Budget Statement — Motion to Take Note

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 4:57 pm on 27 March 2014.

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Photo of Lord Deighton Lord Deighton The Commercial Secretary to the Treasury 4:57, 27 March 2014

Along with the noble Lord, Lord Davies, I pay tribute to the very stimulating contributions from right around the House. The past five hours have simply flashed by. Like the noble Lord, Lord Davies, I hope contributors will excuse me if I do not refer to them all individually. I think the most helpful way to sum up is for me to try to break down the discussion into the five or six key areas and go through what I think were the pertinent issues and the points that I should address.

I begin with pensions and savings because, as my noble friend Lord Bourne said, this was a transformational Budget precisely because of what we were able to do in terms of the pensions revolution. With one or two exceptions here today, it has been very broadly welcomed, particularly by my noble friends Lord Wakeham, Lord Higgins and Lord Stoneham, as well as by a number of other noble Lords. I absolutely accept that the provision of expert guidance is a critical part of making this transition work. The Government have laid out a clear plan and commitment to that, which we will follow through. I was very taken by the very thorough analysis offered by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, of some of the potential impacts which will flow from a change this radical. He is absolutely right to bring those to our attention, and the consultation that we have started will attend to them very directly.

My noble friend Lord James referred to the risk to the annuity companies. A similar change occurred in Ireland and the health of the annuity companies was just fine. My general attitude to the financial services business is that in the same way as we have given pensioners the flexibility to respond based on their own requirements, I think we will find that pensions and insurance companies will be able to respond very flexibly to the new environment. I will certainly take away the request from my noble friend Lord Flight to have a look at the NISA tax issue with respect to the tax treatment of the surviving wife.

We have had this discussion—I think we had it last year as well; in fact, I am sure we had it last year as well—about whether our debt and deficit are really going down fast enough, or whether they have gone down at all. I thought that I was quite clear about the process we are going through, and my noble friend Lord Higgins echoed the way in which I approached it. The situation is really not that complicated. We inherited a record deficit. Until you get that deficit to zero, of course debt will continue to go up. The OBR tells us that we will be back in surplus by 2018-19. It is only at that point that the accumulated debt can begin to go down. We expect the deficit as a proportion of GDP to hit its peak in 2015-16 and then begin to come down.

It is a difficult, long-term process. There are many more cuts that need to be made in order for us to be able to accomplish that. My right honourable friend the Chancellor could not have been clearer about that. I really do not accept the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, that this is driven by some ideological rage to reduce the size of the state. It is driven simply by what I regard as an extremely sensible approach of reducing the amount of debt because debt will eventually overwhelm you and leave you with absolutely no protection against future shocks. It is true in personal finances, it is true in company finances and, while there is more flexibility in sovereign finances, ultimately you have to deal with the same issue. We were overleveraged and we have to fix it. I absolutely agree with what I think was the most popular contribution of the day, from the noble Lord, Lord Desai, that the deficit just has to be eliminated, and we have stuck to the plan to do that. My noble friend Lord Horam pointed to the fact that there are still some risks out there, whether in China or Ukraine or deflation in the eurozone. It is by no means plain sailing even if we stick to the plan.

I will talk about the recovery. The debate we had last year was about there not being a recovery. We have moved on from that. As the noble Lord, Lord Desai, said, we were discussing whether or not we were having a triple-dip. We have moved the debate on. Now the debate is about whether it is the right kind of recovery, which is a higher class of problem for us to be addressing. It is interesting that the essence of the Opposition’s position on this is the risk of, “It might look as though there are some of the components of all the mistakes we made”. If that is the best criticism that can be levied, that tells you something about the potential strategy of an alternative Government.

The Chancellor has been quite clear—and I think I was quite clear in my opening comments—that this is a recovery that has some challenges. It is a partial recovery. There are some real issues in the imbalances. I was not trying to disguise that. The Chancellor has not disguised that. Investment has not yet come back as we would have hoped, although there are some signs. That is not unusual at this stage of a recovery so we should not be surprised. Exports are not performing as well as we had hoped.

On investment, the noble Lord, Lord Kestenbaum, made the case strongly for innovation, as did the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and my noble friend Lord Eccles. I think that there was a lot of agreement about our need to tackle the productivity question and, looking at our science and research capability, the intangibles in the economy which do not get measured in the productivity numbers quite as we would like. I take all that on board.

On the balance of the recovery, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Sheffield implied that all the employment growth was in London. That is not consistent with the ONS statistics, which show that it is much more broadly based than that. My noble friend Lord Holmes made an excellent point in saying how crucial the employment recovery is, because those are real jobs for real people. At the beginning of the recovery, there was perhaps a greater proportion of temporary work, but if you look at the employment improvement over the past 12 months, you see that it is fundamentally in good, solid, long-term jobs. The sector which has seen the most benefit in terms of employment growth has been professional science and technical research, so there has been a lot more substance to the employment recovery in the past 12 months.

My noble friends Lord Sheikh and Lady Neville-Rolfe talked about exports. There are a number of combinations. It is clear that we need to switch over time from the EU towards the BRICS and the MINTs. I am joining the Chancellor in two weeks’ time on a visit to Brazil, where we hope to address what my noble friend Lord Holmes pointed to as our underperformance relative to the Italians. I think that everybody welcomed the extra support for UKTI and UKEF, so that funding can be provided to exporters at the most competitive rates. We now want to support our exports in the most aggressive way rather than try to make available a facility which made us the good guys in terms of complying with OECD rules in the most gold-plated way. I am very much in favour of a much more aggressive approach.

