Adam Dance

Given the time constraints, I will keep my remarks as short as possible. Although there are things that are welcome in this Budget , such as business rate relief and energy cost relief, it does not meet the challenges my constituents in Yeovil are facing, let alone pave the way for the biggest change in a generation that this Government keep saying they are going to deliver. For a start, rural communities have been completely overlooked again. The £100 off most people’s energy costs is great, but it is not means-tested, and is matched to a broken council tax system. For us in rural Somerset, the biggest issue is the price of heating oil, which has doubled in the last year. What we needed was an urgent price cap— I have spoken to residents who have said they are not heating their homes because they cannot afford heating oil. That is unfair, and the Government need to provide real help. There was nothing in the Budget for farmers, the backbone of our rural economy. That adds insult to injury, given Labour has increased taxes on farmers, while cutting the farming budget in England by a further £100 million and locking farmers out of funding by running applications for the sustainable farming incentive as if they were selling Glastonbury tickets—believe me, I know how hard they are to get. That is not just bad for Somerset’s economy; it threatens our food security at exactly the time we need to be strengthening it. That is why we Liberal Democrats have called for the farming budget to be increased by £1 billion a year. More broadly, by missing many of the big-picture challenges, the Budget has failed my Yeovil constituency.