'My short summary has to be: “Seriously, is that it?”

MP for Ellesmere Port

THERE is always so much spin nowadays at times of the year when Budget announcements from the Chancellor of the Exchequer are due to be made.

That is because so many leaks are made to journalists by Treasury spin doctors on subjects that Government Ministers think will be favourable to their cause.

The idea that Members of Parliament will be the first to learn about decisions on important areas of long-term policy are long gone, despite repeated protests by influential politicians including the Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle MP.

But leaks or no leaks, after weighing up the details of Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s Spring Budget, my short summary for my constituents has to be: “Seriously, is that it?”

When national media Budget headlines centre on a tax change that effectively gives extra money – yet again – to some of the richest people in our country through a change to pension allowances, you know all too well we are heading down the wrong track.

The bottom line is we are the only economy in the G7 whose economy is still smaller than it was pre-pandemic, but there was no sense of urgency to tackle that.Equally unimpressed were representatives of many organisations including the Federation of Small Businesses, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Trades Union Congress who were all underwhelmed by what they had heard.

As I told colleagues in my Budget reaction speech in the Chamber on Monday, it is a telling sign of how low expectations have got when we had the absurd spectacle of the Chancellor, at the start of his hour-long speech, proudly claiming that the UK will not be going into recession after all, as if it were some kind of triumph. This low bar was matched by the Chancellor’s so-called ‘Plan for Growth’ is forecast to deliver just 0.1 per cent more gross domestic product (GDP) growth than the average between 2009-2019, a decade widely acknowledged as a decade of economic stagnation.

And what makes it worse is that we have now all been hit hard by sky-high inflation. Real wage growth has been non-existent since 2010 and is expected to fall by one per cent this year.

By the end of this Parliament, real wages are projected to be five per cent less than at the start of 2025 than the end of 2019. A Resolution Foundation report has put a figure of £11,000 on what 15 years of wage stagnation will mean to us all. It should cause us to have a really long hard look at the nation’s wrong direction of travel.

There should also be an Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast on how much foodbank use is predicted to increase. In its absence, Citizens Advice leaders are telling us: “The scale and size of the crisis is unlike anything we’ve seen.” The number of people in employment who have been helped by the CAB has more than doubled since 2020.

That surely tells us everything about how this country is not working.