Autumn Statement Resolutions

Imran Hussain Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Imran Hussain (Bradford East) (Lab)]

It is a privilege to follow some excellent speeches, largely from Opposition Members. I wish that I could say different. Whether people agree or disagree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), I think that everybody would agree that he has considerable experience in the decades that he has been here. For him to say that this is the first time that he has seen the Government Benches so empty on the day after an autumn statement speaks volumes. It is a tragedy that we now have a Government who not only have delivered an autumn statement that will do nothing to address the real issues in our communities, but fail to turn up to defend it.

Like hon. Members across the House, on the weekends I try to be out and about in my constituency, talking to local residents about their concerns. Outside of an election period, I usually expect some friendly chat—not always, but usually—and for local issues around transport, education, policing or the environment to be discussed. Last weekend, however, conversations were largely about the autumn statement—people’s expectations, and their families’ struggles with the rising cost of living.

What was clear from those I spoke to was the sense of utter despondency and despair about their economic situation, and that of the country, even among those living in the parts of my constituency that are considered more well off, and those who identified themselves as previous Tory voters. They knew that, while their family grapple with the rising cost of living, the Government just tinkered around the edges or sat on their hands, making it clear that the autumn statement would not deliver for my constituents, make their lives easier or leave them better off than before, regardless of how hard they worked. If they watched the Chancellor deliver his autumn statement yesterday, they will have been bitterly disappointed, but they will not have been surprised. They will have been vindicated in their low expectations of the Chancellor and in their realisation that ultimately they will never be better off under a Tory Government.

After all, what was there in this autumn statement for those who have just about managed to get by over the past 13 years—those who have just about managed to make ends meet with rising energy bills, rising food costs and rising fuel prices, but who last year had their household finances pushed over the brink by the reckless budget of an ex-Prime Minister who still, bizarrely, thinks that the country wants to hear her economic ideas? The answer to that question is “Nothing”.

The four-point plan that the Chancellor announced yesterday to tackle the cost of living included uprating benefits, unfreezing local housing allowance and increasing the state pension. While those are all welcome measures, none of them are applicable to a typical family struggling with mortgage, fuel, food and energy costs, and if the Government think that the fourth measure, which means that a pint will not cost any more than it does now, is the priority for that family, that just shows how woefully out of touch they really are.

What that typical family needed to hear yesterday was a real plan to spread economic growth across the country: a proper windfall tax on oil and gas giants, who continue to make billions of pounds, a guarantee that the very richest will pay their fair share, as that family is doing, and a strategy not just to raise the wage floor with a rise in minimum wage, but to raise middle and average incomes, which have stagnated in real terms over the past 13 years. Instead, they heard more of the same steps, measures and announcements that they have heard over those years, the same ones that have led us to the economic mess of low growth, low ambition and low pay that we are in now.

Not only does the Chancellor’s autumn statement fail to support such families, but it fails to offer any meaningful support to those in Bradford living in poverty, in some of the worst deprivation in the country, who need the greatest help in overcoming the barriers placed in their way through no fault of their own. As I have had to say in this Chamber before, 50% of my constituents are now living in poverty, and I should not have to say this, but they did not choose to be in poverty.

The tragedy is that time and again from Conservative Members and from this Government we see a narrative that somehow people wake up one day and choose to be born into poverty or to live in poverty. We are the fifth-richest country in the world. It is disgraceful. It is disgusting. The poverty that we have in our streets today is sickening. The destitution we have today is disgraceful. It is disgraceful and sickening that children today are going without food, that people are being forced into homelessness and that mental ill health is now dramatically on the rise without any treatment whatever.

Let us be clear about what got us here. It is political choices, and 13 years of this Government, with their ideological austerity agenda and their attacks on the poorest, have contributed to that. What does this autumn statement do to address any of that? It does nothing. For the poorest and the most vulnerable, the Chancellor ultimately offered nothing—and in some cases, as other hon. Members have said, he even launched an outright assault on them.

The Chancellor may have increased benefits in line with the higher September rate of inflation, but not before dangling the possibility of a much lower rate, causing sleepless nights for 2 million households who have even had to turn their fridge or freezer off because of the cost of living crisis. He may have ended the local housing allowance freeze, but he has still not provided real investment to deliver social housing, which means that, while people will find it a little easier to pay their rent and put food on the table, many still will not have a table in their own home to put it on.

The Chancellor also failed to fix the vital welfare safety net, left broken by his predecessors, which is no longer able to guarantee the essentials for those facing hardship. He has also set in motion another wave of brutal austerity by front-loading his tax cuts and deferring the tough decisions, making it clear that not only is David Cameron, now Lord Cameron, back in Government, but so too is his brutal agenda of ideologically driven austerity cuts to services that the most vulnerable people rely on. The Chancellor has also deliberately ignored an opportunity to create a more compassionate system that is responsive to the needs of the less fortunate, and he has launched an outrageous attack on disabled people with his ill-thought-through plan to try to get them into work.

Last month, I spoke on a panel on how Governments can support disabled people in the workplace and into employment. The panel discussed improving flexible working arrangements, fixing a broken sick pay system and strengthening the rights of disabled people at work. It certainly did not discuss threats and coercion to force those who cannot work to take up employment. It is clear that once more the millions of disabled people across the country are being used as scapegoats by a Government that have lost their moral compass. All I have to say is, “Shame on the Chancellor and every Conservative Member who condoned this attack on some of the most vulnerable in our society.”

After the passage of 13 years, people across Bradford expected to be better off. They did not expect to be in a worse position than they were a decade ago. Yet, after this Government’s reckless mismanagement crashed our economy, that is sadly where we are. Instead of a real plan to fix the country and undo the mess that they have made while they have been in charge, all we got yesterday was a last-ditch effort from a Tory Chancellor to recover his own credibility and prop up the disastrous premiership of a Prime Minister whose fingerprints from his own time as Chancellor are all over the mess they have left us in.

I join the call, which I think the Opposition have made clear, for a general election now, so that the British people can have their say and remove this Government that have been in for too long, causing misery to people’s lives.