PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE
Conduct of the Chancellor of the Exchequer - 10 December 2025 (Commons/Commons Chamber)

Before I call the shadow Chancellor to move the motion, I remind Members that, as “Erskine May” says:

“Good temper and moderation are the characteristics of parliamentary language. Parliamentary language is never more desirable than when a Member is canvassing the opinions and conduct of their opponents in debate.”

The reason that matters in this particular debate, and does not really occur in other debates, is that this debate is on a substantive motion directly relating to the conduct of the right hon. Member for Leeds West and Pudsey (Rachel Reeves). In this debate, because it is on a substantive motion of this kind, arguments intended to criticise or defend the Chancellor’s conduct relating to public finances are in order. Therefore, things may be said that the Chair would not normally permit in other proceedings. Those speaking on the motion should set out their arguments clearly. Intemperate abuse is out of order on this motion as much as on any other.

I inform the House that the Speaker has not selected the amendment. I call the shadow Chancellor to move the motion.

I beg to move,

That this House calls on the Chancellor of the Exchequer to apologise for misleading the country about the state of the public finances, rolling the pitch for raising taxes, breaking her promises and increasing welfare spending, including her claim on 4 November 2025 that the OBR would be downgrading their productivity forecast which, as the Chancellor said, had ‘consequences for the public finances too, in lower tax receipts’, when in fact on 31 October 2025 the OBR had submitted its forecast to the Chancellor that showed tax receipts would be £16 billion higher than previously thought, resulting in the Government’s current balance target being met by a margin of £4.2 billion; further calls on the Chancellor to apologise for breaching the trust of the OBR, whose forecasts are shared in strict confidence until the Chancellor has given her Budget Statement; also calls on the Chancellor to apologise for the misleading briefings and leaks from HM Treasury in advance of the Budget Statement which caused uncertainty for families, businesses and investors; and calls on the Chancellor to apologise for breaking her promise after the last Budget that the Government was not going to raise taxes again, instead raising taxes in the 2025 Budget by £26 billion.

I will, of course, heed your remonstrations and remarks, Madam Deputy Speaker.

It is said that astrologists are there to make economists look good and second-hard car dealers are there to make politicians look good. It is inconceivable that anywhere in the world there is any trade or career that could possibly make this Chancellor look good. Indeed, one need only look at the polls. The Ipsos poll on the Chancellor’s approval rating shows that she has achieved minus 60%. That is a record low for a poll that was first commenced in the 1970s. A recent YouGov poll stated that the Chancellor was the least trusted on the economy, even more so than Jeremy Corbyn and, yes, Liz Truss—

Order. We do not refer to Members by name.

You are quite right, Madam Deputy Speaker; I meant to say the right hon. Member for Islington North and Liz Truss. The Chancellor is not so much the wilting lettuce as a complete liability. How could this possibly have occurred? We have a Government who came to power with one of the largest majorities in the history of our country. One could almost see their majority from the moon. This has happened because of a huge failure on their part.

Let us take unemployment. Unemployment is now at a five-year high, back at a level last seen during the pandemic. The latest forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility show unemployment higher in every single year than in the forecasts from back in the spring. The International Monetary Fund tells us that inflation will be at the highest level of the G7 this year and next year too. Looking beneath the headline figures, the rate of inflation for food is at almost 5%. For a party that claims and professes to stand up for the poorest in our society, that is a disgrace.

When it comes to growth, we know from the OBR’s latest forecasts that, for every year going forward, growth will be lower than the spring forecast set out. Our borrowing costs not so long ago reached a 27-year high, and we are now paying more on our borrowing than Greece.

I congratulate the shadow Chancellor on finally working out what apologies are; I know he is demanding them from this side of the House. Before he carries on, will he apologise for the 15% spike in interest rates under Liz Truss, the thousands of pounds that were put on mortgages under Liz Truss, the billions that were cut from local governments under his Government and the fact that he ruined the health service under his Government? If people make mistakes they should apologise. When is he going to start?

I have had many things to say about the mini-Budget, both at the time that it happened and subsequently—and more recently too. Can I remind the hon. Gentleman that on the day of the general election, we had a near record level of employment and a near record low level of unemployment? We had the highest growth in the G7, and we had inflation bang on target at 2%. It is almost double that at present. The reason this Government have failed can be distilled to just two words: one is “deceit” and the other is “incompetence”. In the run-up to the last general election, the Labour party said that it would not put up taxes left, right and centre, and yet, within a few short months, they were to roll out £40 billion-worth of tax increases, including £25 billion by way of increased national insurance contribution taxes on employment.

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

How could I resist?

My right hon. Friend is right to put his finger on the issue of trust. It is not the 280,000 people who are not employed now compared with last year; it is not the lost opportunities for so many young people in hospitality or, indeed, the so many other areas of failure, such as the reduction in numbers of teachers. The issue that is most corrosive for this Government is a loss of trust, because we can see their mendacity from Mars.

My right hon. Friend is right. To be more accurate, we can see it even from Pluto. He is also so right about the loss of jobs in hospitality; about 90,000 jobs have been destroyed, many of them the first opportunity to get on to the career ladder that young people would otherwise have had. That is as a direct consequence of the increase in national insurance. It was not just an increase in the rate; it was a reduction in the threshold at which that tax cuts in. That disproportionately affects those on lower income, in particular women, part-time workers and, yes, young people.

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

I will in a moment.

We have seen the consequences of that up and down our country. I have spent a lot of time speaking to employers—from the large employers down to those on the high streets. They are all struggling and they do so because of the decisions that were taken by this Chancellor.

I welcome the debate and I thank the shadow Chancellor for giving way on the point about women. We are here to talk about the conduct of the most powerful woman in this country, who used her Budget to remove the rape clause, to take children out of poverty and to give justice to miners in my patch. That never would have happened without her. I welcome this moment to celebrate our Chancellor, and I thank the right hon. Gentleman for it.

I thank the hon. Lady for that passionate intervention. The best way to get people out of poverty is through work. To the point made by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell), the record of the last Government was exemplary. We had 4 million more jobs, and 800 new jobs every day under the last Conservative Government.

Were I not sat in a different place, I would be feeling déjà vu, because this appears to be the same debate that we had on the Budget just a week or so ago when I pointed out to the right hon. Gentleman that the problem we have is that two thirds of children growing up in poverty have a parent in work, when it was a third before the last Government got in. Will the right hon. Gentleman, who is a former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, like to, first, apologise for that and, secondly, reflect on why work was not a route out of poverty under his Government?

I just ask the hon. Gentleman what he thinks the effect of increasing taxes on hard-working people does for poverty. Any economist will say it drives poverty up.

There is also the question of the farm tax, with the changes under the inheritance tax regime. In the run-up to the general election, the Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, then in his shadow position, looked the National Farmers Union president Tom Bradshaw in the eye and said that, at least on that count, farmers had nothing to fear from a future Labour Government. Well, that lasted about five minutes before they changed and the Chancellor changed her position. That will cause untold misery to farmers up and down our country. It will mean that farms that have been passed down generation to generation over many years will now fall into the tax net and potentially have to be broken up.

We know that there are serious questions over this Chancellor’s alleged experience in the financial services sector. We can see that she has no experience in either industry or commerce. Perhaps the worst of her detriments, however, is her clinical lack of empathy, seeming totally unable to connect cause and effect. That is why she has allowed the disastrous—

Order. May I respectfully remind the hon. Member that comments need to be about what is in the substantive motion and not wider matters?

Indeed. In terms of that conduct and those decisions that have been made, that is most evident in the egregious family farm tax—a betrayal of the producers of our food, no less—and the, let us call it, management of market-sensitive information before the Budget, which had a material effect on the economy of these islands.

The hon. Gentleman makes excellent points, and I will come to the issue of the market-moving effects of some of the comments made by the Chancellor. On the point that he rightly raises about the impact on people’s lives, these are real jobs. These are people struggling with real businesses. These are farmers getting up early in the morning, going out, working and doing what they know to be right, yet they are weighed down by the decisions taken by the Government.

Labour said that it had no intention of means-testing the winter fuel payment. There was no mention of it in its manifesto during the last general election, yet within a very short period of time, that is precisely what it did. Before Labour Members get excited about excluding millionaires and multimillionaires from those payments, the reality is that about 80% of pensioners living below the poverty line were impacted by that decision, which would have only entrenched and driven up poverty.

One concern that I have is the repeated pattern seen with the Budget. At the time, the Government sat on an impact assessment that showed that 100,000 pensioners would be pushed into poverty and 50,000 into absolute poverty. That was the Government’s own assessment, but they did not release it to the House or the country before pushing through the policy, which we have now seen in the Budget. Does my right hon. Friend agree that this is a pattern of behaviour rather than a one-off mistake?

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Government talk a good game on poverty, but when it comes down to what they do, we see something entirely different.

