---

Autumn Statement Resolutions

Mr Deputy Speaker, you and I have been here for a couple of decades, and I have never known a second-day debate on an autumn statement to involve only one Government Back Bencher. The emptiness of the Chamber reflects that we are at the fag end of this Government, and people realise that. The seriousness of the Government’s intentions in the coming months almost warrants despair among their own supporters, as well as in this House.

I sat through the Chancellor’s statement yesterday, and he set the scene of an economy that has turned the corner and is looking for technology-fuelled sunny uplands. I have been here a while and have listened to previous autumn statements, so I can recognise a pre-election speech when I see one, and that is what it was.

The Prime Minister basically set out the Conservatives’ election strategy the day before, and it is not a novel playbook—it is one they have used consistently. It is the same old Tory strategy. First, there are tax cuts as a pre-election bribe, then it goes on to the scapegoating of some vulnerable group, before making ludicrous claims about Labour’s plans to try to petrify people into not voting for change. Even with the media that we have, I do not think that strategy is going to work this time.

On economic growth, the Chancellor’s image of the economy turning a corner was absolutely shattered when the OBR report was published as soon as he sat down. It massively downgraded the growth forecast for every year of the forecast period. I listened to him talk on the radio this morning about how his investment in the economy will increase GDP by 0.5% over the coming four years. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, 0.5% produces about £7 billion of income tax returns to the Government, so there is no way this growth will somehow provide the resources we need to fund our public services.

I doubt any amount of tax cutting will restore confidence in a party that has doubled our debt, brought our public services to their knees and crashed our economy with the madcap escapades of the last two Prime Ministers. The cuts to national insurance were the headline proposal in yesterday’s autumn statement, but in the cold light of day, less than 24 hours later, the analysis shows that all the benefit has been swept away by the continuing freeze

on tax thresholds. The IPPR analysis demonstrates that even the national insurance cuts will benefit the highest earners and the richest, and then the energy cap was lifted this morning. There is no way these tax cuts will restore a feelgood factor among the general public.

The most nauseating element of yesterday’s appalling announcement was the scapegoating of the sick, the disabled and those with mental health problems. It is gutter politics. The Conservatives first tried to scapegoat asylum seekers, but that has not worked because, actually, people recognise that asylum seekers are coming to this country from war zones across the world, and they empathise with them. So the Government have now turned on the disabled, the sick and people struggling with their mental health. Hidden in yesterday’s autumn statement is the reality that the Government are cutting £1.2 billion from benefits paid to people with disabilities. As my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Bell Ribeiro-Addy) said, it heralds the return of the nasty party.

I met the Public and Commercial Services Union last week, and the chronic staffing crisis in the Department for Work and Pensions means that the implementation of last year’s sanctions policy is floundering because of the massive casework backlogs. Individual members of DWP staff have case loads of 2,000 cases, and obviously the system is collapsing. Loading more work on those workers will intensify the delays and will result—let us be honest—in more stress for the disabled, the sick and those with mental health problems.

Exactly as is predicted by a number of disability organisations, I fear this will push people over the edge. Those of us who were in the House remember what happened when the work capability assessment was first introduced. People were pushed so far over the edge that we saw a rise in the number of people taking their own life.

The Government have ludicrously claimed that Labour’s plan to borrow to invest in greening our economy will somehow push up interest rates and borrowing costs. That is a bit rich coming from the Conservative party, under which the country’s debt has risen. Let me be clear that Labour’s plan to borrow to invest will generate green growth in the economy. It is not like what the Tories have done in the past, which is to borrow for day-to-day expenditure—in other words, borrowing to cover the costs of failure.

The cost of borrowing £28 billion, even at the current high interest rates, is just above £1 billion, which is readily recouped—that is what investment is all about—as a result of the multiplier effect of this investment and the increased tax income it will generate. The comments of even senior Ministers have been inane in the extreme and lower the level of debate on the future of our economy.

I thought the real question yesterday was whether the Chancellor would do the right thing with the additional headroom that the OBR found as a result of inflation, interest rates and rising tax receipts, and where that additional money would go. Last week, I went to a concert by the brilliant Liverpool singer Jamie Webster. He sang a song called “Voice of the Voiceless”. Yesterday’s autumn statement made it clear to me that, as the Chancellor decided where to spend the new money that had been found, the voices of those most in need of those additional resources went unheard. I therefore think Members have a responsibility to be the voice of the voiceless in this debate.

I think we should be the voice of children. According to the Child Poverty Action Group, over 4 million children are currently living in poverty in the United Kingdom, the sixth richest country in the world. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has found that more than 1 million children are living in and experiencing destitution. Last week, I met people from Buttle UK, the charity supporting children in poverty, and they explained what destitution means. It means children going without the basic essentials needed to eat, stay warm and dry, and keep clean. That is why so many charities, religious groups, trade unions and others have called for a Government—any Government—to prioritise children in poverty for support. One straightforward suggestion is to lift the two-child limit, which would immediately lift 250,000 children out of poverty. This is why so many are campaigning for free school meals, to ensure that our children get at least one decent meal a day. It is also why many of us have called on the Chancellor to restore the £20 that the Government cut from universal credit after the pandemic.

We need to be the voice of disabled people, the sick and the mentally ill, who were under attack yesterday. The new onslaught against disabled people and the sick clearly provided evidence that their voices have been ignored again. If the Government were listening, they would have heard how those receiving benefits have already had to fight their way through a brutal benefits system to secure the help they have gained. The Government would have heard about many of the experiences with the work capability assessment, which has caused so much human suffering and harm—so much so that, as Members may recall, we discovered that the DWP was secretly monitoring coroners’ reports on the suicide of people on benefits. David Cameron has just been reappointed, so I hope he points this out in government now. I remember when a person whose benefits had been cut starved to death in his constituency. The coroner’s report related that to the withdrawal of benefits.

Disability groups are rightly predicting that, as sure as night follows day, this new round of dangerous threats to the benefits of the sick and the disabled, and especially those with mental health problems, will cause serious harm again.