has cut interest rates five times because of the economic stability we have brought, which has reduced mortgage payments and lowered the cost of borrowing. This Government have increased public investment in capital spending by over £120 billion over the course of this Parliament, building for the future—something that the Conservative party failed to do. That is the difference that a Government with British values at their heart can make. At this month’s Budget, we will put those values into practice again, with fairness and opportunity for all so that we can secure our economy, strengthen our public services and lift living standards for the British people.
Question put.