On the point about what poverty means to our constituents, we are sitting in Northern Ireland with the local growth fund and the Treasury refuses to understand that the way we do things is different. We do not need 70% capital funding; we need it the other way around. That, to me, speaks to some of the substantive motion that I am comfortable to speak to, which is that it sometimes feels that the message is not getting through. Whether it is on the farm tax or the winter fuel allowance, our constituents need a Government who will listen. They promised to listen, but so far that has not been reflected.

The hon. Lady is absolutely right.

There is another change to the inheritance tax regime that will be equally as destructive as the agricultural property relief changes, and that is the business property relief changes—the tax changes relating to family firms up and down the country. I have met many of them. These are sometimes substantial businesses that have gone from having a bright outlook under the last Government to suddenly being concerned about the provisions they will now have to make to avoid being broken up as a consequence of the ruinous changes to the inheritance tax regime for those businesses. This is destroying investment, jobs and growth. That is the story of the Labour party.

On the right hon. Gentleman’s new-found concern for pensioners in poverty, the one time that the triple lock was suspended was under the Conservatives in 2021. I believe that he is on record as saying that it was unsustainable and should be replaced with a double lock. Is that still his position or does he support the triple lock?

I invite the hon. Gentleman to look back a bit further in time, before the triple lock was introduced by the Government of my party, to the time when his party was last in office. Under the last Labour Government, pensioner poverty was the fourth highest in Europe. That is why we brought in the triple lock—to clear up the mess that his party had created.

Labour also said, during the run-up to the general election, that unlike all socialist Governments in the past, it would not borrow and spend massively, yet the plan set out in its first Budget last autumn was to spend around half a trillion pounds more across the Parliament than under the plans it inherited. That was added to further in the recent Budget. Billions of pounds more are to be borrowed and spent. The consequences of that are that inflation has been stickier and higher for longer, as I have set out. It will be the highest in the G7 this year and the highest in the G7 next year. The consequences of that are that the Bank of England has had to keep interest rates higher for longer than it otherwise would have. The consequences of that—[Interruption.] Yes, there should have been more reductions—if the Government had not fuelled inflation, we would have seen interest rates coming down faster.

The reality is that increased borrowing costs have heaped pressure on people with mortgages and on businesses, and have added to the cost of servicing the huge national debt, to which the Government are readily further adding such that we are now spending £100 billion a year just to service our national debt, and that will rise to £140 billion, according to the latest Office for Budget Responsibility forecast. That is more than double what we spend on defence. If debt servicing were a Department, it would be the third largest in Whitehall, but not one looking after public services or providing the additional teachers, which, apparently the Prime Minister does not realise are not there. This is money being spent simply on paying for the profligacy of the Labour party.

I want to help out the right hon. Gentleman, because he seems a bit confused. On his party’s watch, the debt service exceeded £100 billion. When it took over, the debt service was only £30 billion, so his party tripled it. Will he apologise for mortgaging our children’s future as a result of the Conservative party’s inability to manage the public finances?

May I give the hon. Member a basic lesson in economics? In 2010, when my party came into office, we inherited a deficit at over 10% of GDP—as any economist will say, that is the amount of money being added to the debt every single year. It was over 10% on the watch of the Labour party, and that is the story of increased debt.

The debt pile as a percentage of GDP was coming down just before covid. Along with just about everybody else in the political firmament at the time of covid, the Labour party urged us to spend ever more to support the economy and to support jobs. That is precisely what we did, and of course that came with a fiscal cost.

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Three times might be a bit too much—we will come back to the hon. Gentleman later.

After the global financial crisis, which hit every country in the world, the Conservatives inherited a growing economy in 2010. I remember that it said it would wipe the deficit by the end of the 2015 Parliament, but that simply did not happen. We acknowledge the huge pressure that covid put on the economy, but we are taking steps to get the deficit and borrowing down, because it is a huge burden on the economy.

The steps, as the hon. Gentleman terms them, that his party is taking to get the deficit down are to borrow ever larger sums of money—half a trillion more than was laid out in the plans that his party inherited, and that has been added to further by the Chancellor at the last Budget.

You will recall, Madam Deputy Speaker, that after her first Budget, the Chancellor said that she would not be coming back for more tax, which brings me to the issue of her being misleading. That was clearly a misleading statement, because the recent Budget sets out that £26 billion more will be raised in tax in the year 2029-30. But £26 billion is not the extent of the increased tax rises. Because the Government have fuelled inflation, for the reasons that we have been discussing among ourselves, fiscal drag has dragged in a total of £38 billion of additional taxation in that year. The Labour party must start to understand that if it taxes and taxes and taxes the economy, it will get less growth, less productivity and less employment, and that is precisely what we are seeing.

The Labour party also said—if you recall, Madam Deputy Speaker—that the Chancellor would not be taxing hard-working people. Well, that simply was not true. By freezing the income tax thresholds for those extra years, the Chancellor is increasing taxes by £7 billion, which is a direct contradiction of what she said—with great gusto—in the previous Budget. She said that she would not do that because it would hurt hard-working people and that she would stick to her promises. Clearly, she did not mean it when she said it.

I wonder how best this behaviour can be described—as a falsehood, an untruth, a fib, a lie or a whopper, or are there other synonyms that better describe the repeated failure to do what one promises?

I thank the right hon. Member for that observation. I have been cautioned by the Chair as to the language—“misleading”—that I use, but it was clearly misleading for the Chancellor to come to the House and say that she would not be putting up taxes and that this was a one-off, as she used the expression “wipe the slate clean”, and yet be back for £26 billion more only a matter of months later.

The Chancellor also said that she would control welfare spending. Well, how did that go? The first thing that Labour did was to scrap the reforms that we had brought in—in fact, from when I was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions—that the OBR had scored as 450,000 fewer people going on to long-term sickness and disability benefits with a multibillion pound—

Will the right hon. Member give way?

I think I have a jack-in-the-box over there. A jack-in-the-box is great to observe, isn’t it? I am not sure that is the case with the hon. Gentleman, but I might take what is probably the fourth intervention from him momentarily.

The Government scrapped our plans, with the result that 450,000 people who would not have gone on to those benefits are now heading exactly in that direction. They U-turned, of course, on the botched attempt to bring in their own reforms because perhaps some Labour Members sitting here this evening refused to back them. That cost about £5 billion.

We have seen that the terms of reference for the Timms review, which is looking at reform of personal independence payments, make it explicitly clear that there will be no attempt to manage down any of the forecast numbers for that benefit within the OBR’s forecast. Labour has given up on welfare reform.

Will the right hon. Member give way?

Momentarily—I assure the hon. Gentleman that I will come to him.

What Labour has done in the meantime with this Budget is to take entirely the wrong decision, which is to tax all those hard-working people to the tune of £7 billion—a high proportion of that to transfer straight across to those who are on benefits, including scrapping the two-child cap. Those are the wrong priorities. They are about the socialist obsession with redistribution, and nothing to do with driving the incentives in the economy that grow it and make everybody better off.

We heard from Labour Back Benchers about the previous Government’s borrowing, but that was for the country as a whole—for example, covid recovery loans. We have seen with this Budget what I would call career recovery loans, which are for the benefit of two people: the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Prime Minister.

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. In her heart, I do not believe that the Chancellor really thinks the right decision was to scrap the two-child benefit cap—I genuinely do not. This is a case of the political or fiscal tail wagging the welfare dog; it is as simple as that. The Front Bench has given up on any serious welfare reform.

Of course, the Chancellor has reassured us by telling us that she has rebuilt her headroom. She has doubled the headroom against her fiscal target, though it should be pointed out—

Will the right hon. Member give way?

I will in a moment.

It should be pointed out, of course, that that is a fiddled fiscal target. It is not the fiscal target that we were working to—the same definition of debt. It is not net public sector debt at all; it is something different. In fact, if we were to apply the targets that we were running to, which were much more stringent, to the figures in the forecast that we see from the recent Budget, those targets would be underwater in every single year of that forecast.

We should acknowledge that there is now real risk to the stability of our economy, even with an apparently doubled fiscal headroom. The first risk is in defence spending. Although within the numbers, there is the ambition to reach 2.7% of GDP by 2027, there is nothing beyond that. Of course, the Government know that they will have to spend more on defence, and that every increase of 1% of GDP in defence spending is about £25 billion—more than the entire fiscal headroom that the Chancellor has set aside.

The Chancellor knows that part of the problem she had with the forecast—although other things moved strongly and positively in her direction—was the productivity growth downgrade by the OBR from 1.3% to 1%. The trend for productivity over the past 15 years has been just 0.5%. If the OBR decides in a couple of years’ time to return to an assumption of trend growth in productivity, that will wipe out £28 billion of headroom. It will destroy all the headroom and more.

