Mel Stride MP: speeches 2025

Speeches

• 27 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  My right hon. and gallant Friend is entirely right, as usual, and something else has also been going on. I have written to the OBR to ask Richard Hughes exactly what happened with the information that the Treasury appears to have leaked out about the forecasts during the run-up to the Budget. I say that in the knowledge that the OBR’s own guidance says that information exchanged with the Treasury during the build-up to a Budget is provided to Ministers in confidence. Why is it then that the Chancellor herself was on the airwaves before the Budget, opining on the apparent coming downgrade to productivity? I have written to the OBR to ask whether it feels that that was appropriate. I have also written to the permanent secretary to the Treasury to ask if he is implementing an investigation into the leaks coming from the Treasury. Interestingly, he has written back to me simply to say that in the event that there are suspected leaks, of course there is an investigation. He has not quite answered my question as to whether there is an investigation being undertaken at the moment, but I will be following up with him on that matter. What has happened in this Budget? The OBR forecasts tell a sorry story: unemployment is higher in every single year of the forecast than it was forecast to be back in the spring. Inflation is up—we have seen the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics. Labour is the party that talks about resolving poverty; it is a disgrace that food inflation in the last set of figures went up way above the headline rate, from 4.5% to 4.9%. That rise is being borne by some of the most vulnerable and some of the poorest in our society. On growth, of course the Chancellor tells a good story. She says that the growth forecast is up compared with spring this year, but, as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury will know, it is down compared with the autumn of last year, when the OBR said that growth would be 2% in this year; it is now forecast to be 1.5%. In in every subsequent year, growth is forecast to be lower than was forecast back at the time of the spring statement. That is the simple fact.

• 27 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  The film “Groundhog Day” sees Phil Connors go to a place where he wakes up every morning to the same DJ playing the same song: “I Got You Babe” by Sonny and Cher. We have a very similar situation with the Chancellor. It is groundhog day, with the Chancellor destroying the economy, putting up taxes, losing her fiscal headroom, and round and round it goes. That film was said to be a romantic comedy. Well, there has been nothing comedic about the results that this Chancellor has delivered in terms of increased unemployment, diminished living standards, higher inflation and so on. Whether the public were ever enamoured with the Chancellor, I know not, but they certainly are not now—according to the polls, she is apparently the least popular Chancellor in the history of polling on that question.

• 27 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The income tax threshold freeze—which has been extended for three years, even though the Government briefed that it would probably just be two—means 780,000 more people paying tax for the first time, because the personal allowance will be frozen for longer, and 920,000 people going into the higher rate tax bracket. In fact, by 2029-30, around one in four workers in this country will be in the higher rate tax bracket. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said that the measure is a clear breach of the Labour party manifesto. The Chancellor herself accepted in the autumn Budget last year, when she said that she would not come forward with the measure, that it would hurt working people. She repeated that yesterday. It is very clear that this is a breach of the Labour party manifesto. When it comes to young people, we hear that there will be a freeze to the student loan payment thresholds. Young people are already disproportionately impacted by the changes to national insurance, particularly the reduction in the threshold that means that lower-income earners, which include younger people, will be disproportionately impacted by those tax changes. The Employment Rights Bill, which is coming down the line, will make it far riskier to take younger people— [ Interruption. ] Government Members should be careful what they wish for. The Labour party speaks a lot about those who are not in employment, education or training, of which there are about 940,000; that Bill will do nothing to improve their life chances. It will make things worse. It will make it more risky to take those people on and employ them.

• 27 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  The Minister says from a sedentary position that inflation is coming down. The International Monetary Fund says that inflation will be the highest in the G7 this year and next year. We know that with high inflation, interest rates are higher for longer. That means businesses’ borrowing costs are higher. It means that consumer sentiment is dampened. It means that the servicing cost alone on the burgeoning debt that this Government are constantly adding to is currently £100 billion a year—twice what we spend on defence. In fact, if debt servicing were a Government Department, it would be the third largest in Whitehall—not spending money on better public services, as we are often told by the Labour party, but simply paying for the profligacy of the Labour party when it comes to borrowing. The run-up to this Budget was a farce. We have seen weeks and weeks of uncertainty generated by the Treasury, which has leaked every possible combination of tax increases and then U-turned on some of them. It has flown so many kites that it has blotted out the sun, and a huge shadow has been cast across businesses, which have pressed pause on investment and hiring. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury should speak to Andy Haldane, who concludes that what I am saying is absolutely right. It has also weighed down on consumer sentiment. All this hokey-cokey around what is in the Budget has done real damage to our economy on this Government’s watch.

