Autumn Budget 2025

Lord Mohammed of Tinsley Excerpts

Thursday 4th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)]

My Lords, I start by congratulating the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth on his excellent speech. I look forward to working alongside him on some of the social issues he raised. As we consider the Government’s Budget, I want to focus on education, an area that should form the backbone of our nation’s future prosperity, yet one that the Budget neglects. Let us begin with SEND provision.

Local authorities across the country will breathe a sigh of relief, albeit temporary, on hearing that from 2028-29, the full cost of SEND provision will be absorbed within central government budgets. The Liberal Democrats have long called for a national body for SEND, precisely to end the postcode lottery that forces parents to fight endlessly for support that should be guaranteed. What we see before us is not a plan; it is just an announcement without substance, clarity or the financial underpinning needed to make it real. The Government have identified no offsetting savings—none whatever—to cover the estimated £6 billion this shift will require. Will the Minister comment on this when he responds? Meanwhile, local authorities, as we heard earlier, are racking up an accumulated £14 billion in SEND-related deficits by 2029. Those deficits do not disappear just because Government have centralised SEND in Whitehall.

Turning to student finance, the Budget includes yet another stealth tax, the freezing of repayment and interest thresholds for plan 2 student loans from 2027. Graduates, many earning modest wages in an increasingly uncertain job market, will now be asked to pay more simply for having pursued a university education. This is not reform, it is a quiet raid on the incomes of young people who are already facing unaffordable rents, rising living costs and shrinking opportunities.

Then we come to the education budget itself. By 2028-29, it will fall by 0.1% in real terms. Schools are already in crisis. They are expected to fund breakfast clubs, free school meals and teacher pay awards—not with new investment but by carving out even thinner slices from their already overstretched budgets. To put that into perspective, an 0.1% cut amounts to a shortfall of around £70 million in real terms. That money simply vanishes before it reaches the classrooms. This is intolerable.

Where would the Liberal Democrats get the additional investment needed to fund the education sector properly? We would raise extra funds by implementing a time-limited tax on the big banks, levied on the massive windfalls that they are able to make only thanks to a technical glitch in the financial system. These windfall profits are due to inflation interest rates shooting up. Our measures would raise around £7 billion a year. We also know that increasing taxes is not a solution to a stagnant economy, which is why the Liberal Democrats have consistently called for a new UK-EU customs union raising over £25 billion a year.

As we heard earlier, new research by the US National Bureau of Economic Research has revealed that the previous Government’s Brexit deal is costing British taxpayers £90 billion each year in lost revenue. It is time for the Government to resolve this. Under our plans, we would increase core funding for schools and colleges above inflation year on year. Teachers’ pay and free school meals would be funded properly—and not at the expense of SEND pupils’ learning. SEND provision would be managed fairly and consistently through the national body, eliminating the postcode lottery and ending the chronic underfunding. Maintenance grants for further education and higher education would be expanded without saddling universities with damaging levies.

Regional Growth

Lord Mohammed of Tinsley Excerpts

Thursday 5th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I very much agree with the noble Lord in what he says about bringing people in. We have far too many people inactive in our labour market. I think we are the only country in the G7 where inactivity rates have not returned to where they were prior to the pandemic, for example. At a time when, as the noble Baroness, Lady Pigeon, mentioned, we need the workforce there to build this infrastructure, there are far too many people who are currently inactive, and it is a huge waste of potential. We have started, with the welfare reforms that we have set out, to get more people back into the labour market. There will be more detail in the spending review next week, or perhaps following the spending review, on the settlement that the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions will be receiving to ensure that we get more of those people who are not in education or training back into the workforce.

[Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)]

My Lords, like my noble friend Lady Pidgeon I support the announcement from the Government. I also support her call for the reinstatement of the £2 bus fare cap.

I listened with interest to the Minister’s comment about connectivity in city regions. I want to press him regarding South Yorkshire. I welcome the tram renewal. However, in addition to tram renewals, did the ask from the regional mayor include tram extensions? The Supertram system in Sheffield has been in place since the early 1990s, albeit that a small extension from Meadowhall in Sheffield to Rotherham was done during the coalition years. Was a tram extension asked for?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his support for what we have set out and for connectivity in general. We announced £1.5 billion for South Yorkshire, to support the reopening of Doncaster Airport and to renew the existing and now publicly controlled Supertram network with track replacements, overhead line maintenance, rolling stock renewal and a full fleet of new vehicles by 2032, linking jobs and homes in Sheffield and Rotherham. It was also to reform South Yorkshire’s buses—the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, is keen on buses—with franchise buses operating in Sheffield, Doncaster and Rotherham by 2027 and across South Yorkshire by 2029.