Balancing the Public Finances — [Joan Ryan in the Chair]

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 10:24 am on 11 July 2017.

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Photo of James Cartlidge James Cartlidge Conservative, South Suffolk 10:24, 11 July 2017

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ryan. I had 90 seconds at the end of the Queen’s Speech debate, as the last Government Member to speak, and I will continue that speech for these two minutes.

The point I made then was that austerity is not a choice; that is a facile argument. It is a mathematical reality determined by the size of the national debt, and most importantly, the future liabilities we are starting to accrue. The Office for Budget Responsibility says that in 50 years’ time, public spending is expected at current prices to be £156 billion larger than it is today, which is the cost of the NHS plus £10 billion. We have to find that money somewhere or consign our children and grandchildren to terrible austerity.

There are two suggestions for where we find that money. The most important relates to productivity in the public sector. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, if the last Labour Government

“had managed to maintain the ‘bang for each buck’ at the level it inherited in 1997, it would have been able to deliver the quantity and quality of public services it delivered in 2007 for £42.5 billion less”— that is equivalent to the defence budget. The enormous savings that come from better productivity cannot be underestimated.

The other part of this, which I feel most passionately about, comes from the debate that came up in the general election about care and the intergenerational covenant. It is a staggering fact that the value of equity in the homes of those over 65, according to Savills, is now £1.5 trillion and earnt £26,000 last year for each pensioner household, compared with average national earnings of £27,000, or a graduate entering the workplace on £19,000, with no prospect immediately of getting on the housing ladder and no occupational pension, probably retiring at 75.

If people think we can put off that issue through parliamentary arithmetic, they are deluded. Economic arithmetic means that at some point in the future, as a mathematical certainty, whether we like it or not, the issue of equity for those who benefited from the housing boom will come up. We have to decide whether we deal with it voluntarily or put it off until we are bankrupt and in desperation.