Budget Resolutions
Adnan Hussain Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Mr Adnan Hussain (Blackburn) (Ind)
Over 45% of children in Blackburn live in relative poverty. I congratulate the hon. Member on taking a principled stance. He has been proven right, so I thank him on behalf of the children of Blackburn.
Richard Burgon
I thank the hon. Member for his kind words. It is important that we all see our time in Parliament as being part of a crusade against child poverty and to make child poverty history, because no child is responsible for their own poverty. It sickens me to hear some of the talk from the Opposition on this.
Budgets are always followed by days of detailed coverage, but the simple truth is that the Budget and the Government’s whole record will be judged on whether living standards rise. Living standards have been stagnant for well over a decade, since the bankers brought the economy to its knees. Pay has been flat while the price of every essential has increased, and millions struggle with skyrocketing rent, energy and food costs. No wonder the cost of living crisis remains the No. 1 concern for people in the polls.
There are more welcome moves in the Budget to address that—the £150 off energy bills, the freeze on rail fares and the boost to the national minimum wage, to name just a few—but the scale of the cost of living crisis demands far bolder action. As it stands, this Parliament is on track to be the second bleakest for living standards since world war two—the worst being the previous Parliament. People are being asked to take more and more pain. That is why, before the Budget, I called for a package of emergency cost of living measures to give people the urgent relief they need. From cost of living grants to universal free school meals, there are so many ways in which we can take pressure off people who have been really struggling through no fault of their own. All that can be funded by raising tens of billions of pounds in taxation from the very wealthiest and those who are making super-profits by ripping people off, as the banks are doing.
Tens of thousands of people backed my call—such calls will continue to grow as this crisis persists—but I am afraid to say that, instead of going down the road of wealth taxes, the Government have chosen a stealth tax on ordinary people. Millions will face an income tax hike from the extension of the income tax threshold freeze, including 780,000 people who will have to pay income tax for the first time. Putting aside any debates on manifesto promises, that move will squeeze ordinary people even further at a time when they simply cannot afford it. The good news is that the extension will not kick in for another two years, so there is still time for the Government to think again and do the right thing by ditching it.
Just as I did with the two-child cap, winter fuel and disability benefit cuts, I will do everything I can to ensure that that regressive policy is overturned. There are much better alternatives. In 2010 the combined wealth of UK billionaires was £250 billion. Now it is more than £600 billion. Their combined wealth has more than doubled since 2010. How many of our constituents can say that their wages, standards of living or wealth have doubled in that time? We need to push for fairness in the taxation system. We should tax extreme wealth, not load stealth taxes on to working people in the middle of a cost of living emergency.
We all know that much of the economic weakness driving the crisis in living standards is the result of 14 years of terrible decisions by the Tories, but people expect this Government not only to sort that out but to protect them in the here and now. Not doing so will pave the way for the first far-right Government in our history. It is in this context of the cost of living crisis that the siren voices of Reform and the far right get an easier hearing. We must all avoid that. We do not want to end up with the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) —the UK’s own version of Donald Trump—as Prime Minister, so let us work together to lift living standards and stop that.
Mr Hussain
Does the hon. Member agree that, in working-class towns such as Blackburn, where years of under-investment have taken a real toll, only targeted, needs-based funding will bring down the cost of living and lift real economic growth?
Charlotte Cane
I actually think we need both. Lifting the two-child benefit cap is really important.
I was also disappointed that there was no help for farmers in the Budget. The Chancellor is maintaining the inheritance tax, which will destroy many family farms in Ely and East Cambridgeshire and across the country. The Government have abolished the fruit and veg aid scheme from this month, removing much-needed support with the capital costs of increasing productivity and accelerating innovation. The Chancellor increases farmers’ costs, the Home Office restricts their seasonal workforce and the Department for Business and Trade signs trade deals that allow unfair competition, but the Chancellor did not give even a small gesture of help to farmers in this Budget.
I visited Christmas fairs this weekend in churches that need hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of repairs. People told me of their worries about the listed places of worship grant scheme, which is currently funded only to March 2026. That grant covers the VAT costs of repairs, meaning that fundraisers only have to raise the cost of those repairs, not the additional cost of VAT. I hope the Chancellor will confirm sufficient funding for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport for that scheme to be continued and increased back to previous levels.
We know that we are struggling to provide good-quality social care. This impacts too many elderly, disabled and vulnerable people who are not getting the support they need. It also impacts kinship carers, many of whom are disgracefully hounded to repay so-called overpayments of carer’s allowance, yet this Budget does not invest in social care. I met publicans in Ely and East Cambridgeshire last week who were very disappointed that there was no cut in VAT for hospitality businesses in the Budget. As their costs go up, for staff, supplies, fuel, duty—you name it, their costs go up—they have to increase their prices, and then they have to add 20% VAT to those increases, so a meal costed at £25 will have another £5 of VAT added to it. Reducing the rate of VAT would reduce those businesses’ prices and encourage more customers.
These are all matters that people in Ely and East Cambridgeshire have asked me to raise in this debate in just the few days since the Budget. They are things that make businesses and individuals struggle with inflation and the cost of living, and the Budget has not addressed them. The Chancellor told us of the difficult choices she had to make in this Budget, but it did not tackle the main problem, which she herself has identified: our relationship with Europe. If she negotiated a new customs union with Europe, as well as a youth mobility scheme to create new opportunities for our young people, she could fill the £90 billion-a-year black hole left by the Conservatives’ catastrophic Brexit deal. People are going to have to pay higher taxes for less public services because the Chancellor and this Government will not cure that £90 billion Brexit black hole.
