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Autumn Forecast

My Lords, it is always depressing to come back to face the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, with his perpetual attempts to talk down the prospects of the economy. We have always said that the recovery is going to be gradual. It is on track. The recovery and the economy are borne down because they have to bear the legacy of the unbalanced growth and the excessive debt that was left behind by the previous Government. The noble Lord does not look forward; he is not grateful for the fact that the OBR has confirmed in its independent forecast that we have a pattern of rising employment in each year of the forecast. Instead, he continually wants to chip away at techie points around the way that the forecast has been produced. The transparency and the information have been vastly increased—and he chips away at it. Well, fine. I am grateful that the noble Lord welcomes, as we all do, the £500 million new investment announced today, and I am sure that there will be a lot more to come. I was up in the north-west of England on Friday talking to a great sweep of businesses from some of the largest multinationals, like Siemens, through to very regional businesses like the Blackpool leisure centre, to family businesses such as the business that puts together Chevron motor cars. I do not recognise the picture that the noble Lord paints. These businesses are looking to the future. They recognise that there is a lot of rebalancing of the economy to do, but they are producing world-class science; the Daresbury science and innovation centre is one of the world’s great leaders. It was thanks to the foresight of the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, under the previous Government, that that project got going. The current Government have just announced a public-private partnership to take forward that project for the next 20 years, creating, on that one science park alone, 6,000 jobs. This is the view of Britain that I see when I get out and about, and which seems to be in no way reflected in the technical analysis of the noble Lord and some of his friends opposite. The noble Lord talks about the fan charts. Well, we have not had the fan charts before; we now have them. He can do the analysis; he can see that the OBR has produced upside and downside scenarios. As I have said, the different scenarios that were suggested to the OBR—not its own scenarios—show that under them the fiscal mandate will be met. Yes, we have taken radical steps on welfare reform. Yes, it is correct that, by doing what we did to take more people out of welfare, we have been able to protect many more front-line public service jobs. That welfare reform is not about anything other than protecting the poor and getting a fair deal for this country. We must have a welfare system in which families who choose to go out to work are able to earn and retain more than families who choose to live on benefits. We must have a system in which housing benefit is designed so that families who go out to work are not penalised in their housing choices, compared to families who are not working. The noble Lord talked about cuts in investment. As he may remember, when we discussed the spending review only a few weeks ago, we increased the amount of money going into public sector investment in economically enhancing infrastructure by more than £2 billion a year through the spending review period, compared to what was in the Budget and what we inherited from the previous Government. I am grateful for the work of the OBR in producing this forecast. It confirms that the judgments that my right honourable friend the Chancellor made are absolutely right. In the 2011 Budget we will update on our progress.