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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Delighted to. Obviously the hon. Gentleman has not been reading Hansard. For every year of the Conservative Administration, between 1979 and 1997 we spent 64 per cent. above the rate of inflation, and for every week that we were in power we spent £1 million on a new capital project. He will have to ask a trickier trick question next time. [Interruption.] Those are the figures, if he wants to check them. On crime and policing, the Chancellor talks about police community support officers, but those are not fully trained policemen and women. They are decent civic-minded people who will do their best, but they are not policemen. We also hear about the regional forces that are being forced on our constituencies, allegedly costing more than £550 million, according to the Association of Police Authorities. The Government are going to fund that policy, possibly to the tune of £150 million, although no one wants it. It is a top-down approach. The police and local people are against it, but the Government have an arrogant disdain for local views and will go ahead with it anyway. As a result, we have to find £400 million from the council tax in my area and throughout the country—£400 million that is not being spent on crime fighting or tackling drugs, violent crime or antisocial behaviour, because it is being spent instead on new badges, new buildings and new management structures. That matters. Let me give the detection rates for my basic command unit, the northern division of Cambridgeshire. Some 53 per cent. of sexual offences are detected, which means that 47 per cent. are not solved; 15 per cent. of burglary cases are detected, so 85 per cent. are not solved; and 20 per cent. of vehicle thefts are detected, which means that 80 per cent. are not solved. That is after nine years of a Government who came to power saying that they were tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is an old man in a hurry. Last week’s Budget was a ““cones hotline”” Budget. It had no vision, it was full of bombast and hyperbole, and it was empty and vacuous. I note that the Prime Minister, even 12,000 miles away, has got his betrayal in first, so the Chancellor may not move next door very quickly. The Budget is full of gimmicks, and although it does not have any price tags or time lines, it includes the much vaunted reannouncement of education spending. It fails the people of my constituency and, above all, it fails the country.