Similarly, on the path of interest rates, a 1% increase in interest rates across the forecast would cost £16 billion. In relation to particular spending pressures, such as special educational needs and disabilities, there is of course a £6 billion cost pressure, because that spending will be taken from local authorities and put on to the Government’s books in 2028. How that additional cost will be met is not in any way accounted for. Similarly, apparent efficiency savings of £4 billion in 2029-30—the target year—are very handy if one is trying to hit a fiscal target, but there is no explanation whatsoever of where or how those efficiency savings will be found.

My final point is that the tax increases set out by the Chancellor are all back-ended. That is when the frozen thresholds kick in. We are expected to believe that, in the run-up to a general election, a party that has shown no resolve, backbone or capacity to take difficult decisions will suddenly find some backbone, stick to its guns and deliver those tax increases. That simply will not happen.

Nowhere is that more evident than in health, with the abolitions and redundancies in integrated care boards. Given that those redundancies cover 50% of ICB staff, we now understand that the funding is just being reprofiled into later spending in 2028-29. Is that not exactly the kind of example that my right hon. Friend is talking about? Labour will encounter real problems in the next couple of years as it tries to drive through its agenda.

The reality is that back-loading tax-paying and squeezing spending, as the Government are doing, simply pushes off the inevitable. The evidence shows that, despite its huge majority, Labour does not have the backbone or a plan to control spending and take difficult decisions, even on tax.

The Chancellor is like Mr Micawber in Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield”, who was just waiting all the time for something to turn up. Mr Micawber, as those who are familiar with the story will recall, not only ruined himself through his inability to manage his own finances, but ended up ruining another person, too. The Chancellor, with her inability to manage the public finances, will, I am afraid, be the ruin of our nation. For most of us, Christmas will be not so much a question of “Great Expectations”, but one of “Bleak House”. I give way to the hon. Member for Southend West and Leigh (David Burton-Sampson), who has been very patient.

The shadow Chancellor wants to talk about fiction, so let us talk about the Liz Truss Budget. Before we do, though, imagine if the Chancellor had turned up to deliver her Budget with headroom of £4.2 billion—£2.2 billion below what is set out by the stability rules. That would have been fiction. But she did not do that; she took the fiscally responsible decision to create headroom of £21.7 billion, which covers us for future financial shocks. Does the shadow Chancellor not agree?

Well, no. The reason there is the obsession with fiscal headroom is that this is the Chancellor who set up too little back in the day, blew it all, had to rebuild it, blew it all, and has had to rebuild it again. That is why the markets are so sensitive to fiscal headroom. The fact that the Chancellor is now saying that she needs £22.5 billion as fiscal headroom against her primary current Budget target is evidence of the fact that she had woefully too little back at the time of the first Budget, when she had £9.9 billion. That is the moral of the story.

The political reality is that this Government have been dead in the water since they failed to get their very modest reduction in the rate of growth of the benefits bill through Parliament earlier in the year. We saw the ridiculous nonsense in the Budget when, having sacked and suspended Back Benchers after the previous Budget because they voted to end the two-child limit, the Chancellor came back with this great triumphal announcement that she was going to do it for them. May I entreat my right hon. Friend to give way one more time to the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) so that he can give us an explanation of his socks?

I think the less said about the socks the better, Madam Deputy Speaker.

They’re more interesting than your speech.

Yes, not bad, but I have to say that the tie runs in a close second—that is pretty shocking too.

I now turn from the substance of the Budget to the chaotic pantomime that we had in the run-up to the Budget? We had every possible kite flown by the Treasury as to which taxes were potentially going up. We had so many kites that they blotted out the sun, and the long shadow of all that chaos swept across businesses who stopped investing, and consumers who stopped spending. Members should not take my word for that; Andy Haldane, the former chief economist at the Bank of England, observed that all that speculation made businesses and consumers “hunker down”. It had real economic consequences.

Will my right hon. Friend give way on that point?

I will take one final intervention, and there is none better than my right hon. Friend.

My right hon. Friend is being very generous. The truth is that through dither, delay and changing their mind, the Labour Government in the run-up to the Budget had a real impact on people’s lives. Does he agree that pensioners in particular were encouraged to withdraw funds from their pension funds, which will have an impact on them for many years to come? What does he think of the remarks of Michael Summersgill, the chief executive officer of AJ Bell, who said that millions and billions of pounds were withdrawn from pension funds precisely because of the changing mind of the Chancellor of the Exchequer expressed before the Budget?

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right, which is why that behaviour was so irresponsible. There are people who would have drawn down on their pensions because they were extremely concerned about what was being briefed out by the Treasury as to what changes may be coming down the line, and about their ability to do so after the Budget. We also had people leaving the country because they were worried about an exit tax, which was another kite flown by the Treasury. That grossly irresponsible behaviour had real-life impacts in the real economy.

When it comes to misleading, there is much to consider in the complete mismanagement of the run-up to this Budget. That is not just my view. Indeed, a member of the Cabinet was quoted in the press saying,

“the handling of this Budget has been a disaster from start to finish.”

The impression that has been given is that there was a deliberate attempt to paint an inaccurate picture of the public finances, designed to give political cover for Labour’s plans for more taxes and more welfare spending. The Chancellor delivered a pre-Budget statement in Downing Street on 4 November in which she said that the OBR would be downgrading its productivity forecast, meaning lower tax receipts, but she failed to mention that in reality the OBR’s forecast had already shown her four days earlier that overall tax receipts were £16 billion higher—not lower—than previously thought. To quote the OBR’s Budget report:

“In isolation, the reduction in productivity growth could have lowered revenues by around £16 billion in 2029-30. However, the boost to receipts from higher inflation and changes to the composition of nominal GDP growth…more than offset this.”

Ministers have pointed out that there was a need to increase headroom, but that was not the justification for tax rises that was being made before the Budget, and it is an admission that the headroom that the Chancellor left in her first two fiscal events was inadequate and irresponsible. Crucially, it also fails to acknowledge that a significant proportion of the increase in taxes was used to fund policy decisions to spend more on welfare.

On 14 November, the media were briefed that a plan to increase income tax rates had been dropped following an improved forecast from the OBR. We now know that that was simply untrue. The finalised pre-measures forecast came weeks before this, on 31 October. That is why it is vital that the Financial Conduct Authority investigates the briefings and leaks that went on, and I have written to it again this week on that matter. Even after the Budget, in a Guardian interview, the Chancellor said that income tax rises had remained on the table well into November,

“because we didn’t know the size of the downgrade, the productivity”.

Again, that is simply untrue.

We now know that at no point was there a deficit of the scale suggested to the media. We know that because the OBR felt it necessary to take the unprecedented step of publishing its forecast rounds in full. The question remains as to why Ministers seem to have been so unconcerned about what was appearing in the press, when the OBR has now revealed that the alarm was being raised before the Budget. The reality is that the briefings and leaks were a smokescreen designed to distract from the real reason that taxes were going up, the utter weakness of this Labour Government and the need to buy off their Back Benchers with yet more welfare spending.

In the process, the uncertainty and speculation fuelled by the Treasury had an impact on families and on growth. As my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison) rightly pointed out, people made decisions about their finances. They locked in higher mortgage rates, and businesses put off making investments and hiring workers. The British public have been left worse off and they have been misled. They deserve an apology, and they deserve much better than this weak and irresponsible Government.

I thank the Opposition for giving me another opportunity to remind Conservative Members how the Budget cut the cost of living, cut NHS waiting lists and cut Government borrowing.

I have seen the shadow Chancellor across the Dispatch Box so much in recent weeks, on what feels like a daily basis, that I might almost miss him over the recess—almost. No matter how many times I have seen him across the Dispatch Box, he has shown that he does not want to talk about the fact that this Budget takes £150 off energy bills, freezes rail fares and prescription charges, lifts 550,000 children out of poverty, increases our headroom to £21.7 billion, and gets debt falling and cuts borrowing in every year. This Budget invests in our NHS, our defence, our roads and our railways, and in every region and nation of the UK. The Conservatives do not want to talk about the substance of the Budget because they can see that the Chancellor has delivered a Budget that delivers for working people.

I did not expect the Minister to give way. He says that energy bill payers in the UK are now £150 better off, forgetting that energy bills are currently almost £600 higher than Labour promised they would be at the election. Ofgem has come in with an additional £108 for infrastructure charges. Energy bills will go up again in January and again in April. Does he want to reflect on what he has said? Is that really the record on which he is standing?

I am unclear whether the hon. Gentleman supports our £150 off energy bills and our extra £150 off for those 6 million households on the lowest income. That will benefit people right across the UK with the cost of living challenges they face. We know that that is what matters to people right across Britain.

Instead of focusing on what this Budget means for people across Britain, we heard the shadow Chancellor’s comments on a motion that focuses so much on process. While I accept that process is very important, it has been covered extensively in recent weeks—indeed, most recently by the Chancellor in the Treasury Committee this morning—so let me put on record our response to the motion and to the comments that the shadow Chancellor made about process.

