Budget Resolutions

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 26th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

It seems, in some ways, a very long time since 2022. Do Members remember 2022? It was when we had a Prime Minister and a Chancellor who put the country in hock to the bond markets, made mortgages rise, and put the British public through a living hell. What a contrast that is with what my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has done today. She has put money into the NHS, she is backing investment in our country, she is supporting start-ups, and she is supporting the British public in a difficult cost of living crisis caused by the Conservative party.

I want to go into what the Chancellor has said today, but I cannot do that without first making some comments about the Leader of the Opposition. Who was “shambolic”, Madam Deputy Speaker? The last Government. Under them, mortgages went up, and children entered poverty in greater numbers. Which party created child poverty? It was them, not us. Which party has consistently talked down the country since the election, been negative at every stage and downgraded people’s confidence in our country? Which is the party of zero hours contracts? The Conservative party. Which party failed consistently to invest in our schools, the NHS, our prisons and our justice system? The Conservative party.

Under the last Government, the country spiralled. Under the last Government, I spent a decade looking at public spending in the privileged role of Chair of the Public Accounts Committee. I saw those mistakes close up. I saw the big nasties that would be left, whichever Government was elected in July last year, and I commend my right hon. Friend the Chancellor for tackling those challenges. Productivity, on which we have seen challenges as a result of the decisions of the Office for Budget Responsibility, has been low since 2010, and who was in government from 2010 onwards? The Conservative party. The last Government left the legacy—they left the big nasties—and now it is this Government’s job to clear it up.

Amid all the noise, however, we must remember that the markets are listening and that we all need to be responsible: Government, Opposition, and every Member of this House. Of course, speculation always swirls around a Budget; that is inevitable because we are all lobbying, quite rightly, on behalf of our constituents, our local businesses and every other group that we represent. We are all seeking to persuade our Government to do the things that we want done, and we are all impatient to see those things happen yesterday, which is why we were elected to make change. However, the leaks about the Budget were very unfortunate, and I hope that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor will grapple with that and ensure that it does not happen again. The most recent leak of the OBR data, moments before her Budget, is undermining for us all, so we will raise the matter with the representatives of the OBR when they appear before the Treasury Committee next week.

The Committee has looked at a number of the issues on which there was speculation, including child poverty, gambling tax and cash individual savings accounts, and I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for tackling some of those. Let me deal first with cash ISAs. In a report, our Committee recommended that the Chancellor should not reduce the limit on cash ISAs from £20,000. She has reduced it not to the £10,000 that was being mooted, but to £12,000. For short-term savers, there could be a real issue. With targeted support coming next year, along with work on the advice guidance boundary review, there is an opportunity to bring the British public into a more investing environment, and to encourage them to invest, or invest more. However, for many years, we have all been warned that our capital is at risk—it has been rather like the warning on the cigarette packets that we might die if we smoke—and it takes a long time to turn that culture around.

I pay tribute to the financial literacy and inclusion campaign backed by the Financial Times, which is running a three-year programme at City of London Academy, Shoreditch Park, in my constituency with young people in years 7, 8 and 9 to teach them about financial literacy. They are the investors of the future, but it will take some time for them to reach the point when they can invest. I am pleased that the Chancellor exempted over-65s from the limit, because that short-term saving is important, particularly for an age group who are planning for retirement or, indeed, already in retirement.

I welcome my right hon. Friend’s support for start-ups, which are a huge issue in my constituency, and her widening of enterprise support, which will doubtless be considered by our sister Committee, the Business and Trade Committee. Encouraging companies to list in London is absolutely right, and the three-year stamp duty relief will hopefully be enough to encourage that. We have seen too many companies listing elsewhere, and we need them here in the UK to grow our economy and create jobs. There are many technical issues involving reviews of business tax that I am sure we will examine. We are putting our slide rule across all the measures in the Budget today.

My right hon. Friend referred to £4.9 billion of efficiency savings to be made by Government Departments by 2031. That is a potential challenge, and the Public Accounts Committee—another sister Committee—will probably consider that, alongside our Committee. However, I am pleased that my right hon. Friend will give His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs more powers to pursue promoters of tax avoidance schemes; we know what the problems have been in that regard. The Treasury Committee has the privilege and the responsibility of challenging HMRC regularly, and when its representatives appear before us in January, we will be able to ask them more about the matter.

I have been thinking about why we need a Labour Government, and one of the central planks for me, as a constituency MP, was the issue of child poverty. We need a Labour Government because of what the Conservative party did to children living in poverty. There are now 4.5 million such children, and the figure has risen by nearly 1 million since 2012. Two million of them are in deep poverty. One in three live below the poverty line, in 2025, in the United Kingdom. Children are sharing beds with their siblings or parents, and turning up to school tired. Every weekend, I visit people in my constituency and see this challenge. Just last weekend, a woman showed me the bedroom that she shares with her now disabled husband, who had a stroke three years ago. There was a curtain between their double bed and a narrow space so that her daughter could share their room. Luckily, they have a second bedroom, where her two sons sleep in a bunk bed. That is the reality for so many children, and the poverty has an impact on their learning and their ability to perform in the world. It is a shameful stain on this country that when the present Government came to power, the UK ranked 37th out of 39 advanced economies in respect of child poverty.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I agree with everything that the hon. Lady has said about child poverty, and I welcome the lifting of the cap, but is there a little bit of a blind spot in this Government when it comes to rural poverty? Their own figures show that by the end of next year, the average hill farmer will earn barely above half the national minimum wage. Is the hon. Lady as disappointed as I am that the Government have not tackled that in the Budget and, indeed, have not got rid of the family farm tax, which will tax many of those farmers out of existence altogether?

[Dame Meg Hillier]

The hon. Gentleman is a veritable champion of his constituency and of rural issues. There are very important changes to the minimum wage and the living wage, which will have an impact, and there is a lot that can be welcomed for rural areas, but I recognise that his constituency and mine sometimes have very different challenges, and I welcome the fact that he champions that here. Obviously, I have not had a chance to look through the Red Book and the Blue Book, but we on the Treasury Committee will bear that in mind.

Seventy per cent of children in poverty are in working families, so the chutzpah of the Leader of the Opposition talking about people making a lifestyle choice really makes my blood boil. In 60% of households hit by the two-child limit, the parents are in work, and 15% of affected families include mothers whose babies are too young for them to work.

My right hon. Friend the Chancellor said it better than any of us could: the Victorian rape clause means that women face humiliation. Notionally, it affects 3,600 women, but we on the Treasury Committee heard evidence that women will not put themselves or their children through the humiliation of using that policy. Any policy that required a workaround like that is outdated and long needed to be gone, and I commend my right hon. Friend for tackling the issue.