Conduct of the Chancellor of the Exchequer

David Pinto-Duschinsky Excerpts

Wednesday 10th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[David Pinto-Duschinsky (Hendon) (Lab)]

I want to help out the right hon. Gentleman, because he seems a bit confused. On his party’s watch, the debt service exceeded £100 billion. When it took over, the debt service was only £30 billion, so his party tripled it. Will he apologise for mortgaging our children’s future as a result of the Conservative party’s inability to manage the public finances?

[Sir Mel Stride]

May I give the hon. Member a basic lesson in economics? In 2010, when my party came into office, we inherited a deficit at over 10% of GDP—as any economist will say, that is the amount of money being added to the debt every single year. It was over 10% on the watch of the Labour party, and that is the story of increased debt.

The debt pile as a percentage of GDP was coming down just before covid. Along with just about everybody else in the political firmament at the time of covid, the Labour party urged us to spend ever more to support the economy and to support jobs. That is precisely what we did, and of course that came with a fiscal cost.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Mel Stride]

I thank the right hon. Member for that observation. I have been cautioned by the Chair as to the language—“misleading”—that I use, but it was clearly misleading for the Chancellor to come to the House and say that she would not be putting up taxes and that this was a one-off, as she used the expression “wipe the slate clean”, and yet be back for £26 billion more only a matter of months later.

The Chancellor also said that she would control welfare spending. Well, how did that go? The first thing that Labour did was to scrap the reforms that we had brought in—in fact, from when I was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions—that the OBR had scored as 450,000 fewer people going on to long-term sickness and disability benefits with a multibillion pound—

[David Pinto-Duschinsky]

Will the right hon. Member give way?

[Sir Mel Stride]

I think I have a jack-in-the-box over there. A jack-in-the-box is great to observe, isn’t it? I am not sure that is the case with the hon. Gentleman, but I might take what is probably the fourth intervention from him momentarily.

The Government scrapped our plans, with the result that 450,000 people who would not have gone on to those benefits are now heading exactly in that direction. They U-turned, of course, on the botched attempt to bring in their own reforms because perhaps some Labour Members sitting here this evening refused to back them. That cost about £5 billion.

We have seen that the terms of reference for the Timms review, which is looking at reform of personal independence payments, make it explicitly clear that there will be no attempt to manage down any of the forecast numbers for that benefit within the OBR’s forecast. Labour has given up on welfare reform.

[David Pinto-Duschinsky]

Will the right hon. Member give way?

[Sir Mel Stride]

Momentarily—I assure the hon. Gentleman that I will come to him.

What Labour has done in the meantime with this Budget is to take entirely the wrong decision, which is to tax all those hard-working people to the tune of £7 billion—a high proportion of that to transfer straight across to those who are on benefits, including scrapping the two-child cap. Those are the wrong priorities. They are about the socialist obsession with redistribution, and nothing to do with driving the incentives in the economy that grow it and make everybody better off.