Budget Resolutions

Alison Taylor Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Alison Taylor (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (Lab)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity to contribute to this important debate.

Before the people of Paisley and Renfrewshire North gave me the distinct honour of asking me to represent them, I had a substantial career in business. After qualifying as a chartered surveyor, I joined a practice in Glasgow. After a decade, I was given the opportunity to become the sole proprietor of that limited company, and I grew that business, doubling its staff and tripling its turnover. If I were starting out now, I would be grateful to this Labour Government for five interest rate cuts, reducing inflation, and ruling out another wasteful independence referendum in Scotland. I empathise with entrepreneurs who are working hard to build something and employ people, and who are willing to take the risk to build a business.

I am not the first Member, and surely will not be the last, to remind this House of the words of the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes:

“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society”.

When I owned my small business in Scotland, that business benefited from the actions of Government, which were paid for through taxation. Taxes are not simply a cost to business; they provide the very foundation on which businesses can succeed. I hear Conservative Members complaining endlessly about the cost of welfare, but let us be clear that almost every penny of every extra payment to the least well-off—almost every penny of any increase to the minimum wage—is a penny spent in our local communities. It will be spent on sustaining a household, putting food on the table or buying clothes for the kids. Almost every penny of extra spending will go through the cash registers of a local business, helping to sustain local jobs and supporting those local businesses; not one penny of it will go directly to an offshore tax shelter.

This Budget has been a Labour Budget, but it has also been a Budget for growth. I look forward with optimism and confidence for the future, and I look forward to what more can be achieved in Budgets to come.