Danny Kruger

I am delighted to hear that there is, in fact, a businessman on the Labour Benches; that is tremendous, and I hope that he and his business prosper under the Government that he is supporting. The fact is that the OBR itself said in its commentary on the Budget that payroll tax rises are “passed through” into lower wages. The direct effect is that the Government are taxing workers to fund their spending commitments. Those spending commitments go partly towards what they call investment capital projects, but also towards public services’ running costs. As we have heard today, the bulk of that money will be front-loaded at the start of this Parliament, in what one would have thought was direct contravention of good fiscal management. However, more importantly and more worryingly, as we heard, the effect will be largely circular, because the additional spending will simply be taken in tax through the NIC increases. On behalf of my constituents, I would quickly add that the one spending area where I have particular regrets is the cutting of the transport budget. The Government talk about increasing investment in the public sector, but they have cut the transport budget overall and, particularly to the regret of constituents in Wiltshire, scrapped the plan to upgrade the A303 and divert all that horrendous traffic around Stonehenge. I deeply regret that, and I am sorry that we have yet to hear any plans from the Department for Transport or the Treasury to alleviate our chronic traffic problems. Let me finish by saying how much I regret the missed opportunities that this Budget represents. We need growth and productivity, which, fundamentally, will come only from the private sector. We need to see more savings in the public sector, so that we can fund proper deficit reduction, but we are not going to see that. We also need meaningful tax cuts, so that we can get the economy going. One area where we urgently need more spending is defence, which is the one area we really have not heard about. When will we hear about the timetable to get to 2.5%?