Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation — House of Commons, 2015-03-18
Topic: Macroeconomics
Ifor Huw Irranca-Davies (Labour, Centre-left): Five years ago when the so-called emergency Budget was announced, I remember twice intervening on the Chancellor and challenging his assertion that there would be an economic recovery and that his was a good long-term plan that would benefit everybody. Ultimately, he had to acknowledge that it would come down to his judgment. Five years on, I have to say that his judgment has failed. It has failed miserably for the people whom I represent. This has not been the so-called long-term economic plan that benefits everyone. It has not been an economic recovery that benefits everyone. It has not been an austerity programme that hits everyone. It has been balanced on the backs of those least able to afford it socially and economically all the way through I do not believe it was ever intended to be a fair plan under which everybody would shoulder their fair burden. The language of the so-called emergency Budget of 2010 made that clear. The recovery has been unbalanced, both sectorally and geographically; it has been delayed, because there was a period of two or three years when we flatlined as a result of the decisions of the coalition Government to cut off infrastructure spending; and it has left people behind. It has left behind a generation of young people and a generation of working poor. When did we see this last? We saw the same approach in the 1980s—"Don’t worry. We’ll do our very best. It will trickle down and the effects will be seen." The recovery does not trickle down into my constituency Some people, I accept, have hardly seen the impact of this recession. They have done well. They have been in a secure job. Life has gone on almost as normal. We have a great manufacturing belt in my constituency. Many people there will not have seen the recession. They will have got through okay, but underneath that there is now a huge group of people—those who work part-time, those who wait for that call in the morning to see whether they are to be brought into work, those who have seen a drop in earnings of probably 6% to 10% if they are working, and those who balance two or three jobs to try to make ends meet What would it be like—this is the reality check that we need five years down the line—if the Chancellor had to wait for a text in the morning to say, "Take a rest day today. You’re entitled to it. We haven’t got any hours for you"? Could he work on that basis? What if the Chancellor did not have to put on his suit and head up to the Banqueting House for a nice gala dinner or a fundraiser, but had to walk 4 or 5 miles between food banks on different days of the week to collect sufficient food for a working family to get through that week? Five years ago, after the emergency Budget, there was one food bank in my constituency. There is now not one town, one village or one street that does not rely on food banks. The generosity of those who supply them is amazing, as we always say, but we should not be in this situation when we are still the sixth most prosperous country in the world What would the Chancellor do if he had not simply to be the Chancellor, but to do another job to make ends meet, or perhaps three jobs—and I am not talking about directorships, by the way. That is the reality for many people. I have spoken to those people, and when I hear the Chancellor speak I wonder if he ever has the same conversations. Does he have constituents who come in and say, "Even after running two or three jobs, some of them on night shifts, I still can’t make ends meet"? Does he ever have that conversation? I have never heard it from him. My constituency must be very different from his, yet mine is not a poor, poor constituency. There are some people who are doing quite well, yet from other constituents I hear about the problems all the time That is backed up by the statistics, which show that in the Bridgend county borough area, a prosperous manufacturing belt on the M4 corridor in commuting distance of Cardiff, there has been a tenfold increase in people who rely on payday loans. Some of them are piggybacking payday loans—not just one, but another one to get over the original payday loan. I have referred to the extent of the food banks and to the fact that, under this coalition Government, people at those food banks are in work as opposed to not working, and that for the first time in history, we now have more working households in poverty than non-working households in poverty. All this stacks up to a compelling argument Since the emergency Budget five years ago, when the Chancellor said to me in response to two interventions, "You’ll have to trust in my judgment. This will not fall on the working poor or on the young", we have seen what has happened to youth unemployment levels. It is great to see claimant counts coming down. They have come down in my constituency, and that is fantastic. However, the last time I heard such praise for claimant figures was during the 1980s when everybody was moving out of the jobcentres and on to sickness benefit. We can cut these figures in any number of ways, but if the people who are coming off claimant counts are in self-employment, they are typically earning 40% below the average median earnings of somebody in a full-time-wage job. If those people are working two or three jobs in order to make the money up, and if there is, as there has been under this Government, a massive increase in housing benefit and in poverty pay subsidised by the taxpayer, I say to Government Members that something has gone seriously wrong, and it stems back to the point in time when a decision was made to say, "We have to go for this austerity; we must have this fetish about deficit reduction above and beyond everything else." At that point—