Living Standards

John Howell Excerpts

Wednesday 30th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I agree with my hon. Friend. The reality is that we are raising people out of tax, while what the Labour Government did by getting rid of the 10p starting rate was to drop more people into higher rates of tax. It was really dismissive, very regressive and attacked the poorest.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

Is my right hon. Friend as surprised as I am that there has been little or no mention from the Opposition of the benefit to living standards that comes from keeping interest rates low?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I was going to come on to that. Had interest rates gone up and had we been paying more for our borrowing, we would all—including those paying mortgages—be poorer.

This debate about living standards is important. Of course, those standards are very tight, and I make no bones about the challenge that we face, but let us not forget where we came from. Let me take the House back to 2007, when personal debt had rocketed to about £1.3 trillion and we had the highest structural deficit in the whole of the G7. That was before the recession began. That is a completely unsustainable picture, and it required very painful readjustment. As my colleagues know, the problem was that we entered the recession ill prepared for the consequences. When Labour Members ratcheted up spending by a massive degree, they simply postponed the inevitable. After all, the IFS forecast for the period 2008-2011 was that living standards would fall by 1.6%. This was a case of a fall in living standards postponed, with pain pushed on to future generations. People do not have to take my word for it—the IFS said:

“Much of the impact of the…recession on UK living standards was not felt until after the economy had stopped contracting, but that…pain was most definitely delayed rather than avoided”.