Let me begin by again addressing the speech that the Chancellor made on 4 November. When the Chancellor addressed the country that morning, her purpose was simple: to give the British people an honest sense of the circumstances we were facing and the principles that would guide her as she took decisions at the Budget. She wanted to highlight the challenges that our country was facing and her priorities in the face of those challenges, and that is exactly what she did.

Following the OBR’s review of productivity—the review of the impact of 14 years of the Conservatives being in power—the Chancellor knew that we faced a downgrade. To understand the scale of the impact, members of the Opposition need only to consult the Budget document. There, they will see that the OBR’s productivity review, which covered the Conservatives’ time in office, reduces

“the amount of revenue the OBR expects the government to collect by around £16 billion in 2029-30.”

I think it is the dishonesty that is catching at everybody’s throat. A year ago at the Budget, the Chancellor said that she was not going to freeze income tax thresholds because—I think I quote—it would be an additional tax on working people, and therefore in breach of the Labour manifesto. A year later, she did exactly that, and then claimed that it was not a breach of the Labour manifesto. That is rank dishonesty. That is why Madam Deputy Speaker is allowing language that would not normally be used in this Chamber: because this motion and this Government mean we have to address issues that normally do not occur.

The right hon. Gentleman is mistaken. We have kept to our manifesto commitment not to raise the rates of income tax, national insurance on working people, and VAT. We also said in our manifesto that we would keep taxes on working people as low as possible, and we have been able to do that only because of the other fair and necessary choices that the Chancellor made on taxation.

Will the Minister give way?

I will give way if the right hon. Gentleman will tell us whether he supports our changes to council tax on high-value properties.

On the issue of the manifesto, will the Minister confirm that it does not say that it would not raise the income tax rates? It just says that it would not raise those taxes. The word “rates” is not in there. It is that that is misleading. It is that that makes everyone outside throw things at their television, because they are disgusted by a Government who cannot face up to simple truths!

The word “rates” is definitely in there. The manifesto talks about the income tax rates and additional, main and higher rates of income tax, and it is very clear that we were talking about the rates of tax on working people. As I said, the manifesto also says that we will keep taxes on working people as low as possible. I note that the right hon. Gentleman did not take my suggestion to comment on some of the other tax choices we took at the Budget—the fair and necessary choices. The Opposition are picking and choosing what they want to refer to in the Budget. The Budget is a package. If they do not like it, they should explain what they would do instead.

On the matter of picking and choosing, the right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that on 4 November, the Chancellor did point out that there was a downgrade in productivity; we now know that to be £16 billion, and she knew that at the time. Does the right hon. Gentleman accept, however, that she did not mention—it was omission—the upgrade to the number, which was twice as much as that £16 billion, and that she thereby gave an inaccurate reflection of the state of the public finances at that time?

The Chancellor set out the productivity review that was under way by the OBR. In fact, if the right hon. Gentleman consults the OBR document published on Budget day, he will see in black and white that the productivity downgrade reduced tax receipts by £16 billion. The Chancellor was clear in her speech on 4 November that this, combined with the clear need to increase headroom to build resilience in public finances, would require everyone to contribute, and that is what happened.

The right hon. Gentleman had a very long time to comment earlier in this debate—I may give way to him later.

The Minister is a reasonable man, and I imagine that he would subscribe to the Government’s much-vaunted duty of candour that they are selling in their Public Office (Accountability) Bill, which is currently in Committee. The Bill is so important to the Government that the Prime Minister himself had to introduce it on Second Reading. Will the Minister examine what has happened over the past couple of months? Does he really believe that the Treasury, and in particular the Chancellor of the Exchequer, can truly be said to have discharged that duty of candour in their dealings?

As the right hon. Gentleman should know, this Government take our responsibilities to public office incredibly seriously, and we have made sure we focus on that in the way we conduct ourselves in office. In speaking to people on 4 November, the Chancellor was setting out the challenges that we knew we were facing and the principles that would guide her in approaching decisions ahead of the Budget. It was important to set out the priorities she would have in taking her decisions on Budget day.

The right hon. Gentleman is being very generous with his time. Does he accept that on 4 November, the Chancellor knew that there was an upgrade to the state of the public finances of around £32 billion due to additional tax, inflation and other factors? If he does accept that, could he explain to the House why no mention whatsoever was made of that fact by the Chancellor?

What the Chancellor knew when she gave her speech on 4 November was that headroom stood at a precarious £4.2 billion, and that was before previously announced policy measures had been accounted for. As I have said before in this House, and as Professor Miles of the OBR said to the Treasury Committee, that was a very challenging fiscal situation. If I had been at this Dispatch Box trying to justify a headroom of £4.2 billion or less, that would have been completely indefensible. Doing nothing was not an option—£4.2 billion of headroom would have been insufficient and deeply irresponsible.

In her speech at the beginning of November, the Chancellor was clear that she would seek to build more resilient public finances, with headroom to withstand global turbulence. She set out her priorities for the Budget, and those priorities were exactly what the Budget delivered. The apparent astonishment of Conservative Members that a Government could set out circumstances honestly, explain their approach and then deliver as promised is very telling—it must be an alien concept that they never considered during their time in office. As the Chancellor set out on 4 November and then delivered in her Budget, she wanted to cut NHS waiting lists, and that is exactly what we are doing. Waiting lists are already down by 230,000, with an extra 5 million appointments delivered since the election and 250 new neighbourhood health centres on the way.

One of the things I am most proud of—having stood on doorstep after doorstep in Tipton, Wednesbury and Coseley at the general election, hearing people tell the dreadful stories of how long they and their relatives had been waiting for hospital treatment—is the 45% fall in people waiting more than a year for their operation in the Black Country, in our hospital trusts. I am glad the Chancellor made the decisions she did in the last Budget that have enabled that.

I thank my hon. Friend for talking about the experience of her constituents. She is absolutely right that the NHS is so important to all of us, and it is so important for the Chancellor to protect it in the Budget. The decisions she took protect our investment in the NHS in order to get it back on its feet, which will improve people’s experiences right across the country.

On the topic of the NHS, the point I made in the previous debate is really important. The investment in the NHS is not just an investment in buildings; it is an investment in people, including working people. I have lots of people in my constituency who are self-employed—sole traders, as we call them. Does my right hon. Friend agree that those people having to wait years for an NHS appointment is bad for the economy and bad for their pockets?

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that although improving the NHS is a clear priority, because of all of our experiences and because of our reliance on it to keep ourselves and our families healthy. Investing in the NHS is also an economic investment, because people being out of the workforce due to ill health is a serious drag on our economy—that is the situation we inherited from the previous Government. Our investment in the health service and our desire to get the NHS back on its feet is the right thing to do, not just for families across the country but for economic growth.

Will the Minister give way?

I will give way one more time, and then make some progress.

On the same topic, the way this Budget was handled has undermined public confidence in North Norfolk in many ways, few more so than the fact it produced radio silence on our long-pledged dental school at the University of East Anglia. Does the Minister agree that if the Treasury had spent a little less time on its fiscal fandango and more time on delivering dentistry improvements in North Norfolk, this Budget might have gone down better with many of my local residents?

I would take the hon. Gentleman more seriously if he spent a little less time opposing the decisions we take on tax to fund public services, because we are taking fair and necessary decisions on tax precisely to fund the NHS and the other public services on which we all rely.

I have set out at length what we are doing to protect the NHS, but the Chancellor’s second priority going into the Budget was to tackle the cost of living, and that is exactly what we are doing. At this Budget, the Chancellor chose to freeze rail fares for the first time in 30 years, to extend bus fare caps, to freeze prescription charges, to increase the basic and new state pension, to raise the minimum and living wages, to extend the fuel duty cut, to help more than half a million children who would otherwise live in poverty, and to save the average household £150 off their energy bills. As the Bank of England deputy governor told Members yesterday, this Budget will reduce inflation by between 0.4% and 0.5%.

The Chancellor’s final priority going into the Budget was to cut our national debt and Government borrowing, and that is exactly what we are doing.

The Conservatives have spent a lot of this debate saying that apologies are due from the Government, yet under them £11 billion of taxpayers’ money was lost in covid fraud. Does the Minister agree that if an apology is due from any party in the House, it is them?

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Sorry seems to be the hardest word to say for Opposition Members when it comes to covid fraud, the state in which they left the NHS, the Liz Truss mini-Budget and everything they did to public services and our economy, writing off the next generation and vast swathes of our nation. They should stand up and say sorry.

The priority for the Chancellor at the Budget was also to make sure that we cut our national debt and Government borrowing. Because of choices that the Chancellor made at the Budget, borrowing will fall as a share of GDP in every year of this forecast. Net financial debt will be falling as a share of GDP by the end of this Parliament, and will be lower by the end of the forecast than when we came into office. As I have said already, our headroom now stands at £21.7 billion, meeting our stability rule a year early, giving businesses the confidence to invest and leaving Government freer to act when the situation calls for it.

