David Simmonds

Clearly, the benefit for people of keeping more of the money that they make is that they spend that money on the quality of life of their families from the wealth that they have personally created by their own efforts. What we are seeing is that a greater and greater share of the wealth that they are creating and more and more of the money they are earning through their jobs, or of the profits being generated by the businesses they run, is going into a central pot for the benefit of other people and, in many cases, delivering less and less benefit to those other people. In the recent Budget, the announcement of £100 to help with heating bills was more than offset by the cost impact of the Government’s policies on household energy bills. The Government say that housing is really important, despite the fact that their own policies in the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 have massively driven up the cost of renting a home. They have made it harder for landlords to place a home on the market, and made it harder for developers to build, resulting in accelerating insolvencies in a sector that is crucial to our national economy. In many areas, the cost of state interventions has become grossly disproportionate to the benefit that accrues to the individual, and we as a party need to accept that we have had some responsibility in some of those areas. This is a debate about working-age welfare. We have always accepted that we protect pensioners, because once people have retired it becomes much more difficult for them to increase their income by finding another job, but we need to find a better way of ensuring that work pays and enterprise pays if we are to address the long-term conundrum of growth in this country. So many of concerns that we all share—rough sleeping is often cited by Labour Members—have surged since this Government took office. More and more people are living on the streets of this country every day because of this Government’s policies. It is welcome that they talk about introducing policies to address that, but they are trying to fix with a sticking plaster a wound that they have created by their own actions. The same is true of housing policy. It is also true of VAT on school fees, which has left our state schools net worse off than they were before. It is particularly true of national insurance, which has driven up the cost of employing people in this country, and the so-called Employment Rights Act 2025, which has, as we have all heard, made businesses more and more wary of hiring people and giving them the opportunity to get on the ladder to a job and prosperity. Let us not forget that this is not just about money. This is not an arid debate that is solely about balancing the books. Having a job is good for mental health, for physical health and for family wellbeing. It is the one solution that we know makes the biggest difference to people’s opportunities in life. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) described, one of the things that we should be proud to have done in office was to massively increase the share of working-age households earning their own living by their own efforts, rather than increasing the number who are dependent on welfare and benefits from the state. This is a time of missed opportunity. The proposal that our Front Benchers have set out is about a subset of that issue. It is about how we deal with welfare, but it is also about how we get this country back on to a path where prosperity is something that all our people have a realistic prospect of enjoying. It is worth remembering that when the previous Chancellor set out this Government’s first Budget, it provided flat cash for every single Government Department except the NHS, and that was entirely dependent on welfare reform, which Labour Back Benchers immediately overturned. I say gently to Labour Members: please make sure that welfare reform is something you are willing to drive through, so that we can make the difference we need for this country.