Sir Mel Stride

The Minister for Employment shakes her head, but my understanding is that while the Government may say they will make some changes, they are quite happy to take the savings that are baked into the OBR’s forecast. The Secretary of State is right to clamp down on fraud, but it is important that she does not misrepresent the fact that the approach she is taking is exactly the same as the approach we were bringing forward to do that. The reality is that some DWP budgets are growing to an extent that they need to be arrested in order for us to have a successful economy. If we were able to hold the number of people of working age with a health or disability component to their benefit at the level it is now for the next five years, there would be a saving of about £14 billion; if we were able to get it back to where it was before the pandemic, over £30 billion would be saved. When the Conservative party was in government, we had a clear plan to begin to address that issue. We have heard nothing from the Government about how they will tackle that fundamental fact. What we have had from the Government on welfare expenditure is the announcement that the welfare cap will be set, at the end of the scorecard period, at 5% above the OBR’s forecast for spending on those benefits. That is not a restraint; that is permission—an invitation—to spend ever more on welfare without hitting the cap. The Government have no plan and the taxpayer will continue to pay for it. So what do we have to show for this Budget? Compared with the spring: lower growth, lower living standards, lower wages, higher taxes, higher borrowing, and increased interest rates and mortgages. This is a Budget of broken promises, and when the dust has finally settled and this lot have gone, as we step over the fallen—the former farmers, the pensioners, the one-time businesspeople, the poor and the vulnerable—there we will find the shattered remains of the working people of this country, betrayed by a party that lied to them, and they will never forget it.