Contribution
I could not really make up my mind, when listening to the Chancellor, whether the Budget was a gathering note for an early general election or simply a wasted opportunity. Well, we have been told in the last few minutes that the Prime Minister has said to reporters:
“I can rule out calling a general election in the next 12 months.”
So that has sorted that one. I am sure that many right hon. and hon. Members on the Labour Benches will be heartily relieved.
We are left with a wasted opportunity: a Budget that contains no growth strategy worth the name; nothing on welfare, except for one or two small rises here and there; and nothing on reducing the size of the state. While countries in Europe are giving serious attention to reducing the size of the state following covid, this Government are doing very little indeed, to put it politely. The Netherlands is reducing the headcount in its civil service by 15%, except in the military and the police. If we were to do something even approaching that, it would be the thick end of a headcount of 100,000, freeing up resources for deficit reduction in the interests of generational fairness.
I am particularly focused on good growth in the BA12, BA13 and BA14 postcodes, but my constituents are seeing none of it. What they did see, practically on day one of this Government two and a half years ago, was the cancellation of the A303 improvements. They saw the long-grassing of the north-south strategic study to link the south coast with the M4. That seems to have gone by the board, meaning no Westbury bypass after all these years. We see continuing fiscal encouragement for the much-loathed plan for an incinerator at Westbury. We have seen VAT and charitable rate relief changes for independent schools, which has closed a foreign languages college in my constituency that brought in a great deal of foreign investment. We have also seen the retrenchment of one independent school, and only yesterday we received news that a further school that is very close to my constituency is finally, after over 100 years, closing down as a direct result of Government policy. There is not much growth there.
We have seen the family farm tax. We have seen the family business tax. We have seen the carbon border adjustment mechanism, which was included in the Finance Act 2025. It will come in on 1 January to add to farmers’ woes—something that I had thought the Government might mention in the Budget. It was said earlier that farmers have hardly featured at all in this Budget. Well, CBAM was an obvious thing to look at to reduce the cost of fertiliser. There are farmers in my constituency who are seriously considering not planting this year because of the cost of fertiliser. This was the opportunity to put that right.
My constituency is very military. We heard a deafening silence on spending 3% of GDP on defence by the end of this decade, making a complete mockery of the now Chancellor’s resignation in June. Goodness me—his namesake, Denis Healey, must be turning in his grave. In 1969, he famously said that
“once we cut defence expenditure to the extent where our security is imperilled”
—the grounds on which the current Chancellor resigned in June—
“we have no houses, we have no hospitals, we have no schools. We have a heap of cinders.”—[Official Report, 5 March 1969; Vol. 779, c. 551.]
Yet it is precisely this issue—the welfare of our defence personnel and our ability to protect the state—that the now Chancellor resigned over in June. I have to say that that is quite extraordinary.
Now we find that RDEL will be cut in real terms over the next two years. In the time available to me, let me explain what that means. It means defence personnel’s accommodation will not be kept up to the extent that it should be. It means establishments will not be renovated. It means there will be no fuel for ships at sea. It means dockyard workers will not get overtime, which means ships will be anchored off at a weekend rather than service people being able to get home to their families. It means no exercises. I speak as a reservist, and it means no reserve service days, which means demoralising our reserve. This is catastrophic, and it is no way to behave. It is certainly not indicative of a Government who are halfway serious about the defence of this country.