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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

My right hon. and learned Friend is absolutely right about that. It is an absolutely cynical manoeuvre. There is something that Government could do today. The document I have with me was leaked to us. These are the internal Treasury fiscal tables. They tell everyone—all taxpayers—about the departmental spending envelopes for the coming years; they tell what the Treasury expects to spend on debt interest, welfare bills and the like. This is the document that revealed that this Labour Government plan a 9 per cent. cut in Departments. It was leaked to us, as it happens, after the last Budget. This document could be published today in the interests of open information as we approach the election. I will ask the permanent secretary to publish it in the interest of good debate ahead of the election, so that we have at least some basic truths about what the Government's lack of a spending review means for Departments in future. Of course, yesterday the Government tried to put up a smokescreen around efficiency savings. Three hours after the Budget was delivered—this must be pretty unprecedented in that it happened after the Chancellor sat down—a series of written statements were produced from different Government Departments saying that they were going to deliver efficiencies. I have with me the one from the Department headed by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. We find that £550 million of efficiency savings are set out, expressed and explained in three sentences. It is a half-page press release with some notes to editors underneath. Ministers like the right hon. Lady went on television and said, "I have found my cuts." The most vocal exponent, in fact, was Children's Secretary, the right hon. Lady's husband, who said, "I have got £500 million worth of cuts that I have been told to find by the Chancellor. I have found £300 million, and I am working on the other £200 million." What Ministers do not say is that they have absolutely no idea of their budgets for 2011-12, on which these efficiency savings are supposed to be based. They can produce as many efficiency reports as they like, but—quite apart from the fact that the National Audit Office found that barely a quarter of the savings promised before the last general election can be traced today—that is not a credible way to approach the current problem. This is what was said by the officials who were contacted by the media last night. When telephoned by a journalist, an official at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said:""All quite deliberately vague. We haven't got any detail on where those savings will be gathered. We haven't got a breakdown of the detail: it doesn't exist."" Another official said:""We certainly don't have a list as of today. It's a figure that we have agreed with Her Majesty's Treasury, as part of Building Britain's Future or whatever the slogan is that's on our press release."" Another official was asked by a journalist about the £10 million corporate services reform programme. This was his reply:""Corporate services. Christ! Let me see if I can find out"" what that is. So there we have it: the largest budget deficit in our peacetime history, and they are turning to God to help them to sort it out. One thing that the Government could do—I shall ask the right hon. Lady to confirm that they can do it—is publish the fiscal tables that we know exist. The Government claim that they want open and transparent debate about spending ahead of the election, so why do they not publish those tables? What are they trying to hide? If they published the tables, we could have a more serious debate about what the Government are actually planning to do. As I have said, that would help to focus people's attention on the central fact about the Budget: that the Government have not produced a credible plan to deal with the deficit. That is why, in the end, there has to be a change of Government. Our economy faces the most serious risks. For the first time in our country's history, we face a credit downgrade; for the first time in our country's history, we have a budget deficit that is larger than any other in the developed world. The challenge for a Government faced with those facts is to produce the plan that will put the economy back on track, and they have failed to do so.