• 27 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  That is absolutely true. Let us look at how we ended up at this sorry pass. In opposition, Labour assured the British electorate that they would not be putting up taxes left, right and centre, and when they got into power, what did they do within a few short months? They slapped taxes—£40 billion-worth—on the British people, £25 billion of that by way of national insurance increases on business alone. It is no surprise that that destroyed employment and growth. They talked down the economy. They came up with this confected £22 billion black hole. What an irony it was— [ Interruption. ] There may be chuntering from those on the Front Bench, but what an irony it was that it was at the behest of the Government themselves that the Office for Budget Responsibility was invited to look into this claim and said that it would not legitimise that figure. The damage was done. The animal spirits in the economy were extinguished. Of course, they did something else that socialists down the ages always do: they borrowed and borrowed and borrowed and spent and spent and spent until they ran out of other people’s money—

• 27 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I will in a moment. It is there in black and white in the OBR’s report. The reason for that forecast is £26 billion of additional taxation in 2029-30, and, as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury will know, an additional £12 billion of tax take that will occur because of fiscal drag. Those higher inflationary numbers in the forecast are dragging ever more people into paying ever more tax.

• 27 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I congratulate the hon. Lady on reading accurately from the Whips’ circular. The Opposition stand by our record— [ Interruption. ] Absolutely. When we were in government, we were a job-creating machine: there were 4 million more jobs under us than had been there before. When we left on the day of the general election, we had a near-record high level of employment and a near-record low level of unemployment. Unemployment is now at a five-year high— [ Interruption. ] The Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury shakes his head, but it happens to be true. One of the results of the Budget for young people is that there will continue to be a lost generation of workers. What about those who want to save, do the right thing and provide for their future in retirement? Should we not be encouraging that? What has the Budget delivered on that front? Salary sacrifice has been savaged, the savings tax has been put up, and the cash ISA has been cut. We are punishing savers. We will see the reverberating effects of those measures for many generations and many years to come.

• 27 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I have already set out the fact that this Government’s ruinous taxation policy, including in the Budget yesterday, is to load up taxes on people who are in work, many of them not high earners. The impact of that tax is the reason why the OBR has concluded that for every year of this forecast, real household disposable income—in other words, the cost of living issues people are facing—will deteriorate compared with the forecast back in spring. The Labour party is making poverty worse by making sure that work does not pay to the degree that it should. The other point to make is about inflation. If the Government run a policy of borrowing vast amounts of money and spending half a trillion pounds over and above the plans that they inherited across this Parliament— that was added to by more than £100 billion just yesterday—we should not be surprised if inflation is the highest in the G7, or if the International Monetary Fund says that it will be the highest in the G7 next year. What does high inflation, particularly on food, do to poverty? It drives poverty up, and therein lie the answers that the Government need to think about. There is an alternative, which is to get on top of and control Government spending and to do the responsible thing. Our golden rules is that at least half of those savings should go towards driving down the deficit and the debt, but we would then have capacity to drive down taxes as well. That is exactly what we set out at our conference: £49 billion of savings, and £23 billion of savings on welfare. Thanks to the solid commendable work of my hon. Friend the shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, we have found those savings, and it is a tragedy that the Government— [ Interruption. ] The Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury says, “What are the savings?” The savings are £23 billion on welfare— [ Interruption. ] It is a number. As a member of the Treasury team, he should be familiar with numbers, but clearly he is not. We will be bringing down the welfare bill, and the savings are clear. I direct the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury to the paper from the Centre for Social Justice, which makes it clear— [ Interruption. ] Well, it is rather better than the Resolution Foundation stuff that he produced, I have to say. The paper from the Centre for Social Justice makes it clear that by changing the gateways into longer-term sickness and health benefits, which we did when we were in office— [ Interruption. ] If the hon. Gentleman stops jabbering and starts listening, he might actually learn something, and that might be for the good of his party and this country. When we were in office, we made reforms to the work capability assessment that, according to the OBR’s own scoring, would have seen 450,000 fewer people going on to those benefits. We were making a real difference in arresting the rise of the welfare bill. What did the Government do on coming to office? They scrapped those measures on day one. They then came forward with their own proposals— [ Interruption. ] I hope that when the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury gets to his feet later he will address this, and talk us through what happened to his Government’s attempt to control the welfare bill. It got smashed into a million pieces on the rocks of his own Back Benchers—that is what happened. That is the tragedy of much of this Budget: the economics are being driven by the internal politics of the Labour party. We have a Prime Minister and a Chancellor whose position is now so precarious that they have to bob up and down like a cork on the tide when it comes to making policy at the whims of Labour Back Benchers. There is a certain melancholy about this Budget. It is like groundhog day; an old song, with the words seared into the collective mind. A socialist anthem for all time: “That for he who has, then that must be taken away. For he who has not, then to him must be given.” That is not on the basis of any measure of fairness, as suggested in the topic for debate today, but rather on a fundamental misunderstanding of basic economics. Economics is about resources, of course, but it is also about incentives. To he who has, I say this: if you work hard we applaud you, and we will incentivise you to work harder still, recognising your contribution to the common good. To the vulnerable we say this: we are there for you. But to others who have not we say this: here is not a hand out, but the means for improvement. For the socialist, Madam Deputy Speaker, distribution is all, and the means are never sufficiently willed. The eternal lesson—also the lesson of this Budget—is that that path leads all to be diminished. An economy laden with debt, with Government spending spiralling still and taxation touching skyward, will never burn bright. The whole will never grow. It is not enough—it will languish. That is how the dreams of millions perish. Yesterday, the lingering flickers of hope died.

