Contribution
No, I am going to try to be quick. I am not going to take any interventions.
All those matters, and others too, require us to make a change in the direction of our economy. That is what this Budget has begun to do; we are turning the page.
One final reflection on ’97. When Labour introduced the minimum wage, one of the great reforms of the century, the Tories kept us in the Lobby night after night after night. We were proud to do it. The arguments they made then have a parallel with the arguments they are making about our Budget today—that there will be job losses, an impact on profitability, small firms will be in trouble and so on. Let me say this. Eventually, they accepted the minimum wage because it was the right thing to do. There were no job losses and there was no impact on profitability. So, I say to those on the Government Front Bench: continue in the direction you are travelling, but move faster and be even more radical. I recommend that they have a look at Spain, where a socialist Government are in place. They have—I think I am right in saying—the highest rate of growth in the G7. They introduced a 0.5% wealth tax on estates worth more than €3 million a year and they are getting high growth. That shows that a determined Government restructuring the economy, as we need to do, can deliver change and not damage a country’s economic success.
I represent 23 villages, all former mining communities that were treated brutally by the Tory party 40 years ago. It is a distant memory for many, but I remember every single moment of the strike. They destroyed the mining industry and have done nothing to replace it in the last 40 years, so we have widespread poverty, as there is in all post-industrial communities throughout our country. They perpetrated a hoax on those communities by saying that they would level up. The levelling-up fund was not directed to where poverty was. In any event, it was a competition in deprivation between one area and another. My communities got nothing, yet we are struggling desperately to achieve growth. Levelling up was a great slogan, but it was used as a trick to persuade people to vote Conservative in 2019. What happened? People have learnt their lesson.
Let me come on to one point that I am worried about and then on to a general point. On transport, the differences in the distribution of funding for transport are extraordinary. The previous Government—that lot—spent £418 per head on transport in Yorkshire. In London, it was £1,200. That is three times as much per head per year spent on transport in London than in Yorkshire, and that leaves us with problems. I represent 23 villages—rural communities in many ways, deprived communities, post-mining communities. To get from one community to another, bearing in mind over 20,000 people in our area do not have a car and the trains do not work very well—the train service has left us without adequate public transport by train—the only option is the bus. Buses often do not start until 8 o’clock, but people begin work at 7, or leave home at 7. I have met women walking from one village to another in the dark on unlit streets because the bus service has not yet started. That is a problem the Conservatives created.
I regret this Government’s decision to raise bus fares from £2 to £3. I do not suppose there is anybody in this whole Parliament who does not have access to a car, but there are many people across the country who do not have a car because wages are so low. People are walking in the dark at 7 o’clock in the morning to get to work from one village to another. And for those of us who do have a bus service, it is going up by 50%. It will be roughly £6 a day to get to and from work. That is £30 a week and £1,500 a year in bus fares to get to work and back. Clearly, that gives us a problem. In my constituency, there are villages that are only seven miles apart, yet the bus takes one hour and 19 minutes to get from the one you live in to the one where you work. That is completely unsatisfactory. If we are going to raise bus fares—that is the decision that has been made, which I regret—we need to reform the way buses operate so that they are accessible to communities. The Government have made some announcements in relation to that already, which is welcome.
My final point is on the lack of investment the Conservative party presided over for years. I heard the shadow Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Godalming and Ash (Jeremy Hunt) saying today, “Okay, there might have been a black hole in the public finances, but we were going to cover it with cuts.” That is effectively what he said. The cuts were always taking place to investment and they were going to cut more investment. If we measure my constituency by GDP per head—a controversial measure, but the one we are familiar with—that lack of investment means the average worker produces £29,000 per year of GDP. Wages are pegged to productivity, as we all know, so we have low wages—less than £30,000 a year. But listen to this. In Camden—we know it is a different economy in Camden—GDP per head is £174,000. The regional differences between output, capacity and productivity are all the result of that failure to invest.
The Budget sets out to invest, and to invest big and go for growth, but I will be pressing, for all the held-back, post-industrial communities up and down our country— not only the coalfields but in the midlands and elsewhere —for the investment we achieve and the growth we deliver to be more equitable than it has been under the Conservatives.
With those few thoughts, and an encouragement to be more radical and even more bold for the future—let us bear in mind ’97—I wish the Budget well.