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Legislative Programme and Budget Statement (Wales)

We intended to deal with the deficit. We had a tough deficit reduction plan, as I have already told the Committee. The right hon. Lady is going to increase borrowing—increase the deficit—by putting more and more people on the dole and pushing more and more businesses into bankruptcy. While pensioners would have been exempt from the national insurance rise, they are not exempt from VAT. The Government say that we are all in this together, but many people on low and middle incomes will see their earnings cut. Child benefit will be frozen for the next three years for more than 7 million families. In two years’ time, tax credits will be reduced for families earning just over £15,000 and scrapped for families earning just over £30,000. The right hon. Lady may remember during our election television debates specifically denying to me that that would happen—yet another broken promise. She also specifically denied in those same debates that hundreds of Welsh police officers and police community support officers are for the chop, as are many thousands throughout Britain. Yes, there was a boost to child tax credit, and much was made of that, but it was more than offset by housing benefit cuts, and scrapping of maternity and pregnancy grants along with other benefits targeted at supporting children. The Con-Dem Government have also launched a full-scale war on public sector pensions. Of course reform is needed, and Labour introduced such reforms, such as postponing the retirement age, increasing public employees’ pension contributions, and closing old schemes and starting new ones—all changes negotiated with the trade unions. The orchestrated Lib Dem-Tory assault on public pensions heralds a race to the bottom, which will leave a huge burden on future taxpayers coping with pensioner poverty.