Warm Homes Plan
Adnan Hussain Excerpts(1 month, 3 weeks ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (Martin McCluskey)
I thank the hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Dr Chowns) for securing this debate, and for the constructive way in which she has engaged with everything that the Department has been doing since the election last year. In the seven minutes available to me, I will try to address the points she has raised, but I am more than happy to discuss them with her further afterwards.
Everything we do in life starts at home, and the state of our housing stock, as has been mentioned by many hon. Members, is a national issue. It is therefore only right that the warm homes plan should receive proper scrutiny. We invite that scrutiny. We encourage people with a range of views to make their voices heard. Today, I reaffirm our commitment to the warm homes plan, restate our ambition, and remind hon. Members of what we will deliver in the years ahead, because this is one of the most urgent challenges the Government face in our mission to improve the lives of working people.
When I was given this role 10 weeks ago, the clearest of the instructions I was given was to reduce energy bills by making millions more homes warm, safe and fit for the 21st century. That is the challenge. Our housing stock is among the oldest in Europe. Over a third of it was built before the second world war, and that has a cost: high bills, damp and mould, miserable winters, risks to health, families wasting their hard-earned money on heating leaky, poorly insulated homes, and persistent, debilitating fuel poverty. This is an obstacle that we must overcome in our mission for national renewal. It is not just an economic imperative, but a moral and social one. This is how we rebuild people’s trust that the Government still have the power to intervene and improve their lives. It is why upgrading our homes is at the heart of our clean energy mission and our national mission.
We have been working hard to get our warm homes plan right and will publish our full plan soon. It has been a priority for me since I took on this brief two months ago, and it will be published soon. We have been clear from the moment we came into government about the scale of our ambition, and we are planning to upgrade up to 5 million homes by the end of this Parliament; that is entire streets and whole neighbourhoods benefiting from solar panels, heat pumps, home batteries and better insulation. To ensure that we deliver on that, we have matched every penny that we promised for this in opposition, investing £13.2 billion to improve homes up and down the country, slashing both bills and emissions—and, importantly, reducing fuel poverty.
To achieve our goals, people need to have full confidence in the system. We are aware of the recent National Audit Office report into non-compliance in two Government schemes delivering solid wall insulation, as many hon. Members have mentioned. Let me be clear: we will never let that happen again. More than that, we are taking this chance to completely overhaul the consumer protection landscape for retrofit measures so that work is done right the first time, guaranteeing customers the level of service that they deserve and swift redress on the occasions when those levels are not met. The warm homes plan will work only if we take people with us and deliver change at pace and at scale to the highest standards.
We are not waiting for the warm homes plan to start this work. We have already kick-started delivery, making it cheaper and easier for families to get heat pumps installed, almost doubling the funding for the boiler upgrade scheme to £295 million for this financial year, with a commitment to increase that funding year on year up to 2030, and removing the 1-metre rule for air source heat pumps in England, giving people more flexibility to install them without applying for planning permission. Today I was pleased to say that we have published our response to the boiler upgrade scheme consultation, extending the eligibility for that scheme. We have also published a consultation on alternative heating solutions today, including—my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Jayne Kirkham) will be interested in this—on renewable liquid heating fuels, which I know is of interest to many Members in rural constituencies.
Martin McCluskey
I am going to make progress because we are so tight on time.
Crucially, it is not just homeowners who will benefit from our plan. Back in March, we allocated around £1.8 billion to local authorities and social housing providers to deliver home upgrades through the warm homes local grant and warm homes social housing fund, which will support around 200 projects over the next three years, with work already under way. To achieve our goals, we are also backing improved standards in the private and social rented sector, as the hon. Member for North Herefordshire mentioned. We know that far too many tenants are faced with the daily reality of living in damp, draughty homes that they cannot afford to heat, which is why we have set out proposals to increase minimum energy efficiency standards in the private rented sector in England and Wales to an EPC rating of C or equivalent by 2030 and to introduce a minimum energy efficiency standard in the social rented sector. Combined, these measures will lift hundreds of thousands of households out of fuel poverty, giving renters the warmer homes and cheaper bills that they deserve.
Our plan is not just about retrofitting the older homes, but building the homes of the future. We have also set the target of building 1.5 million new future-proofed homes by the end of the decade, and our future homes standard will ensure that for the residents of those new homes, heat pumps, heat networks and solar panels on rooftops will become the norm, saving the typical household £500 on their bills each year.
While we deliver our plan, we are giving families the short-term support they need this winter. Earlier this year, we expanded the £150 warm home discount to every household where the bill payer is on means-tested benefits, meaning that this winter around 6 million families —one in five across Britain—will get this crucial benefit.
As for the long term, it is really very simple: home-grown clean power is the way through. It means that we can control our energy prices—the end of rollercoaster energy bills, price spikes, and an uncertain future decided by dictators and upheavals beyond our borders. By upgrading homes with energy efficient technologies, we can ensure that people feel the direct benefits of that clean, secure and affordable energy. That is how we will bring clean power home.
The Labour Government have a plan: to make millions more homes fit for the 21st century, to finally and properly tackle fuel poverty, and to protect working people and ensure that they will not have to worry about every degree turned up on the thermostat, every light switched on and every penny spent. We welcome constructive views on our approach, but we will not entertain those who would abandon our mission to decarbonise our homes and buildings or the wider transformative architecture of clean power and, with that, abandon a hopeful, forward-thinking vision for this country. The British people want change and that is what we have set out to deliver with the warm homes plan.
Question put and agreed to.