Comprehensive Spending Review

Tom Brake Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Ms Eagle]

Yes, according to the OBR. We saw the undisguised glee of Members opposite as they celebrated the hardship and misery that the Chancellor proposes to inflict on so many people in our society. These are not just numbers; they are police constables, care workers, teaching assistants and dinner ladies. In the private sector, they work in small businesses which rely on public sector contracts at a time when order books are empty. All those people are being asked by this Conservative-led Government to shoulder the burden of a crisis made in the banks and the dealing rooms.

[Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

Will we hear anything concrete from the Opposition today about their alternative proposals?

[Ms Eagle]

Well, the hon. Gentleman could take a look at the March Budget, which was presented to the House before the general election, and the Red Book that was published subsequently. We went into the election with far more detail about what we would do had we been re-elected than either party opposite, and at least we did not flip-flop immediately afterwards so that we could get into government.

These are not just numbers; they are the people being asked by this Conservative-led Government to shoulder the burden of a crisis that was made in the banks. It is not those who caused the crisis who will now suffer as a result of the Chancellor’s reckless gamble with jobs and growth. It is the 490,000 ordinary men and women serving in the public sector whose jobs will go, and it is the 500,000 jobs in the private sector that PricewaterhouseCoopers has calculated will also be lost as a direct result of the spending review. Redundancies on the scale now threatened are not inevitable, but are the result of the Government’s choice to cut further and faster.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Eagle]

I think we know who to believe. There is a great deal of real worry out there about the effects of the draconian cuts in public expenditure that have been announced in the spending review.

I will tell the Deputy Prime Minister and anyone else on the Government Benches what they cannot hide about fairness. There is nothing fair about cutting 10% from housing benefit for those who are out of work for more than 12 months when there are already five people chasing every job vacancy—and that is before the Government add another million to the dole queue. There is nothing fair about expecting children to play a bigger part than the banks in getting the deficit down. There is nothing fair about failing to carry out a legally required equality assessment that would have shown that the Budget had a disproportionate impact on women, who often do the lowest paid jobs in the public sector. When it comes to the cuts under this Government, it really is women and children first. Let us have no more of these ludicrous claims of fairness from the Government.

As for the idea that the Government are cutting less than we had planned to do, there is something distasteful in a Chancellor who is prepared to skew his spending decisions, cutting an extra £7 billion from the social security budget, just to get a cheap one-liner at the end of his speech. There is nothing so cynical as a Chancellor who begins his speech by claiming that Britain has been saved from the brink of bankruptcy by his savage cuts, only to conclude it by claiming that Labour would have cut even more. He knows that he cannot have it both ways, and he knows that he has cut £30 billion more from public expenditure than we planned to do. He knows that, in doing this, he has totally failed in his pledge to protect the most essential front-line services. It is now clear that his promises are unravelling, and that there will be a major impact on our schools, our hospitals and the police.

Schools up and down the country are facing cuts in funding, thanks to a budget settlement that takes no account of rising pupil numbers; and before the Liberal Democrats start getting excited about the pupil premium, I am sorry to have to tell them that the Education Secretary has now admitted that it is simply a con. In June, the Prime Minister pledged:

“We will take money from outside the education budget to ensure that the pupil premium is well funded”.—[Official Report, 2 June 2010; Vol. 510, c. 432.]

But at the weekend, the Education Secretary finally came clean and admitted:

“Some of it comes from within the Department for Education budget, yes.”

It is not new funding after all; it is just money being moved around within the Department to disguise budget cuts.

The IFS calculates that 60% of primary school pupils and 87% of secondary school pupils will see a real-terms funding cut to their schools as a result of the new funding formula. We knew that the Liberal Democrats supported recycling, but we did not realise that this was what they meant. We were also repeatedly told that health spending was to be protected, yet £1 billion has been raided from the NHS to make up for some of the shortfall caused by the huge cuts in local government spending. With this settlement, the Prime Minister’s promise of real-terms increases in health spending will not be met.

There has been no commitment to front-line policing either. The Police Federation tells us that as many as 20,000 police will be sacked. The thin blue line has become a casualty of the thick red pen. For schools, the NHS and the police, there will be no protection for front-line services.

[Tom Brake]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Ms Eagle]

No. I have given way to the hon. Gentleman before.

No priority is to be given to the services that we rely on, day to day. That is the choice that the Government have made. Let us have a serious debate about the differences between us, and let us have no more nonsense from the Government about the four myths on which their entire defence of the scale of their cuts is based. Let us hear no more nonsense about the deficit being the result of the decision of one party or the fault of spending on our public services, rather than the inevitable result of a global economic crisis and the greed and recklessness of the banks.