Autumn Statement Resolutions

Darren Jones Excerpts

Monday 27th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Darren Jones (Bristol North West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to close this debate, and the debate on the autumn statement as a whole, on behalf of the Opposition. I pay particular tribute to my hon. Friend the new Member for Tamworth (Sarah Edwards) for her excellent maiden speech and welcome her to the House, and to the shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), for her comprehensive and damning opening on the Government’s record.

I also pay a particular tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) and express my condolences for the loss of his constituent. It is a tragedy that he did not see justice from the Post Office Horizon scandal before he died, but I know that he and his family will be proud of the work that my right hon. Friend has done over many, many years to bring justice to those who have been affected.

More broadly, we have heard a range of excellent speeches, including from my hon. Friends the Members for Halton (Derek Twigg), for West Ham (Ms Brown), for Bootle (Peter Dowd), for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma), for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) and for Blaydon (Liz Twist), to name just a few who set out from their constituencies how, even though the Conservatives tell us things are doing alright, the lived reality for families across the country is anything but. We also heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) about the amount of money the Government have wasted over many, many years, and what that could do to support people in constituencies across the country, including Blaydon, Lewisham East, Newport West, Liverpool, West Derby, Cynon Valley, Coventry South, and Rutherglen and Hamilton West. Lastly, we heard from my hon. Friends the Members for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald), for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe), for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) and for Selby and Ainsty (Keir Mather) about 13 years of Conservative failure on the economy and the consequences for their constituents.

Over the course of the past few days of the debate—and noting, if I may say so, how few Conservative Members contributed to the debate today to defend the Government’s record—it has been clear that we on the Labour Benches have the ideas and the energy to turn the economy around, while on the Conservative Benches, after 13 years of Conservative failure on the economy, it seems the Tory bandwagon has run out of fuel, leaving its Back Benchers arguing on the side of the road about who should be given the keys next while the real world moves on, leaving our country and the British people behind.

Let me now turn to the autumn statement itself. Well, what can I say, Madam Deputy Speaker? A fiction, a fantasy, a fallacy, an all-round F grade for an autumn statement that failed to deliver the change that our country needs. Even the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies has pointed out, with some surprise, that

“a lot of these numbers… are sort of made up.”

But it is worse than that, because the Conservatives want the public to believe in their financial folklore. When he announced his autumn statement last week, the Chancellor said:

“we are sticking to a plan that is working.”—[Official Report, 22 November 2023; Vol. 741, c. 337.]

The plan is working? Really? We all know that, irrespective of which side of the House we sit on, if we asked our constituents, “What in this country is working right now?”, they would say “Absolutely nothing at all.” How strange, therefore, that this Conservative Government, who appear to be so lacking in vision for our country, can be so good at playing make-believe.

The Conservatives keep telling us that we have never had it so good—that everything is fine—but here in the real world, people have real problems: unaffordable food bills, unaffordable mortgage bills, unaffordable energy bills. Many Conservative Members seem to think those are not problems for working people across the country, but, remarkably, this is the first Parliament on record—the first Conservative Parliament—in which, by the end of the Conservatives’ time in office, people and their living standards will have fallen, not improved. Those are the hard realities that people are facing.

We know why people are facing these financial pressures, and why living standards in the UK are falling. Irrespective of what we are told by Conservative Ministers, economic growth has been downgraded, not upgraded. The tax burden weighs heavier than ever, not lighter, and high inflation is lingering, not fleeting. On every measure on the dashboard of the UK economy, the red lights are flashing. The Conservatives would have us believe that tax is down when it is up, that the cost of living crisis has ended when energy bills are going up once again, and that this autumn statement will somehow stimulate economic growth when even the Governor of the Bank of England has said of growth that

“there’s no doubt it’s lower than it has been in much of my working life.”