• 27 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is precisely right. I have set out the iniquitous impacts of the reduction of the national insurance threshold on younger people, as well as the impact that the Employment Rights Bill will have by increasing the risks of employing younger people. That is self-evident and obvious, and businesses are saying it over and over again. If an employer is put in a position where he is faced with a young person who has no career track record, and the Government’s legislation says that on day one the employee can take that employer to a tribunal for unfair dismissal—a claim that may get clogged up for two years, and for which the lawyers advising the employer will probably conclude that he should give in and pay out, even if the merits of the case do not warrant it—that is a recipe for higher youth unemployment. It is simple; it is basic economics. Look at the taxes in the Budget placed on rental income. Do Labour Members not realise that that will lead to higher rents and fewer properties on the market? Do they not understand that if the family home is taxed, we will catch a lot of people who may be asset rich but are income poor? I suppose the solution will be to allow that liability to roll up and be paid on death—yet another death tax at the hands of this Government. What is all this pain and taxation paying for? In large part, it is paying for more welfare—it is as simple as that. Scrapping the two-child cap is a mistake and it is unfair, because those who are paying taxes, working hard and doing the right thing have to take tough choices as to whether they can afford a larger family or not. It is quite right and proper that those who are on benefits should face similar choices.

• 27 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  The Minister is having trouble containing himself, such is the punishment that he is receiving at the moment. They borrowed all this money, and what did that do? It stoked inflation, and with inflation higher, interest rates have been higher for longer.

• 27 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady has been very patient, so I give way to her.

• 26 Nov 2025 · Point of Order · Hansard source

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  On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. This morning we have seen an unprecedented leak of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s “Economic and fiscal outlook” report before the Budget. The report contains market-sensitive information. It is utterly outrageous that this has happened, and the leak may indeed constitute a criminal act. In Prime Minister’s questions, the Leader of the Opposition asked the Prime Minister about this leak, but he refused to answer her question. Please can you advise this House on the steps at its disposal to force a leak inquiry into this matter? Would it be possible to ask the Table Office to distribute copies of the report to the House, given that everybody outside the House has already had the opportunity to read it?

• 17 Nov 2025 · Budget: Press Briefings · Hansard source

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  Given that response, the right hon. Gentleman might try a bit of stand-up in his spare time. The process around the Budget is meant to be the most closely guarded secret in Government, but in recent weeks, we have barely been able to pick up a newspaper without reading a fresh report of the latest policy movements. On 6 November, The Times reported that the Chancellor had included increases in income tax rates in the measures sent to the OBR for scoring. Then, last Thursday, the Financial Times revealed that those proposals have now been removed from the Budget package. The Chancellor and her officials may think this is a game that they are playing, but it has real-life consequences and impacts markets, as we saw on Friday. More than that, it shows utter contempt for this House. In this place, questions about the Budget are always met with the same answer: “Decisions on tax will be announced at the Budget”. That is right and proper, but it becomes hollow and absurd when those same matters are being openly reported in the national media daily. The Chancellor even delivered a pre-Budget address to the country—not in this House, but in the Downing Street press room. Given that the Chancellor has chosen not to come to the House today, I will ask the Minister the following questions. Has the Chancellor or any Treasury Minister sanctioned any briefings to journalists on potential Budget tax measures or the contents of the OBR’s forecasts? Have any Treasury officials or special advisers conducted such briefings? Has the Chancellor or the permanent secretary launched an investigation into the source of the leaks, and can the Minister explain why the Chancellor seems to have confirmed that the OBR has downgraded its productivity forecasts before the Budget has even taken place? Either the Chancellor has been knowingly allowing the Budget process to be briefed out, or serious unauthorised leaks have occurred from her Department. That has fuelled confusion and uncertainty, and disrespects this House.

