John Glen

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner), who I know holds his views with great sincerity, although I do not agree with many of them. Before I get into the substance of the Budget measures, I want to address the process leading up to the Budget. People might say that this is a subject of fascination just for those in the Westminster bubble, but in the run-up to this Budget, it went way beyond that. In the weeks—and, indeed, months—before the Budget, virtually every conceivable tax rise was floated as a possibility. Last week, we heard from the Office for Budget Responsibility, and what it said was summed up very well by Ben Zaranko from the Institute for Fiscal Studies: “At no point in the process did the OBR have the government missing its fiscal rules by a large margin. Leaves me baffled by the months of speculation and briefing. Was the plan to lead everyone to expect a big income tax rise, then surprise them on the day by not doing it?” Next Wednesday, the Chancellor will come before the Treasury Committee, of which I am privileged to be a member, and we will no doubt ask her about what was happening in those weeks. I do not want to pre-empt the scrutiny of that Committee, but I think everyone across the House must acknowledge what was happening. We all read the papers. We could all see how decisions about where to invest, whether to invest in the UK, whether to employ any more people and whether to have confidence in the future of the country’s economy rested on the way the Budget was prepared for. I regret very much the error that was made by the OBR. It was clearly a profound error, and Richard Hughes has taken responsibility for it this afternoon. He has done the right thing—the honourable thing—but this will be conflated with the much more serious breach of protocol over several months leading up to the Budget, and we in this House need to come to terms with the implications that this has for our reputation. There are some things in the Budget that I welcome, but there are some that I do not, including the enormous tax increase. We all fought an election where Labour plainly said that only £7 billion of tax rises were implied. We had £40 billion last year and a further £26 billion this year. This will mean 780,000 of the lowest-paid people coming into tax by the extension of the threshold freeze, as well as a tax on electric vehicles, more tax on property rents, a tourism tax and increases in tax on dividends, savings and unearned income. Employee ownership trusts relief will be halved and salary sacrifice contributions will be limited. It is obviously the prerogative of every Government to raise tax as they see fit, but what concerns me is the lack of understanding of what it takes to drive growth in an economy. When I look at the implications for the hospitality sector, which is a significant one in Salisbury, I see people who are already bemused by the unexpected increase in employer national insurance, the increase in the national living wage and the implications of changes in employment legislation—and that is before we even heard the measures in last week’s Budget. People are worried about the risks and costs associated with investing in plant, machinery and people.