Budget Resolutions

Chris Vince Excerpts

Monday 1st December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Stepney) (Lab)]

This Labour Government are rebuilding our economy, rebuilding our public services and addressing the cost of living pressures that our constituents face. This Budget will make a huge difference to my constituents’ lives, thanks to the cuts to energy bills, the freeze on rail fares, increases in the living wage and action to tackle child poverty. Inflation is coming down, and forecast interest rates are also coming down. Growth is forecast to rise this year, and business investment is forecast to rise over the course of this Parliament.

We inherited a dire situation, with public services on their knees, chronic under-investment and a fiscal black hole. For 14 years, Tory Governments presided over austerity, stagnant wages, the chaos of leaving the European Union, and the Liz Truss mini-Budget fiasco that sent markets into a panic, mortgage rates soaring, and inflation rates to over 11%. The cost of leaving the EU is now estimated to be far more than previous estimates: a recent report by Stanford University found that Brexit is reducing the UK’s GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. That report also found that investment has reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment has reduced by 3% to 4%, and productivity has also reduced by 3% to 4%.

[Chris Vince (Harlow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way at such an early stage in her excellent speech. She has talked about the impact of austerity on the country’s finances; I would add that austerity has had a huge impact on productivity, particularly in my constituency, where we have seen 13-hour waits in A&E and year-long waits for appointments. Does my hon. Friend agree that that means people cannot go back to work, which affects their productivity?

[Rushanara Ali]

I fully agree with my hon. Friend. That is why it is vital that we rebuild our public services and invest in our national health service, to ensure people are able to contribute to our economy.

We also inherited a mountain of debt, with the previous Conservative Government having borrowed £1.5 trillion between 2010 and 2024. The fact is that austerity, Brexit, covid and Tory economic mismanagement have left our economy in peril, and our constituents are suffering the consequences in the form of rising prices and flatlining wages. For the poorest and most disadvantaged, the cost of living crisis has been a daily struggle for years. The Trussell Trust distributed approximately 60,000 food parcels in the 2010-11 financial year. By 2024-25, the number had risen to 2.89 million. This is the poisoned inheritance that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor is tackling, so of course she had to make tough choices with the hand that she had been dealt.

The decisions made in this Labour Government’s second Budget to lift 450,000 children out of poverty, help families with the cost of living and enable record investment to be made in our NHS will help a great many children. In my constituency, the scrapping of the two-child cap will lift more than 6,000 children out of poverty.