Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

Let me begin like this.

“My husband was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer and has not been able to work since. We are now reliant on the ESA he receives. There is nothing more that either of us want than for life to somehow return to normal and for him to be able to return to the job he loves. We did not choose these dreadful circumstances—the benefits system is intended to protect those in society as much as possible when things go badly wrong. Forcing people in very difficult circumstances into poverty seems an outrageous way for any government to behave.”

That is a letter from one of my constituents, and she is absolutely correct. More than 9,000 Brent residents rely on ESA to live independently and with dignity. Their income has been cut by £30 per week, and the cut in the PIP would have caused 640,000 disabled people to lose up to a further £3,500 a year by 2020. It is therefore with great relief that many of them will have watched the Government’s U-turn on the proposed £4.4 billion cut. However, disabled people in my constituency have already suffered real hardship under this Government as a result of the bedroom tax, the benefit cap, the benefits uprating policy, the scrapping of disability living allowance, and the 12-month time limit on contributory ESA.

Yesterday the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions said in his statement that the Government would not be making further cuts in to the welfare budget, but that gives the Chancellor a serious problem. He has a fiscal charter which enshrines in law that he must achieve a budgetary surplus by 2020. Last Wednesday, he believed that in order to meet that fiscal charter, he had to make £4.4 billion of cuts affecting the most vulnerable people in our society, because he wanted to cut corporation tax and capital gains tax and to raise the higher-rate income tax threshold to benefit the very richest. If he is genuinely not seeking to identify other cuts in services to offset that £4.4 billion, it is essential that we are told how he does propose to balance the books. The choice is simple: he must make further cuts in services, increase taxes, or fail to meet his own fiscal charter.

The inescapable facts of the Chancellor’s record will come back to haunt him. In 2010, he promised to balance the books by 2015. He did not. This year, he has a deficit of £72 billion. He has a debt-to-GDP ratio of 83.7%, and productivity failure means that manufacturing still lags behind its 2008 level. This is the failing Budget of a failing Chancellor who lacked the courage to come to this House and explain its collapse yesterday. That failure branded him a coward. Today he came to the House, but his failure to apologise to the most vulnerable in our society has branded him a nasty coward.