Autumn Budget 2025

Lord Hamilton of Epsom Excerpts

Thursday 4th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours. He is very courageous in the way that he still contributes to the proceedings of this House, albeit over the internet.

You do not have to be a rocket scientist to have been able to tell way before the last election that Labour was going to win it. That seems to have been a pretty well-established fact long before the general election was held, although we did not know that the majority was going to be as big as it was. We all knew that Labour was going to win, so why did it not have a more coherent policy vis-à-vis the economy of this country?

We are talking now as though the unaffordability of the welfare state is something new. It has been there for a very long time, and Labour should have known that for ages and produced ideas for how to tackle it. When it was looking around for policies to follow, surely it could have done a lot worse than many of those of the Blair Government. They were re-elected more than once as a Labour Government and can be put down as one of the successful Labour Governments in this country in recent history. Why did Labour not look at what the Blair Government did and think, “Should we be emulating that as way forward in running the economy?”

The Government have put an enormous premium on the whole matter of growth, and that is absolutely right. But the problem with infrastructure growth is that it takes a very long time to come through. Orders get disputed the whole time. There is a dispute about a major nuclear power station, I think in Essex, because there is bird sanctuary next door, and it says that a number of rare birds will be wiped out if the power station is built. It is the first time I have heard of birds being affected by building power stations; you very much feel that any excuse is better than none to try to stop the progress of building this power station. The Prime Minister himself pointed out that £100 million was spent on a bat tunnel on HS2. Going by reports in the newspapers, none of the bats has gone into the tunnel but their number has increased in the meantime. It seems that we are getting slightly carried away by all these environmental concerns which slow everything down.

The answer is to look to the private sector. Before the election, it was very keen to expand and confidence was growing. As my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe pointed out, there was a lot of Budget speculation which meant that a lot of people who might have taken the decision to expand their business said, “There’s so much uncertainty around, I’ll sit on my hands and wait to see what the Budget produces”. To their alarm, the first Budget produced a whole mass of taxes that were damaging to small businesses, so they not only sat on their hands for that period but continued to do so and did not expand. That is why the economy is rapidly slowing down and unemployment is rising.

There was no question of the Blair Government ever taking this view towards the private sector. Indeed, they kept most of Thatcher’s reforms in place; they did not drive away the non-doms and rich people. The noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, who was a big chief in the Blair Government, went around saying that he was very comfortable with the filthy rich. It is extraordinary that no lessons have been learned from the Blair Government, and the result is that I do not think that this Government’s mismanagement of the economy will survive the next election.