• 17 Nov 2025 · Budget: Press Briefings · Hansard source

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  (Urgent Question): To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer if she will make a statement on briefings to the press about the contents of the Budget.

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  I agree. Of course, higher taxes are bearing down on living standards, but so is inflation. We have the highest level of inflation in the G7 and are forecast to have the highest in the G7 next year, too. Within that sits food inflation, which is running way above the headline rate of inflation. Who does that impact the most? It impacts the very people that Labour professes to stand up for the strongest: the poorest in our society. It is a direct consequence of the policies pursued by this Chancellor.

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman has given me an opportunity to correct the record, because I know this has been spun by the Labour party. At a fringe meeting at the Conservative party conference, there was a long, extended debate about just how bad things are, with speculations about all the “what ifs” and “maybes” of different scenarios. If the hon. Gentleman reads the full transcript of those exchanges, he will see that the point I was very clearly making was that there is an alternative to putting up taxes, which is controlling spending. That is the point I was making. What is happening to the wealth creators in our country? About 16,000 of them have fled—they are going by the day. These are the people who generate the wealth, jobs and growth that we are all striving to achieve. Look at the cumulative tax take that has just walked out of the door with the 16,000 who have gone—it would probably require a third of a million to half a million people on average earnings to fill that gap. It is not sustainable. There is an alternative. The Conservatives set out this alternative at our party conference: a way forward through control of Government spending. Government spending could be controlled to the tune of at least £47 billion, which were the savings we identified. Of the £47 billion, £23 billion can be found from the welfare budget by getting people off benefits and into work. It is better for the economy, but equally, for those who have mild mental health conditions such as mild anxiety, mild depression and ADHD, it is a better outcome than parking them on benefits, which the Government are doing through time. By focusing on actual need rather than simply transfer payments and on medical diagnosis rather than self-assessments and by not paying benefits to non-UK citizens, we can make real savings. In some cases they are tough choices, absolutely. However, these are decisions that the Government have made.

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  We did, actually. We did arrest it. We made changes to the work capability assessment, which the OBR scored at £5 billion-worth of savings. The OBR also scored the fact that there would be 450,000—almost half a million—fewer people going on to those benefits as a consequence. We had already started a consultation on personal independence payment, which I will come back to in a moment, but it was interrupted by the general election. The first thing the Labour Government did when they came into office was scrap all of that and then come forward with some ill-thought-through proposals that did not survive contact with their own Back Benchers. There are other areas where we can make savings. The size of the civil service is one. The civil service has grown by 37% since 2016. We could cut it back by 25% and make about £8 billion— [ Interruption. ] The hon. Member for Halesowen (Alex Ballinger) should listen carefully to this, because he is about to sit on those benches on the 26th of this month and listen to his Chancellor come up with some pretty unpalatable things. These are good alternatives that should be taken seriously. Raising taxes is simply a choice. The Labour Government are too weak to make the choice to control spending, so they fall back on taxes. They had to U-turn on the welfare reforms they brought through, and £5 billion was added to Labour’s black hole in an instant. We have seen the terms of reference for the Timms review of personal independence payment. They show quite clearly that there is no intention of saving any money from the PIP budget. That is grossly irresponsible. It is spiralling ever skyward. From what we hear, it is highly likely that the two-child limit will be scrapped and abolished. Why? Probably because the Prime Minister, shackled to his Chancellor, is feeling that he is being squeezed halfway out the door of No. 10 and thinks he had better do something to settle the troops on the Back Benches. But that comes with a price tag of £3.5 billion. The only choice that this Chancellor is taking is to fail to get on top of spending and to put up taxes in order to fund ever more welfare.

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman’s question identifies the core of the fallacy of his Government’s approach, which is to assume that getting better outputs is all about spending ever more money. It is not. It is about what you do with that money; it is about productivity. One of the Government’s many mistakes when they came to office was to splash out on pay rises for their trade union paymasters—14% for the railways drivers and 22% for the junior doctors—with not one string attached in terms of improved productivity. Therein lies the answer to the hon. Gentleman’s question.

