Oral Answers to Questions

Matt Western Excerpts

Wednesday 17th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I think that my right hon. Friend is referring to the plans from the Labour party. It is quite interesting that this week, while we are pushing ahead with legislation to break the smuggling gangs, Labour’s big idea is to give foreign nationals a say in our elections. So there we have it. While the Conservatives will stop the boats, Labour will rig the votes.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

Q7. I was concerned to read last week that the Prime Minister had to be airlifted to a pharmacy in Southampton after suffering electoral dysfunction. Several weeks earlier he flew all the way from Lancashire to Yorkshire by private jet. Meanwhile, angry rail commuters face the reality of cancellations and longer journey times and are unable to get to work on time as operators shed services. The public think that the Prime Minister has his head in the clouds. They are right, aren’t they?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

It is quite extraordinary to take lectures from the Labour party about the railways when the head of the train drivers’ union sits on its national executive committee and was described by the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) as “one of us”. No wonder Labour will not stand up to the militant rail unions; it literally lets them drive its policies.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Matt Western Excerpts

Wednesday 15th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

Mr Deputy Speaker, you probably did not hear an interview I did with BBC Coventry and Warwickshire Radio back in 2021. I was talking about the pandemic. I said that inflation was something we should be concerned about and that it could potentially rise to 7%. I had been talking to local businesses, such as the Box Factory, Vitsoe and Picturesque picture frames, which were seeing huge rises in the price of glass, cardboard and so on.

Spin forward a couple of weeks and the then Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), said on Sky News that people’s fears about inflation were unfounded. I am not sure where the then Prime Minister had his head at that time—whether it was in an ice bucket or in the sand—but his Chancellor should have pointed out to him what was going on. It was really clear to businesses in my constituency what was going on, and that was long before Russia’s illegal invasion. It was not just the fact that the price of gas was going to increase from that point, but we had no energy storage. It was rather like going into the pandemic when we had no personal protective equipment.

Spin forward 12 months and we had a new Prime Minister, a new Chancellor and the kamikaze Budget. Straight after that statement, the right hon. Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng) said, in answer to my question, that I was fearmongering when I said there would be a run on the pound. What happened next? The Bank of England was left to bail out this Conservative Government. In any other organisation, the directors would have been sacked long before this point of 13 years if the shareholders had been able to have their say.

Now we find ourselves on, I think, a fourth Chancellor. We hear that things are getting better versus last October. Well, one would hope that they are, given where we were. If we stand back and look at where we are, we have the lowest growth in the G7—even sanctioned Russia might be ahead of us now. The World Bank describes us as having the weakest economy. The medium-term forecast does not look good. Inflation is one of the highest in the G20. It is not rocket science how we seem to have got here.

There are some positives in the Budget. In particular, I applaud the idea of enterprise zones around universities. Those investment zones will be a very good thing and I would welcome more of them, because I believe they can be dynamos of a new economy. On the cost of living, I certainly welcome the extension of the energy price guarantee and parity on charges for prepayment meters with those who pay by direct debit. That is long overdue.

However, on the impact on real wages, we have heard that real household incomes will fall by 5.7% over the next two years, the worst performance since records began 60 years ago. Compare that to France, where the average French family will be 10% richer than those of us in the UK. In Germany, they will be 20% richer. Both are working approximately 20% less than us. That is the social scandal of our time. At the same time, mortgages in the wake of last year’s kamikaze budget have increased by, on average, £2,000 on a variable rate mortgage. Given the frozen income tax thresholds that the Chancellor previously announced, we have a £500 increase for those on the basic rate and a £1,000 increase for those on a higher rate.

I welcome some of the moves on childcare, but our proposals are a lot better. A nursery provider in my constituency texted me earlier to say that the funding equates to 26p per child per hour, and will not make a blind bit of difference. On pensions, I do not understand who will be the great beneficiary. What percentage of the population will benefit from going from £1.06 million to £1.8 million? It sounds like the super-wealthy in our society—a big win for the wealthiest, and perhaps more help for bankers but less for ordinary folk. It will do nothing to get retired consultants back into the NHS. It is too late.

[Anthony Browne (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Matt Western]

I will not, because we are short of time. Corporation tax is rising to 25% from 19%. George Osborne told us that we had to reduce it from 29%, which would ensure increased revenues because people would be keener to pay it at a lower rate. That does not seem to have transpired. Let us compare that to France and the US, which have much higher levels than us today. How much tax revenue have we lost from corporation tax since 2014?

The lack of a coherent industrial strategy is striking. I want to focus on the automotive sector. We have just one small gigafactory in the UK, versus five in Germany and five more planned. Labour has gone on record to say that we want to build them. Those investment decisions are ebbing away from us. Ford has divested out of Dunton. Tesla had the opportunity to come to the UK but said that it would not because of Brexit. We need companies such as Northvolt and others to come and invest in the UK. Mike Hawes of SMMT said:

“There is little that enables the UK to compete with massive packages of support to power a green transition that are available elsewhere.”