Whatever mischief the Conservatives try to make and however personal they make their attacks, the truth is that the Chancellor was clear about the challenges the country faces. She set out her priorities in taking those challenges head-on, and she delivered a Budget that meets the priorities of the British people now and in the future.

As usual, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury is out here defending the Chancellor. I feel quite sorry for him. He has reeled off a number of policies that his Chancellor and his Government have made a choice about, but before the election, the Chancellor said that those choices would be on the back of a fully costed manifesto. Instead, taxes have gone up to pay for those choices, and that means that the manifesto was not fully costed. The motion therefore is correct, is it not, that the Chancellor misled the country before the election and in this Budget?

The hon. Gentleman said he feels sorry for me—he needn’t. I am proud to be defending a Labour Budget in this Chamber. Frankly, I might repay the sympathies to him: I feel sorry for him to be stuck on the Opposition Benches, where I fear he may be for a long time.

The other point of process in the motion, to which the shadow Chancellor referred in his comments, is speculation ahead of the Budget. Let me start by addressing the premature publication of the “Economic and fiscal outlook”. We know that the EFO is a highly sensitive document, which is obviously not meant to be published until after the Chancellor has finished presenting the Budget to the House. The fact that it was accessed online before she began her Budget speech was a serious matter.

The Minister refers to the accidental or deliberate release of this information, but we know that on 14 November the press were briefed, clearly with incorrect information. Will he confirm to this House today who gave authority for that press briefing to go ahead, which misled not only the press, but the country?

I think the hon. Gentleman is incorrect in what he said. He said that I may have implied the premature publication was deliberate; I certainly did not. It is none the less a serious matter, which is why we are responding to it with the commensurate seriousness that it deserves. We know that the OBR rightly took responsibility for this mistake, and soon afterwards—while we were discussing the matter at these Dispatch Boxes last Monday—its chair, Richard Hughes, resigned. That, of course, is a matter for Mr Hughes, and is his decision. The Chancellor wrote to him to thank him for his professionalism and dedication. Many Members and I have made clear our gratitude for his work as a public servant. Nonetheless, it was a serious breach, and the Government are acting with seriousness in response.

I read the OBR report with interest. One of its recommendations that caught my attention was this:

“We recommend that the process for publishing the EFOs…should immediately be removed from the locally managed website and conducted in an environment more appropriate to the nature of the task”.

May I ask the Chief Secretary, or his Treasury colleagues, to find out whether “immediately” means that that has been done?

My hon. Friend is right to point out that the OBR’s report contains a series of recommendations. It was, in fact, published within a few days of the premature publication. We are acting on its recommendations, including the recommendation that we should determine whether this has happened before, at previous fiscal events. While the OBR indicated that it might have happened earlier this year, at the time of the spring statement, it did not look into previous fiscal events, either under this Chancellor or under Chancellors in the last Government. We are looking into that to find out what happened.

More widely, beyond the EFO and the OBR, we put the utmost weight on Budget security, as I told the House last week. That is why, as I have told the House, a leak inquiry is under way, with the full support of the Chancellor and the whole team at the Treasury. In addition, the permanent secretary to the Treasury will conduct a review of its security processes, which will inform future fiscal events. The Budget security review will happen in the new year, and we will publish the outcome once it has concluded. More immediately, however, while recognising the seriousness of what happened with the OBR’s forecast, we remain fully committed to working with an independent OBR, and we recognise its vital role as a core part of our fiscal framework. The Government will soon launch a competitive external recruitment process to appoint a new chair, subject to the consent of the Treasury Committee. In the meantime, Professor David Miles and Tom Josephs will jointly lead the OBR until the new chair is in place.

I am happy to come here every day to explain the decisions that we took in the Budget in the interests of the British people. It is clear that the Conservatives do not want to talk about £150 off energy bills, freezes in prescription charges and rail fares, our investment in our NHS, and the fact that we are cutting debt. They do not want to confront the fact that this is a Budget that not only delivers for Britain, but does so in challenging times. It is a Budget that invests in Britain, supports the NHS, helps people with the cost of living, and gets our debt and borrowing down. It is a Budget delivered by a Chancellor who takes challenges head-on, makes the right decisions for our country, and meets the priorities of the British people. It is a Budget from a Government who will not let Britain’s future be defined by the failures of Governments past. This is a Budget that we are proud of, and we reject the Opposition motion.

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

It is a real delight to speak in this debate, because I honestly thought that I would not get the chance. There was a risk, I thought, that the shadow Chancellor might even filibuster in his own Opposition day debate, much as I enjoy his poetry readings and so forth.

We all know that the Budget process was a bit of a mess. It had more leaks than a sieve, lots of flip-flopping, and all the rest. By the time we got to Budget day, many of us were relieved that the process was over. But let us not pretend that this was all new. Previous Budgets had involved a number of leaks, and we all know that the Liz Truss mini-Budget must surely be the gold standard for sidelining the OBR.

What with the Chancellor’s flip-flopping on the Budget, the various leaks and the misleading comments about the state of the public finances, Labour is beginning to look as incompetent as the Conservatives in its running of the economy and the Government. Does my hon. Friend agree that Labour has let the public down, and must start being transparent with us all?

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. I agree with him: transparency is critical. On transparency, we Liberal Democrats think that it is time to overhaul this entire process. Colleagues will know that when Sweden faced a similar crisis in its Budget process in the 1990s, it overhauled the process, and it now has a system in which a draft Budget is published. There is a lot of time for it to be debated, and amendments can be tabled by Opposition parties before the process is concluded. The public would welcome such transparency; it would then be incumbent on the Government and all Opposition parties to set out how they would fund their pledges, raise revenue and manage Government spending.

These debates over the last few weeks have raised questions about the role of the OBR, and I want to put it on the record that we Liberal Democrats think that we should keep the OBR. It plays an important role as an independent organisation that can scrutinise the Treasury, but there is scope for more democratic accountability, and to tease out the divergence between forecasts by the OBR and the Treasury.

I am slightly perplexed to see that the Opposition day motion focuses on process, not policy, and that it promotes spin over substance. This Budget has levied stealth taxes on households and on our high streets, and has fundamentally failed to galvanise growth. Maybe it is obvious to people at home why the Conservatives have not tried to focus on the substance: because those stealth taxes were started by the Conservatives and have been carried on by Labour. The Conservatives failed to fix the business rates system, and Labour has not taken forward fundamental change. It is clear that both parties continue to refuse to go for growth with Europe.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone) asked a very reasonable and legitimate question about why the Treasury has not said whether it will provide funding for dental training places in his county and for his constituents. That was a legitimate question to ask, so I was disappointed that the Minister tried to say, in response, that we have not supported his tax rises, when we Liberal Democrats have repeatedly, over the last year and more, set out the different ways in which we would raise taxes, including by reforming capital gains tax, looking at other taxes and a windfall tax on the big banks, as recommended by the Institute for Public Policy Research and endorsed by independent economists. We have also set out how getting a customs union with the European Union would boost public finances by £25 billion a year. [Interruption.] I understand that the Minister and those on the Treasury Bench who are chuntering right now may wish to level their accusation at the Conservative party, but that does not stack up when talking to the Liberal Democrats.

Is the hon. Lady as frustrated as I am to hear the normally temperate Chief Secretary to the Treasury chuntering, “Do you agree with our taxes?”, as though there is only one way to raise fiscal revenues, and as though if we do not agree with Labour, we have got it wrong? That would be ironic, because there are many ways to raise taxes. Is she, like businesses across Scotland, concerned that this Government have taken £66 billion out of the real economy, with no care for what that will do to growth?

I am concerned about the impact of this Budget on businesses, and particularly about business rates.

We have been very clear that we are trying to be a party of constructive opposition. In last year’s Budget, it was clear that the jobs tax would raise £10 billion, once we had adjusted for spending, for rebates for the NHS and education, and for changes to behaviour—not the £25 billion that the Government claimed. We set out a number of proposals that could have raised that £10 billion. We Liberal Democrats welcomed the Government raising remote gaming duty in this Budget, because that was in our manifesto at the last general election. I absolutely agree with the hon. Member for Angus and Perthshire Glens (Dave Doogan) that there are other ways of raising taxes, and we hope that the Government look at some of our proposals, including our ideas for reforming capital gains tax, which would be a fairer way of raising revenue. It would raise more money from the 0.1% of the population who are super-wealthy.

Let me make a point before the hon. Lady makes it herself: the jobs tax is a peculiarly misconceived tax. It is a £25 billion or £26 billion hit on the real economy, with all the lost jobs that we have seen as a result, and it does not even raise much money. Looking at all the negative impacts in the round, it may actually raise even less than £10 billion. There is a £25 billion or £26 billion hit, and the measure potentially raises less than £10 billion. It is economic madness, and it shows why the Government need to think more deeply.