The Tories want to spin a tale that the latest Conservative Prime Minister is the hero of the story, a real-life Robin Hood bringing tax cuts to help working people, but there are a few serious holes in that story. First, the Prime Minister is not new to the scene, but has played a prominent role in this Conservative Government for many years—a Conservative Government who have introduced 25 tax rises in this Parliament alone, and a further 12 Tory stealth taxes just in the autumn statement. Secondly, it is this Conservative Government who decided to put income tax and national insurance thresholds on ice, which means that millions of people are being dragged into paying more tax. Thirdly, as a consequence, the tax cuts are not cuts in real terms at all. The Conservatives’ 25 tax rises have seen working people hand over an extra 10p in every pound they earn. So while I welcome the last week’s announcement of a 2p cut in national insurance, I do so with a very slow clap.

Everyone at home knows that the Conservatives may be giving out a few hundred quid in the autumn statement with one hand, but they have already taken thousands of pounds more from us, each and every year, with the other. In real terms, low and middle-income earners will still be worse off than they were before the Conservatives came to power, and that is a shameful record of failure. The Prime Minister is not Robin Hood; rather he is the Sheriff of Nottingham, because never have we paid so much in taxes and had so little in return. People at home will rightly be asking, “What on earth am I paying for? I cannot get an appointment with the GP, and I cannot find a dentist. Why is my pay not keeping up with the cost of living? Why is my rent”—or mortgage—“so much more expensive than it was before the Conservatives crashed the economy, and why will my energy bills, I am told, start to go up again?”

The Chancellor may have announced 101 policies for growth, but after 13 years of Conservative failure it is just too little, too late. That is why we in the Labour Party are focused on economic growth. Only by getting the economy back on track will we make the British people better off again. While it is obvious that Labour is the party of good work for working people, we are now the party of business too—working in partnership to deliver the investment that the country needs, co-investing alongside business to deliver a more secure, cheaper energy system, and unblocking the bottlenecks that prevent businesses from creating the good jobs that people want in the industries of the future.

The Prime Minister is hosting his global investment summit today, but we hear from investors and businesses week in, week out that it is all too late. Even IFM Investors, the Australian infrastructure investor which has pledged investment today, has said that

“government dysfunction and inefficient planning processes”

have meant that there are not many “attractive opportunities” left in the UK. The message could not be clearer.

The UK is at risk of relegation, and change is required. That is why my Friend the shadow Chancellor and I launched the British Infrastructure Council last week, and it is why my review on how we deliver major projects and infrastructure better in this country will set out how a Labour Government will get Britain building again. Alongside that laser focus on economic growth, built on the Labour party’s bedrock of fiscal responsibility —[Interruption.] There is chuntering from the Conservative Benches, but people at home will remember one year ago when the Government crashed the economy and interest rates and mortgage rates went through the roof, and those people are still suffering with the cost of living crisis today. Let people at home look at Ministers on the Government Benches laughing when those people cannot afford to pay their bills. Let them look at Conservative Members and decide whether they want even more after 13 years of Conservative failure or whether, quite frankly, it is time for change.

Public services are one of those things that need to change. My work in what I hope will be a future Labour Government will also be focused on reforming our public services, which have been left on their knees after 13 years of the Conservatives. In his autumn statement, the Chancellor has shown that he would rather just throw what money he has left at a problem than roll up his sleeves. With the interest on our national debt costing the British public more than £112 billion this year alone, he clearly has a different idea to me of what it means to be fiscally responsible with our money. Last week, the Chancellor demanded that public services should be 0.5 % more productive each year for the next 10 years, but he did not say how.

Instead, I stand here with my colleagues in the Labour party ready to modernise our public services. If we win the next election, we will improve outcomes for people who rely on those public services, we will improve the quality of work for our public servants and we will get the public sector budget back under control, because the British people deserve better. In contrast, the Conservatives seem happy to ignore the waste and inefficiencies of their spending over these past 13 years. Why? Because the hard work of reforming our public services and our economy requires strong and accountable leadership, not fleeting changes between 13 Ministers in one Department, five Prime Ministers and so many more. This Conservative Government are not strong and accountable for delivering our public services. They are weak, weak, weak. The only answer to fixing the last 13 years of this Conservative Government is to close the book on their failure, to say goodbye to those last 13 years and to have a Labour Government who will unleash a decade of national renewal, so I ask the latest Conservative Prime Minister to do this country a favour and call an election.