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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

I certainly agree with that. We all, across the House and across government, ought to be more aware of just how mobile company headquarters are. We hear people in the City talking rather grandly about the City of London being like Wimbledon, in that we put on the best tournament in the world and all the foreign banks and companies want to come and play here. However, the analogy that I would commend to the House is that of Silverstone. We do not have to have a grand prix in this country. If it becomes too expensive, Mr. Ecclestone can move it somewhere else. There are plenty of other people who want to put on a grand prix. The hon. Gentleman’s point is extremely well made: if the burden of tax or the regulatory framework enveloping some of these successful financial services companies becomes too great, London could lose them. I want to make several points about the spending side of the Budget. The first relates to the curious claim that the Chancellor repeated yesterday—he has probably inserted it into almost every Budget speech that I have heard him make—that he has abolished boom and bust in the economy. So far as the private economy is concerned, we will be able to test that claim only when the present house price boom finally runs out of steam. The Chancellor has, however, created boom and bust in the public economy, through the way in which he has organised public spending. At first, public spending was tight, then we had the splurge, and now it looks as though it is going to be tight again. Indeed, having studied the detail of the numbers that were announced yesterday, I am worried not only that it will be tight but that there will be a sudden change that will affect some of the smaller spending programmes as well as some of the long-term programmes that are vulnerable to sudden changes because of the way in which they are planned and organised. Research spending at the universities is one example, as is the work of the British Library and the British Museum. I understand that both those organisations have been asked to consider illustrative cuts—cuts, not freezes—of 5, 10 or 15 per cent. in their budgets as part of the work leading up to the spending review in the autumn. It is those smaller essential longer-term programmes that need protection from this sudden feast and famine in our public spending. My second point relates to the NHS. As others have already noted, we did not hear an awful lot about the NHS yesterday. It is my view that the NHS is still in turmoil. We have seen the extraordinary upheaval in manpower planning, with a number of young doctors now struggling to find positions. We have also seen endlessly overlapping reorganisation at every level of the health service, and we are now seeing very real job cuts in some of the non-medical professions. I should like to give the House an example. Well over a year ago, the community hospitals in my constituency were being reviewed by the former South-West Kent primary care trust. The review, involving all the staff and services at those hospitals, has now been continued and widened by the new West Kent primary care trust that took up its role in October. That review, which will determine how many and what kind of services should be provided by the community hospitals, will itself be overtaken by the more general fit-for-purpose exercise being conducted by the strategic health authorities. The result is that staff are demoralised and the future of the Sevenoaks and Edenbridge hospitals still swings in the balance. Furthermore, the Government have still failed to decide on the key issue of resource accounting for the trusts’ deficits. All three of the trusts that serve my constituency—the West Kent primary care trust, the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust and the Dartford, Gravesham and Swanley primary care trust—have been struggling with deficits. Because of the way in which resource accounting has been applied, they must balance their books each year, but if they fail to clear the historic deficit, its effect is doubled in the subsequent year. As a result, trusts up and down the country are scrambling to make last-minute economies. In fact, the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust wrote to all its staff inviting them to work a day unpaid to help to clear the deficit. The Audit Commission reported last July that the resource accounting rules were simply incompatible with the way in which NHS spending has been conducted, yet there has been no decision, either in the Budget or from Health Ministers, on whether that will be corrected in time and the NHS will be released from those obligations from the beginning of the new financial year—1 April. If the Financial Secretary to the Treasury has time, I would be grateful to hear whether resource accounting is to be abandoned for the NHS trusts in time for the new financial year. The way in which it is being applied now seems to be extraordinarily arbitrary and is undermining the staff and public support that the trusts need if they are to serve their public. As for jobs in the NHS, in 20 years as a Member of Parliament I have never seen job cuts on the scale that we are now seeing across our local NHS. Physiotherapists coming out of training who were promised jobs are now being denied them and have to consider alternative careers. Health visitors are being told that their services are no longer required, and midwives are being made redundant. In all those professions the number of posts is being reduced. Those people decided to go into the public service, but now their career aspirations are being shattered. If the Government were going to cut NHS jobs on such a scale, they should have been more honest at the start. Finally on the spending side is the voluntary sector. It ought to have been encouraged to come forward in support of the state, but the sector is now crippled by new legislation of all kinds and the excessive application of regulations on money laundering and criminal records, which are worth while in other fields but which are now applied to the very smallest, most local charity that is never likely to have been involved in money laundering or anything like it. In addition, grants to voluntary sector organisations are beginning to be cut. Let me give the House the example of Dorton college of further education, which is one of the few institutions in this country that serves blind and visually impaired people. It has been told that its work retraining funding grant of £250,000 a year is to be halved; as a result, fewer blind people will be able to attend the college from next September. That sort of yo-yo public funding for voluntary organisations and charities working in support of the state is no way to organise public spending. The tax cut with which the Chancellor somewhat theatrically ended his Budget statement yesterday may well have fooled some of the City commentators, forecasters and analysts who were supposed to have predicted what he would do, but it certainly has not fooled my constituents and I believe that, when the time comes, it will not have fooled the country.