I agree with the right hon. Gentleman that the jobs tax has been damaging. I say to Treasury Ministers that the combination of the jobs tax and higher business rates bills will have a profound impact on the very small businesses on our high streets, and our high streets are critical to our communities. Most ordinary folk do not follow the statistics on growth, unemployment, GDP and everything else; when they walk out their front door and look at their high street, they decide how they would answer the question, “Is the economy working in our area?”. It is so vital that we support our high streets.

On that point, I genuinely urge Ministers to look again at the multiplier for retail, hospitality and leisure businesses. They talk in a very technical way about one element of the bills and continue to say that the rates are coming down. They have come down by 5p for retail, hospitality and leisure businesses, but Ministers gave themselves the power to reduce them by 20p. However, businesses heard “lower business rates”. They did not think about the technicality of how the rates are calculated; they just heard the word “lower”, and made decisions on that basis—but bills are now higher, and they are really struggling.

I have said it before, and I will say it again: we cannot tax our way to prosperity; we have to grow our way to prosperity. We hope very much that, as Ministers move ahead on this debate, they not only reform the OBR and Budget process, so we have more transparency in this House, but think again about going for growth with Europe.

It is a pleasure to speak in this Opposition day debate. I would say that it is the first time I have spoken in a while, but I did so about two hours ago. [Interruption.] I am already getting heckled.

I thank both my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and the shadow Chancellor for their different but equally engaging styles of beginning a debate. I was a little disappointed the shadow Chancellor did not give me any Shakespeare quotes, but he did refer to Dickens at the end.

On Dickens, whom the shadow Chancellor mentioned, Mr Bumble, a minor parish official, was described as having

“a great idea of his oratorical powers and his importance”.

Does that suggest to my hon. Friend anyone in the Chamber?

I thank my hon. Friend, but I must disagree with him, because my next point was to say, in all sincerity, that I am a little bit disappointed with the Opposition motion, which I feel is particularly targeted at an individual. I recognise that the motion is about the Chancellor’s position and does not name her, so there is an attempt to talk about the role that she holds, rather than the individual. However, I just do not like the way that the motion singles out a particular person. I think it could have been worded in a way that made it more about the Budget process—but that is my view. I say that because I feel very strongly about the importance of political debate, but as I hope the Opposition have seen, I always try to avoid political attacks on individuals, and to be honest, the motion makes me feel uneasy.

I share the hon. Gentleman’s appreciation of the fact that the motion is about the post and role of a Minister, not about a local MP and a person. However, while he is dishing out sympathy and empathy, can I encourage him to think of his constituents and mine who are disabled, who thought for the longest time that they were going to lose their livelihood until the Government U-turned on that policy? Can I encourage him to worry about family business owners, who now have no idea how they will afford to pass their local growth-generating business on to the next generation—not to mention farmers, who are now scared to die?

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I do not think I could ever be accused of being devoid of sympathy. I became an MP because I genuinely and passionately care about making a positive difference to people’s lives. In fact, as Members across the House know, I previously worked in the charity sector and as a teacher. I got involved in those jobs because I wanted to make a positive difference to people’s lives.

One of the big things in the Budget—before I go completely off my speech—is the scrapping of the two-child cap. I recognise the concerns raised by Opposition Members about increased welfare spending—although, it went up on their watch too—but when I am presented with the statistic that over 1,000 young people will be taken out of poverty as a result of that policy, I find it very difficult to ignore.

On a lighter note, I would like to state—there will be collective relief across the House—that no members of my immediate or extended family have ever worked for the Treasury or the OBR. That said, like many Members across the House, particularly on the Labour Benches—I am glad that the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper), mentioned this too—I value the work done by the OBR and, in particular, its independence. Of course, as many Members have mentioned, it is extremely disappointing that the OBR’s “Economic and fiscal outlook” was prematurely accessed by external users before the Chancellor’s speech on Budget day. I am really pleased that the OBR responded to that very quickly. In its own words:

“It is also important to note that the EFO contains market-sensitive information, i.e. information that is not public and could have a material impact on financial markets. This is why, in the run-up to the delivery of the Budget, any leaks concerning the OBR’s forecasts, whether accurate (as in this case) or inaccurate, whether inadvertent (as in this case) or deliberate, are to be greatly deplored.”

This is a good Budget for residents and families in Harlow, with rail fare freezes; prescription fee freezes; additional investment in our local NHS, which I have covered previously, and which had sadly been neglected; a rise in the minimum wage; a rise in the state pension—yes, a brief mention of my mother, who is delighted—and, for the vast majority of residents in Harlow who do not own a property worth over £2 million, no increase in tax.

We saw in 2022 what happens when the OBR is bypassed in the Budget-setting process, but we must ensure that the IT that backs up this non-departmental public body is fit for purpose and that such mistakes do not happen again.

I think it was Gladstone who said that the first duty of a statesman is to be honest. Is the hon. Gentleman, who I think would be recognised across the House as someone for whom honesty is a natural state, entirely comfortable with the Chancellor cherry-picking the confidential briefing from the OBR in that 4 November speech and not setting out the full circumstances that she was then aware of?

The right hon. Gentleman will be aware that the OBR was very confident that the Chancellor did not mislead in the statement she put out, and I am confident about that.

The Chancellor was consistent in her priorities for this Budget: tackling the cost of living crisis, bringing down waiting times and cutting borrowing. It cannot be right that £1 in every £10 is being spent on interest payments alone. We cannot go back to the austerity we have seen, with schools and hospitals that would literally fall apart.

I would like to finish with two quotes. The first is from Margaret Thatcher:

“I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means that they have not a single political argument left.”

And finally, to quote Dickens:

“charity begins at home, but justice begins next door”.

I call the Chair of the Treasury Committee, Dame Harriett Baldwin.

I am the former Chair of that Committee, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I appreciate the chance to make a couple of additional points.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Central Devon (Sir Mel Stride) set out an extensive case. In the speech I made right after the Budget, I mentioned that shenanigans had happened with regard to the Budget. I think we are beginning to find out a bit more about what those shenanigans were. The OBR has published a full analysis of the error that led to it publishing the Budget before it was delivered by the Chancellor.

On 1 December, the chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility rightly resigned for that technical breach. I think he showed real leadership, and I thank him for his service. However, it has distracted us from a much more serious breach that happened. The Chancellor clarified this morning in evidence to the Treasury Committee that there are, apparently, two categories of leaks from the Treasury: authorised leaks and unauthorised leaks. We are going to hear a report from the permanent secretary about the unauthorised leaks, but I think the authorised leaks also need focus.

Let us face it: this all started in the run-up to the general election, when the Chancellor promised many, many times not to raise taxes. Then, in what was probably one of the greatest robberies since Ronnie Biggs and the great train robbery, she managed to increase taxes by £40 billion a year in her first Budget, before increasing them by a further £26 billion a year in this recent Budget.

Will the hon. Lady give way?

I would love to, but I am going to try to really race through what I have to say.

There is a track record here of saying one thing and then doing another. What we see is a revealed preference from our Chancellor for tax hikes. She was unable to deliver the welfare reforms she sought, and she has been unable to deliver much in the way of savings from any Department, so she is always going to go for tax hikes. We have seen that in her behaviour, despite her assurances to the contrary.

I just want to point out how damaging all this speculation has been to decision makers in the British economy. These authorised leaks have led to changes in behaviour across the UK economy; people have made real-world, real-life decisions. Now we know that at every fiscal event during this Parliament the Chancellor will have a default position to tax more: to tax homes more; to tax cars more; to tax pensions more; to tax savings more; to tax jobs; to tax the farm that farmers want to pass on to their children; to tax anything she can justify.

That is the lasting legacy of this period of shenanigans, selective leaking and manipulating behaviour. I believe it has done lasting damage to our Chancellor, and we are right to condemn her conduct today.

Order. We will start the winding-up speeches at 6.40 pm.

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate. This is clearly a serious moment for our country—perhaps the most serious moment in a hundred years. We are threatened by existential crises: the affordability crisis, with the far right on the march; the climate crisis, with a planet that is burning; and a military crisis in Europe. Any one of those crises would pose a massive danger. On top of that, we are a nation that is deeply divided. The question for this House is whether the Budget will help us to meet those challenges. That is why I am surprised that the Opposition’s motion focuses so much on process, rather than on the things that actually matter to the country.

I have seen hard budgets before, in this country and elsewhere. When I lived and worked in Somaliland, it experienced the most serious drought in living memory. The choice in that budget was between feeding children and paying soldiers. I have seen hard budgets and Chancellors having to make difficult decisions. Now, as then, we are facing a difficult, existential and dramatic moment for our country.

The point about this Budget, and about this Government, is to help us to meet those moments. How do we make life affordable? How do we stop the planet burning? How do we prepare for war so that we can prevent it? Those are the questions before us, and those are the questions the Chancellor addressed in this Budget. That is why we are here: to take each of those challenges in turn.

