Torsten Bell

What I know is that youth apprenticeships fell by 40% under the Conservative party. That is what failure looks like. I am coming on to some of those matters. We do not want to grow this economy by simply borrowing more, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Phil Brickell) rightly pointed out before he turned, at some length, to snails. There is nothing progressive about arguing that we should spend more than £1 in every £10 of taxpayers’ money on debt interest —money that would be better spent on schools and hospitals—so Liz Truss and the leader of the Greens should stay exactly where they belong and where they both started out: in the youth wing of the Liberal Democrats, far away from Government. We in the Labour party will cut borrowing in every single year—more than in any other G7 country—and more than double the headroom against our fiscal rules. We are cutting borrowing and giving businesses the confidence to invest, and cutting inflation too. We are taking £150 off energy bills, freezing rail fares for the first time in 30 years—as my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Oliver Ryan) set out—and extending the fuel duty freeze. All this knocks 0.4% off inflation next year, helping interest rates—which have already been cut five times since the election—to keep on falling, helping businesses to expand and getting mortgages down. What will not be coming down is public investment, which the OBR says boosts our economy. The pro-growth choice is not to return to the austerity of the past, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Josh Newbury) set out. Austerity saw Tory Chancellors slash public investment, and repeatedly scrap and delay projects—the worst kind of short-term political fixes, with the worst kind of long-term economic consequences. This Budget presses ahead with an extra £120 billion of capital investment. It is exactly because this Government are confident about Britain’s future that we are going to invest in it. Sizewell C is going ahead, and we are building the UK’s first small modular reactor at Wylfa—the biggest industrial investment in north Wales for a generation. We are also building the lower Thames crossing. Infrastructure is being built in every corner of Britain. The blockers and the pessimists, and the gloomsters and the doomsters, are being taken on, confronted and defeated. The Opposition parties have never seen a housing development or energy project that they did not want to block, but those days are done. Britain is getting back in the building business. The Budget also contains necessary and fair choices on tax, which hon. Members have raised repeatedly. We have not hidden from that fact, nor am I hiding from the fact that we are asking everybody to contribute by further freezing tax thresholds towards the end of this Parliament. I hear the chuntering and the howls from the Conservatives, but where did this year’s frozen thresholds come from? Them. Who put in place next year’s freeze? Them. They announced threshold freezes, they defended threshold freezes, they voted for threshold freezes, and they cannot howl with outrage about them now. In case all of that is not clear enough to them, let me spell it out: of the revenue raised from frozen thresholds, over three quarters comes from the choices made on their watch. The difference between us and them is that we are not ducking the long-needed reforms that our tax system needs—reforms that mean we can keep the contribution from workers as low as possible. We have already abolished non-dom status, raised capital gains tax and ended tax breaks for private schools. The Budget brings an end to the disgrace of someone in a terraced house in Blackpool paying more in council tax than someone in a £10 million mansion in Westminster—or what the shadow Chancellor called an ordinary family home. If he had had more time, I am sure he would have gone on to worry about people with an ordinary family deer park, duck pond and stables.