Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to catch your eye in this important Budget debate. I listened to the Defence Secretary, and thought he absolutely embedded his comedic skills. Some of what he was saying would have been better said on “Have I Got News for You” than in this Chamber. This Budget was a tragic lost opportunity to fix the fundamentals of the economy. Our debt is at a record level. The tragedy is that we are paying a higher interest rate than Greece on that debt—5.31%. That will add additional interest of £14 billion, just on that debt. If the amount that we are paying to service that debt were a Department, it would be the third largest. The budget for the Department for Work and Pensions is around £344 billion. That does not even cover the amount of income tax we raise in this country in total, which is £330 billion. In other words, income tax does not pay all our DWP bills. The second highest-spending Department has a budget of £226 billion. I welcome the Chancellor saying that he will meet his fiscal rules by the end of this Parliament, but that involves the national debt falling by the end of the Parliament. If I were a betting man, I would doubt very much that he will meet that rule. One of the saddest things about our economy is that inflation is going up. Before Labour Members start to scoff at that, it is one of the most important measures of the lot, because it affects everything; it affects all our cost of living. Everything from our fuel costs to our energy and mortgage costs are affected by inflation, so the one thing we ought to be doing is trying to get the rate of inflation down. One of the saddest things about inflation is that my constituents, many of whom live off the gas grid, have to pay for heating oil, which has gone up by 75% in the last year. Imagine that for someone on benefits. In this Budget, they are getting very little help with meeting those costs.