Make UK echoes that. Our energy bills are approximately 100% higher than the average of those major European nations.

Small businesses have been ignored once again. The owner of a pub in Warwick has been in touch to say that he will have to close, because he cannot afford it. Another in Leamington has said, “That’s it. We’re going to close in April. There was just nothing for us.” The Federation of Small Businesses supports that, saying that it believes that all small businesses have been short-changed by the Budget—a point backed up by the chamber of commerce. I heard nothing for the self-employed, but maybe I am mistaken.

This has been another Budget with next to no mention of a proper coherent industrial strategy. We have heard a lot about potholes, but the Government cut £400 million from the highways maintenance pothole budget, and then they announce, miraculously, a £200 million budget today. It all seems a little Paul Daniels to me. Ordinary people and small businesses have been left short-changed by the Chancellor’s announcements. Somehow, the major promise from today’s Budget is a pensions bonanza for the very wealthy. Therein lies the truth of this Budget: it is for the very few.

Oral Answers to Questions

Matt Western Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd February 2023 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My right hon. and learned Friend is absolutely right that we need to keep going, but he is also right that we need to find enduring solutions to the challenges faced by the people of Northern Ireland. That is why, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Lagan Valley (Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson) mentioned earlier, it is absolutely right that we address the constitutional and legal framework of our arrangements and ensure that we can put in place new arrangements that secure Northern Ireland’s place in the UK.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

Q12. The Prime Minister is no stranger to paying fines. The £2.3 billion he paid last week to the EU after the UK Government allowed Chinese fraudsters to flood Europe with cheap goods is the worst waste of public money. My question is simple: if he can find £2.3 billion to pay a fine, why can he not pay NHS workers and others the pay increases they deserve?

[The Prime Minister]

The hon. Gentleman may not have seen that the Royal College of Nursing is now in talks with the Government about resolving the disputes, and I am grateful to it for entering those talks with a constructive attitude, and for calling off its strikes next week. I urge him and his colleagues to be on the side of working people—that is, to back our laws to introduce minimum safety levels across the NHS and transport, because that is the best way to demonstrate you are on the side of hard-working families.

Oral Answers to Questions

Matt Western Excerpts

Wednesday 16th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I join my hon. Friend in thanking all those businesses, but I also thank all the charities and individual families up and down the country who have shown the traditional big-heartedness that makes this country so great. My hon. Friend will, of course, be aware of the new sponsorship scheme, for which 100,000 people have applied. Working with businesses is particularly valuable, not just in allowing those who come here to gain access to work but in helping them to integrate into society as confident members of our community.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

Q4. I am sure the Deputy Prime Minister will agree that when it comes to judging a person, it is often done by the company they keep. When it comes to tennis, the Prime Minister enjoys both the company and the backhanders of Lubov Chernukhin. When it came to celebrating the election victory, he prioritised the party hosted by the former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev. The Prime Minister counts a great many others—such as Victor Fedotov and Alex Temerko—as friends. Can the Deputy Prime Minister tell us what first attracted the Prime Minister to the billionaire Russian oligarchs?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I was not quite sure where the hon. Gentleman was going at the beginning of his question, but I can tell him that the Prime Minister is not just a very social individual—[Laughter.] He also wants this country to be open and outward-looking to the world. We were the Government—he was the Prime Minister and I was the Foreign Secretary—who introduced the Sergei Magnitsky sanctions, which include human rights sanctions, asset-freezing and visa bans. Those have been applied not just to Russians when we have evidence of wrongdoing, but to the murderers of Khashoggi, the persecutors of the Myanmar minority, and many others. It was this Government who did that, not the Labour party.

Oral Answers to Questions

Matt Western Excerpts

Wednesday 7th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

Yes, I can indeed confirm to my hon. Friend that, in addition to the particular support that he mentions, we are directing another £160 billion of support for business and local authorities and business improvement districts, and I am more than happy to congratulate The Only Way is Melts, by Tracy in Radcliffe.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

Across the UK, our universities are struggling to contain the coronavirus, with some 5,000 cases reported in recent weeks. Our communities deserve better and more local and immediate access to testing facilities, but in Leamington I am told that Deloitte will not deliver on its testing facility until the end of this month, some four weeks after 7,000 students will have arrived back in the town of Leamington. My question is simple: were the Government not expecting students to return to university?

[The Prime Minister]

It is very important that students should return to university in the way that they have, and I want to thank the overwhelming majority of students for the way that they have complied with the guidance, complied with the regulations and are doing what they can to suppress it. Clearly, there are particular problems in some parts of the country, which we have discussed at length already, and we will be pursuing the measures that we have outlined to bring them down in those areas, and I hope that the hon. Member will support them.