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House calls on the Government to control public expenditure in order to keep the promise made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the Confederation of British Industry conference on 25 November 2024 that, after the last Budget, the Government would not raise taxes; and further calls on the Government not to break its manifesto commitment that it would not increase National Insurance, the basic, higher or additional rates of Income Tax or VAT. Right at the centre of this motion is the single word “trust”—the trust that Labour Members lost with the British electorate. They lost it when they promised not to put taxes on farms, and did so; when they said they would not be means-testing the winter fuel payment, yet did; and when they said they would not be putting up taxes left, right and centre, but did exactly that when they came into office. Indeed, in their own manifesto there were around £7 billion of tax increases, which by the time of the first Budget translated into some £40 billion of additional taxes. Of course, much of that related to employer national insurance—a clear breach of the Labour party manifesto. Do not take my word for it. Take the word of Paul Johnson, the former head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, who said that that particular tax increase was a “straightforward breach” of the Labour party manifesto. The Chancellor also said that she would not take decisions that would affect working people, yet we know from the figures released just yesterday that unemployment is at a five-year high. There are 180,000 fewer jobs on payrolls on her watch. Some sectors are particularly badly impacted. Some 90,000 jobs in hospitality have been destroyed, which particularly affects the youngest people in our country, who are desperate to get on the first rung of the career ladder but are deprived of that opportunity by Ministers. After that calamitous Budget, there were further pledges and further promises from the Chancellor. She said to the Treasury Committee: “we are not going to be coming back with more tax increases”. She said on Sky News that she had “wiped the slate clean”. On 25 November, at the CBI’s annual conference, she said: “I’m not coming back with more borrowing or taxes.” There has been little of that language of late, and I think we all know why. At the October Budget, the Chancellor said something else that was telling and extremely important. It is worth my repeating it in full. It relates to her clear pledge not to extend the freeze in the personal allowance under the income tax regime. She said: “I have come to the conclusion that extending the threshold freeze would hurt working people. It would take more money out of their payslips. I am keeping every single promise on tax that I made in our manifesto, so there will be no extension of the freeze in income tax and national insurance thresholds”. —[ Official Report , 30 October 2024; Vol. 755, c. 821.] When the Minister comes to the Dispatch Box, will he reconfirm that solemn pledge the Chancellor made in the last Budget? [ Interruption. ] He could intervene now—that is true. We know that the Chancellor has messed up the economy, yet now, only about a year into the Government, we are already into the blame game. The Chancellor made an extraordinary and rather confusing address to the nation recently in No. 10 Downing Street, in which she sought to blame everybody for this fiasco except herself. She blamed Brexit. She blamed Donald Trump. And when it came to future downgrades of productivity by the Office for Budget Responsibility, she even had the temerity to blame those of us on the Conservative Benches—blaming the past for the future. I was half expecting her to blame world war two or the great war, or the Boer war, or perhaps the battle of Hastings, which surely, with the harrying of the north, must have scarred our economy and must still be being felt 1,000 years later.

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend makes an extremely incisive and correct point. If a Government spend huge amounts of money, there is an opportunity cost to that and it comes through in various forms, including, as he rightly says, raising the cost of capital and crowding out labour, skills and so on. It is a fine and important balance to get right and this Government, palpably, have got it wrong.

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend is entirely right. The conclusion that one must draw on the mess that this Government have made of our economy is that it has become brittle, fragile and vulnerable to the kind of external shocks that it was able to withstand when the Conservatives were stewards of it. While per capita growth is almost on the floor, unemployment is at a five-year high; as we know, every Labour Government in history have left unemployment higher on leaving office than it was on entering office. Inflation is high and business confidence is at rock bottom. In a recent survey, the Institute of Directors found that business confidence among its members was the lowest in history. My right hon. Friend the Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison) refers to covid—according to the IoD, business confidence is even lower now than it was during covid, when the economy contracted by more than 10% overnight. That is how bad business sentiment is out there.

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  Madam Deputy Speaker, that is a great shame. The hon. Gentleman has not been here for any of the debate, but that does not mean that he might not have given the best possible intervention from the Labour Benches so far. Perhaps he may like to come in a little later. We have a Government who are engaged in serial breaches, who have no backbone to take the right decisions, and who will always fold to pressure, including from their own Back Benchers—and all at the expense of businesses and hard-working people up and down our country.

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  I am glad the hon. Gentleman has raised my tenure at the Department for Work and Pensions, when I was the Secretary of State. I was very clear that we needed to arrest the rising welfare bill, and—

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend absolutely gets to the core of it. This is an extraordinary point to have arrived at, but this Government, despite their majority, do not have the plan, political will or, seemingly, even the ability now to command enough support on their own Benches to push through vital spending controls that would allow us to get the taxman off the back of businesses and people up and down our country.

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  If the hon. Gentleman looks at absolute poverty after housing costs, he will find very significant reductions for children, pensioners and across the piece during the vast majority of our time in office.