Antonia Bance

Here we go again, Madam Deputy Speaker—always the promise of tax cuts to come, never the proper plans to ensure it is affordable. This motion tells us everything we need to know about the modern Conservative party; once again, its first recourse is to reach for the austerity button instead of making a serious plan to invest, grow the economy and strengthen our public services. Reckless with the public finances and reckless with our public services, the Conservatives are not a serious party. I was going to make this point specifically for the right hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart), but I see that he is not in his place, so everyone else can enjoy it instead. Yes, it is time for the greatest hits of austerity—the 14 years in which the Conservatives talked and did this country down, when day-to-day spending on public services fell by nearly 17%, stripping away nearly £46 billion every year from the services our residents rely on. Members should remember that figure as I talk about austerity, because the Conservatives would fund the tax cut we are talking about today with £47 billion—a larger number than that figure from the austerity years. Look at the back-of-a-fag-packet plans that they have to make it add up. Let us remember what austerity did to our country. It left our NHS with a £10 billion repairs backlog. It left nine in 10 of our schools in urgent need of repair, with more than 230 schools with Swiss cheese for roofs, including reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete in the roof of Wood Green school in my constituency. Those pupils deserve so much better; they deserve a decent place to learn. We will make that happen—the Conservatives did not. When the pandemic struck, our public services were critically understaffed and had received critical under-investment. The result, thanks to the Conservatives’ austerity and cuts, was more than 170,000 excess deaths, putting the UK among the worst in the developed world. In that period, our precious public sector workers who give their all—nurses, teachers, carers—had their pay frozen or capped for years, leaving the average nurse more than £4,000 worse off than in 2010. The Conservatives left one in 10 workers in insecure employment, including the better part of a million on zero-hours contracts. The Conservatives’ cuts to social security pushed more families into poverty, which has resulted in 50% of children in my constituency living below the poverty line. That is every second kid—every second door when I walk around the estates that I have the honour to represent. Some 117,000 people are now living in temporary accommodation because of the money the Conservatives took out of the affordable housing building fund that today they seem so very pleased to speak in favour of.