The first challenge is affordability. Yes, that is about taking £150 off people’s energy bills, but it is also about creating good jobs across the country by building the homes that we need. It is about increasing social security payments for the poorest people in this country so that children do not go hungry.

The second challenge is the climate. Of course that is about the investment we are making publicly and reducing emissions, but it is also about leadership. That does not just mean political leadership, with us saying to other nations, “Yes, we are doing our part to reduce emissions”; we can also sell our innovations around the world and help other countries reduce their emissions as well.

Finally, and most importantly, given the news that we are hearing from across Europe, this nation must prepare for war in order to prevent it. I remind Conservative Members that it was a Prime Minister from their Benches—perhaps this nation’s greatest Prime Minister—who spoke of the dangers of not preparing for war, of the years that the locust hath eaten, and of the things that his generation did not do. He spoke of those dangers, yet the most dramatic and destructive war in the history of humankind followed. I say politely and with good will to Conservative Members that perhaps those are the things they could have focused on today; perhaps that is what is important at this moment for our country.

Britain is hurting: families are cutting back, bills are soaring, and inflation is twice the Bank’s target. Just last month, the Chancellor claimed that she had no choice but to raise taxes on working people, and in true Harry Enfield style she blamed the Tories, the Tories, the Tories—and, of course, the OBR.

On the subject of honesty—the thread that runs through today’s debate—it is worth me returning to my earlier exchange with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, in which I said that the Labour manifesto did not specify that it was the rates of the taxes that would rise. I was quite wrong, and the Minister was correct. I would like to apologise to him and the House for getting that incorrect.

The OBR told the Chancellor in October that tax receipts were £16 billion higher than expected. She knew that but suggested otherwise. That is not spin or sophisticated political communications; it is deceit, and it does matter.

Will the right hon. Member give way?

I have very limited time, so forgive me but I will not.

It matters because the Chancellor has a nearly £3 trillion debt to service, and because trust is everything. Because the policies that are being implemented and the promises that were made by the Chancellor are at such variance, the markets—unlike in any other western nation, I believe —have put a higher and higher cost on borrowing for this country. That has very real-world impacts. Investors from Beverley to Berlin need to believe what the Chancellor says. After all, “credit” comes from the Latin “credo”, meaning “I believe”. If that belief falters, borrowing costs rise and more of our taxes go to paying lenders instead of funding the priorities of the British people. When trust goes, growth goes. Investors hesitate, businesses hold back and families feel the pinch.

The Chancellor appears to have learnt nothing from last year’s Budget of broken promises. It was a Budget that brought higher unemployment, fewer businesses and lower growth. She did not learn from that first exercise. As the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper) pointed out, the weakness of the jobs tax is not just that it will hurt growth; it does not even raise much money. It was peculiarly poorly thought through.

This year’s Budget repeated more of the same. The British people know that the way to tackle the cost of living is by getting people into work, not increasing the number of people on welfare; and by creating opportunity, not dependency. But Britain has a Chancellor who talks about helping working people while making it harder to work, to save and to succeed—and throwing the OBR under the bus while she is at it. That is not a vision for the future, and it is certainly not leadership; it is fantasy dressed up as policy, and the people of Beverley and Holderness can see right through it.

Labour came to power promising change. Unfortunately, change has been delivered, but it is not what we were promised. We have 280,000 more people on the unemployment register, more than 200,000 businesses have closed, and 5,000 people are signing off sick every single day, because of the decisions made by this Labour Government. People are angry about the impact of Labour policy, but my constituents tell me that they are particularly angry about feeling misled. I hope I have shown my own candour in addressing my earlier error, for which I apologise again. Can we Members of this House try to speak honestly and accurately, and not gaslight or mislead?

I call James Wild to wind up.

This is a rare and serious conduct motion that calls on the Chancellor of the Exchequer to apologise for misleading the country about the state of the public finances, breaking promises on tax and breaching the OBR confidentiality process—in short, for not being straight with the British people.

I was expecting to refer to more contributions this afternoon, but it has been a slightly curtailed debate. [Interruption.] We had the comprehensive introduction from my right hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor. The hon. Members for Harlow (Chris Vince) and for Loughborough (Dr Sandher) were surprised and disappointed that the Chancellor is being held to account not for her personality, but for her conduct. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) just said, this debate is about honesty, trust and confidence and what happens as a result, and about the “shenanigans”, as my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Dame Harriett Baldwin) put it.

On Times Radio this morning, the shadow Chancellor was asked why this debate matters. It matters because the deliberate briefing and misrepresentation of the Budget has damaged workers, savers, pensioners and investors. Let us start with the simple truth: this Government and the Chancellor spun false narratives about the public finances to justify their political choices to increase welfare spending.

During the Budget debate, I asked the shadow Chancellor whether he would address the fact that, on multiple occasions, he referred to the public finances in a fantastically negative tone that appeared far from the truth that was revealed at the Budget, suggesting at one point that there was a £40 billion black hole in the public finances. As the shadow Minister says that we were not being straight with the public about the state of the public finances, will he take this opportunity to apologise on behalf of his colleague for doing just that?

If the hon. Gentleman had been here for the whole debate, he would have had the opportunity of the opening 45-minute speech to put that to my right hon. Friend.

What happened as a result of all the policy kites that were flown? Pensions were drawn down, fewer mortgages were approved and investment was paused. That is not my verdict; the Bank of England warned that the economy was heading for slowdown as a result of the uncertainty, the British Chambers of Commerce said that that uncertainty affected investment and recruitment, and hundreds of thousands of people drew down their pensions. Those are the real impacts of that activity—the shenanigans—and there is genuine anger across the country at the damage such uncertainty caused. The Chancellor must take responsibility because she is responsible for that uncertainty.

People are already cynical about politics, but what could do more to undermine trust than abusing the OBR process to cook up a story to make a case for higher taxes that were not needed? It is the Chancellor who is at the centre of misleading the country. On 4 November, she staged that unprecedented press conference to roll the pitch for tax rises.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I will not. In breach of the confidentiality rules, the Chancellor warned that the OBR productivity downgrade meant lower tax receipts. Indeed it did, but the OBR report makes it clear that that downgrade was more than addressed by higher tax receipts. In other words, there was no black hole. The Chancellor had the numbers and she knew the position. Now we know what she said was simply not true. Instead, she crafted a narrative to justify decisions to increase taxes to fund higher welfare spending.

On 13 November, the Financial Times reported that the Chancellor had decided against the much-briefed income tax increases. The next day, after the gilt market had responded badly, journalists were briefed that the tax rises would not happen thanks to an improved fiscal forecast. Yet that is not what the OBR pre-financial measures said. Little wonder the OBR took that extraordinary step of publishing the forecasts, exposing the truth that there was no giant deficit, as briefed to the press.

The OBR said it took that action to address misconceptions about the forecasts. Where might such misconceptions come from? We do not need to be Sherlock Holmes to identify the Treasury as the culprit.

The OBR told the Treasury Committee, on which I sit, that the narrative that the Chancellor set out on 4 November was consistent with the forecast at that time. When the OBR made that point, was it right or wrong? Are you questioning what the OBR said?

I am sure that Madam Deputy Speaker is not questioning anyone. I am pointing out that the Chancellor said that there was a big £16 billion downgrade from the productivity—that was all offset—but she did not mention that—[Interruption.] If the Minister wants to intervene to say that she did mention that on 4 November, I will give way. She did not. She did not at all.

Yesterday, when the Chancellor was asked in the House if she had authorised or allowed confidential details of the Budget or forecasts to be briefed to the press, she gave a categorical no. If the Chancellor did not license briefings, can the Minister give a cast-iron commitment that no other Ministers, special advisers or officials in the Treasury or No. 10 briefed or authorised briefings about potential measures or the forecasts? Frankly, if you believe that all of those were unauthorised briefings, the Treasury is utterly out of control and I have a bridge to sell you. There is a leak inquiry, but the permanent secretary said today that it centres on 13 November, not on the tsunami of tall tales on potential Budget measures. Why might that be, I wonder. Nothing less than a full inquiry, with the findings made public, will do.

That brings us to the broken promises referred to in the motion. A year ago, the Chancellor delivered the biggest tax-raising Budget in modern history, hitting the British people with £40 billion of tax rises. Then in this Budget, taxes were increased yet again, by £26 billion, despite the Chancellor promising not to come back for more. Life comes at you fast. A year ago, the Chancellor also said that extending the freeze on income tax thresholds

“would hurt working people. It would take more money out of their payslips.”—[Official Report, 30 October 2024; Vol. 755, c. 821.]

Do Labour Members remember her saying that? I certainly do. She said that she would not freeze the thresholds. Then what did she do? Oh, she froze the thresholds. She imposed a three-year extension, with £23 billion coming out of the pockets of 1.7 million people who will pay higher taxes for her failures. As the motion says, the Chancellor should apologise for breaking her promise not to raise taxes again.