It was inevitable in a discussion on the balance of recovery that mention should be made of house prices and the housing market. I think we all accept that we have a long-term challenge to build the supply of houses that this economy needs. We tried to attend to this challenge at this Budget as we have in previous fiscal events. The initiatives at Ebbsfleet, Barking Riverside and Brent Cross, together with the expansion of the Help to Buy equity loans scheme, which is available solely to new house purchases, should all add up to improving the pipeline by about 200,000 houses. This year, we have seen more housing starts than in any time since 2007, so a degree of normalisation is going on in terms of the recovery from the financial crisis.

On the argument that house prices have been inflated by the Help to Buy scheme, I think that the scheme has been much maligned. If you look at the data behind it, you see that 75% of the houses supported are outside London and the south-east. I do not think that anybody regards us as having anything close to a housing bubble outside London and the south-east. Appearing in front of the Treasury Select Committee this morning, the OBR described the higher inflation in London house prices simply as a function of excess demand over supply. The problem was a lack of supply of houses; it was not a bubble. I think that one defines a bubble in terms of people speculating and buying houses on the basis that prices will go up and up, but that is not what is driving house price behaviour in London.

There was a lot of discussion about infrastructure, particularly from the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, who asked whether we should have borrowed more to be able to accelerate development. From my experience over the past 15 months in trying to tackle this problem for the country, it is clear to me that you do not turn infrastructure on and off like a tap. The political debate about it mildly amuses me, because we spend all our time trying to take credit for the things that are being built on our watch whereas, of course, those are all things that other people did all the hard work on to get them to that stage by the time you are in government.

The work I am doing is really to make the next one, two or three Governments look really good by having a stable pipeline of terrific projects which will come through. Those are things such as HS2, which we are trying to do in a first-class way. That will also bring growth back to the north, which we have talked about. That is why we spent so long trying to get Hinkley Point right. There was misinformation about the Hinkley Point investment. It is of no surprise to anyone that it is currently going through state aid; something of that scale was always going to go through state aid; we accepted that. The noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, said that this was a bad deal for the British. The basis of the deal is that the French will construct at their risk a nuclear power station, and it is their problem if they cannot build it on time and on budget. I am very happy to have signed a 35-year contract with them on the basis that they can do that, because that was a risk that I did not want our taxpayers to bear.

More broadly on energy, which both the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, and the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, addressed, the focus on energy in the Budget was about ensuring that our manufacturing businesses remain competitive. A number of things have happened in the short term. This morning, Ofgem referred the supply side of the industry to the Competition and Markets Authority for review, which is a good thing. We need a good, evidence-based review so that we can look at the facts to decide what we need to do with the supply side of the industry. That is the right outcome given the noise around it and the shortage of facts and evidence.

On generation, I think we are in good shape in our nuclear plan. The new energy policy has enabled us to write contracts for difference which can support that investment. We have a series of wind and other renewables projects underway based on the same CFD process, and we will see at the end of the year how the new capacity market auction works to trigger gas investment. It is extremely tricky to get the right combination of securing supply, making prices affordable and decarbonising at a rate which balances all the different interests, but we have a plan and it will work.

We had a little discussion about quantitative easing. There were questions from the noble Lord, Lord Myners, and a response from my noble friends Lord Higgins and Lord Flight. I shall not give a point of view about that because I think it undermines the independence of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, whose job that is, but I accept that exit from quantitative easing is an economic issue that will need to be addressed intelligently.

The noble Lord, Lord Davies, said that there is really nothing in the Budget for young people. I really could not disagree more. This Budget is all about shaping an economy which will provide the jobs and opportunities that our young people can succeed in. For me, it is completely the other way round.

There was a very interesting contribution from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester on social mobility. For me, there is no better measure of a successful society than whether that is working. I know that Terry Leahy was certainly a product of that; as was I. For me, education is absolutely at the heart of that, which underlies all the work that this Government are doing in that area.

There was some discussion of tax policy. They were very interesting suggestions from my noble friend Lord Wakeham about the longer term plan to remove anomalies from some of the other taxes in place. Of course, stamp duty is a very profitable source of revenue for the Exchequer. The noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, mentioned increasing the personal allowance and bringing down tax rates. I would just point him towards the Chancellor’s comments that he is, ultimately, a believer in low taxes.

I should say as a coda that the noble Lord, Lord Northbrook, mentioned the Economic Affairs Committee’s recommendations. We will carefully consider and address those as part of the Second Reading. We decided not to address them today.

In short, and as noble Lords can tell, I believe that we have a plan that deals effectively with the extraordinary challenges and very high debt levels that we inherited from the financial crisis. As I have acknowledged and noble Lords have discussed, the economy faces many longer-term structural challenges that, crucially, we must address consistently over time. I think of our economic management as stemming and managing down the consequences of the crisis while at the same time putting in place structural reforms to position us to be a winner in the global economic race.

I thank all noble Lords for their contributions. The debate has been extremely stimulating. I apologise to those to whom I have not referred or answered in person but, as always, my door is open.

Motion agreed.