What Chancellors say matters. The public and the markets need to believe them, and to trust that they are not being misled. That is not the case around the events of this Budget. That is why this motion calls on the Chancellor to apologise for the misleading picture she presented of the public finances, for the Treasury briefings that did so much damage to businesses and to people, and for breaking her promise not to increase taxes. Frankly, in the face of such a charge sheet, an apology is the very least that the British public deserve. I commend this motion to the House.

I thank the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (James Murray), for his earlier remarks, which framed today’s debate rather well. As he set out, we have here an Opposition day debate, a chance for Members to really interrogate Government policy, to challenge our decisions, to say what they would do differently and to paint a picture of the kind of country that they would build if they were in charge. Oh, what a sight it would be! In short, an Opposition day debate is a chance to be a serious Opposition, but as my right hon. Friend set out in his opening remarks, they have not chosen to do that, instead preferring to rehash their already discredited complaints about process, which we have already addressed extensively, rather than talk about the Budget.

Will the Minister give way?

I am going to make some progress, if that is okay, because my hon. Friend will know that many other Members have not yet spoken and I might give way to them later.

It is worth recounting just how many times Conservative Members have chosen in the last few days to major on process rather than policy. They are very interested in what was said by whom and on what day, so let us recount it. On Wednesday 26 November, the Leader of the Opposition, in response to the Budget, raised process multiple times, introducing to Hansard the somewhat intriguing phrase “fiscal fandango”. No, me neither! Admittedly, this was immediately after the OBR had dumped the Budget just before the Chancellor stood up, so that is fair.

But then the Tory process paso doble—two can play at this game—really began. Thank you, everyone! On 27 November, the shadow Chancellor raised process in a Budget debate. On 2 December, the shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury raised it in a Budget debate. On 3 December, the Leader of the Opposition raised it at Prime Minister’s questions. This was the same day that the Opposition called an urgent question on the resignation of the chair of the OBR, which had coincidentally happened during a statement two days earlier by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury on the OBR and its forecast. Yesterday, the Opposition Front Bench raised this at Treasury orals, and today we are having an Opposition day debate on the same topic after the Chancellor took questions on it this morning in the Treasury Committee.

All this political dancing has denied the Opposition the chance to scrutinise the Budget. I am not sure how much of it they have read. Let me remind them that the Budget will cut the cost of living, raise pay for those earning the least and invest in our NHS. It meets our fiscal rules and delivers £21.7 billion of headroom. It is a Budget that delivers on the promise of this Government and delivers for the British people. By contrast, the Opposition are stuck in the past, playing the songs of old again and hoping for a new audience.

There are 4,600 reasons in my constituency why this Budget is the right thing to do: 4,600 children who will be lifted out of poverty by the Budget. On the basis of the Opposition’s remarks, it is my understanding that the Conservative party would plunge those 4,600 children back into poverty as part of a £46 billion welfare cut if it were to win the next general election—as well as potentially scrapping the triple lock. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is morally bankrupt?

I agree with my hon. Friend, who is a strong advocate of ensuring that we do all we can to support people, lift people out of poverty, and grow our economy and our towns and cities across the country.

By contrast, the Opposition are stuck in the past, playing the songs of old again and hoping for a new audience. After a year and a half on the Opposition Benches, the Conservative party knows that all it has to offer the country is the same as it offered before: a reheated and not renewed set of Conservative policies, tax cuts for the wealthy, wages held down for the poorest, cuts to public services and a rise in child poverty.

The problem is not just that the Conservative party is playing the old tunes but that half the old band has jumped ship to join the more extreme party, which has not even bothered to show up to this debate. I do not know how the band will manage to perform without the likes of the hon. Members for Ashfield (Lee Anderson) and for East Wiltshire (Danny Kruger), Jonathan Gullis, Dame Andrea Jenkyns, Nadine Dorries, Ann Widdecombe, Sir Jake Berry, Mark Reckless, Maria Caulfield and Marco Longhi—those are just the Tory-to-Reform switchers I have heard of. There are many more who I think are probably as well known as I am, so I do have a soft spot for them. For completeness, let me remind the House of their service and their defection, too: Lia Nici, Chris Green, Anne Marie Morris, Graham Simpson, Adam Holloway, Alan Amos—

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Last time I checked, this debate was supposed to be about the conduct of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I know the Minister is relatively new to the Dispatch Box; perhaps he may need a little guidance.

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his point of order. I am sure the Minister has heard it and will return to his speech.

Indeed; I heard the point of order loud and clear. It is worth remembering that this is an Opposition day debate—I think it is within the remit to talk about the Opposition and the fact that they have lost all their players to the other team.

I also think it is time to move on from talking about process, because on this side of the House, we have a country to run, an economy to build and public services to mend. Instead of this subject, we could have talked about whether it is right to raise wages for those on the lowest incomes, but the Opposition did not want to bring that up. Maybe that is because wages have risen faster in the first 10 months of this Government than they did in the first decade of the Conservative Government, or maybe it is because it turns out that their latest policy is a real-terms cut to the living wage. We could have talked about the cost of living, but again, the Conservatives did not choose that as a topic because its mini-Budget crashed the economy and added thousands of pounds to mortgages, and since this Government have come to power, the Bank of England has cut interest rates.

The Minister makes a point about the previous disastrous mini-Budget of September 2023. The shadow Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Central Devon (Sir Mel Stride), said at that time,

“I welcome much in this statement. There is a great deal that will help millions of families and businesses up and down the country.”—[Official Report, 23 September 2022; Vol. 719, c. 942.]

Does the Minister agree that the reason the right hon. Member focused on process is that his judgment on policy is so poor?

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. Too many Conservative Members defended the mini-Budget, which crashed the economy and added thousands of pounds to mortgages. In contrast, since this Government have come to power, the Bank of England has cut interest rates five times, taking £1,200 off a typical two-year fixed rate mortgage. At this Budget, we cut £150 from the average energy bill, froze rail fares and prescription charges, and extended bus fare caps and fuel duty cuts, but the Conservatives do not want to talk about that either. They could have chosen in their Opposition day debate to talk about fiscal stability and increased headroom, but again, they chose not to do that because of the £21.7 billion of headroom that the Chancellor secured at the Budget, which will help protect our country from global shocks and unforeseen challenges.

Of course, the Conservatives do not want to talk about child poverty either because they know that this Budget has lifted 550,000 children out of poverty, whereas the last Government were content to leave them, preferring instead to rebrand the hungry children who they let down while in power as benefit scroungers. They should be treated as our future, not as our opponent.

I have a couple more minutes, so let me address some of the points made during the debate. I thank the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper), for engaging on policy. We have had conversations on business rates already this week, and I am sure that we will have more. We have begun the work to rebalance the system with a £900 million switch from the highest value properties to those on the high streets.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Chris Vince) for his Thatcher quote. It was a good quote that bears repeating. She said,

“I always cheer up immensely…if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.”

I thank the hon. Member for West Worcestershire (Dame Harriett Baldwin) for going through every single tax change and saying that she opposes them all. That is the sort of opposition we have got used to. Rather than constructive opposition, which comes forward with proposals that would raise revenue in a fair way, such as the changes on electric vehicle excise duty, which will stop us losing £12 billion of fuel duty revenue in the coming years, we just hear, “No, no, no,” over and over again. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Dr Sandher). His experience in economics is richly valued in this place, and I enjoyed his speech, as I always do.

Finally, it has been a short debate, has it not, Madam Deputy Speaker? I am glad that the right hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) took the time during the debate to read the Labour manifesto—that was much appreciated—and that he was able to clarify for the House that my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary was right to say that we have stuck to our manifesto commitment.

To bring the Minister back to the debate, it is about honesty and the real-world consequences of the briefing that happened around the Budget. Does the Treasury accept that hundreds of thousands of people drew down their pensions, which is an irrevocable decision—yes or no?

What the Treasury does accept is that at this Budget, the Government had to make the decisions to ensure that we could increase our fiscal stability and get borrowing falling in every single year. The previous Government were not able to control our public finances, and yet in every year of this forecast, borrowing will be falling, and we have more than doubled our headroom to £21.7 billion.

Will the Minister give way?

Go on—that’s helpful.

I always try to be helpful, and I thank the Minister for giving way.

There was a lot of speculation about the Budget, but a lot of that came from the Opposition Benches. Every single clickbait headline was repeated in the Chamber to fuel speculation. It was incredibly damaging—does the Minister not agree?

I agree that the Opposition are incredibly damaging for the economy.

The clean-up operation of the disaster zone that was the last 14 years is well and truly under way. Our economic plan is working, with growth up, employment up, interest rates down and borrowing falling, with a Labour Budget focused on the British people delivered by a Labour Chancellor making the fair and right choices. We reject this absurd monologue of emotion from the Conservatives, and we will stick to our plan for a better Britain.

Question put.