Polly Toynbee: This budget lays the turf for the election – on Labour’s home ground
“Are you and your family better off than you were 13 years ago?” Ask yourself this, Labour says, echoing Ronald Reagan. Of course not. Living standards will fall and every public service will continue to decay. The government can expect few thanks for preventing another monster rise in energy bills, when people are still paying twice as much as a year ago. Headlines on falling inflation will impress few when voters find prices don’t fall, but keep climbing. “You could have been even worse off” is not much of a slogan.
Out there, the biggest wave of strikes rolls on, yet there was nothing here for public sector pay. The only tax break goes to the top 1% who are already soaring ahead while others fall back, given a bonanza on already over-subsidised pensions to prevent a handful of NHS consultants retiring.
With UK childcare costs the highest in Europe, that £4bn will help parents back to work. This shows how oppositions can force change: Labour’s “party of the family” promise of broader and deeper wraparound care has spooked the government. With weakened staff ratios of 1:5, it’s no restoration of Sure Start and crucial early years education. Have ministers looked after five two-year-olds all day long? Jam tomorrow, as much of this is not due until the other side of the election. Yet this bidding war for best early years policy is a giant leap forward in political priorities.
This budget lays the turf for the election, and it’s all on Labour’s home ground: green growth, services and cost of living. Minor repairs here and there only act as public reminders of all that is lost since 2010.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
Miatta Fahnbulleh: No proper plan to kickstart the economy
After a lost decade during which economic mismanagement has led to the biggest squeeze in living standards for generations, the chancellor had two big jobs to do today: insulate people from the cost of living crisis, and jump-start the economy to reverse the decline in living standards. He bottled both. And the result is a projected 5.7% fall in real incomes in the next two years, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility – the largest two-year fall since records began.
The chancellor showed how out of touch he is with the reality of people’s lives as he failed to boost the incomes of those who have been hit the hardest. Nothing for the public sector workers we all rely on, or for families on low pay who have been pushed further below the breadline. Holding the energy price guarantee at £2,500 was right, but this is a small reprieve for families facing bills that are double what they were two years ago. We needed a great homes upgrade to insulate millions of homes and the rollout of free basic energy to keep bills down for good.
But the biggest own goal was the lack of a proper plan to kickstart the economy. In the US, Joe Biden has laid down the gauntlet for action on green investment. Hunt should have taken a leaf from Biden’s book and boosted much-needed investment in green transition to build new industries, create good jobs, revive our communities and boost prosperity in every part of the economy. Hunt’s failure to make the big calls today will cement this lost decade and leave millions paying the price.
Miatta Fahnbulleh is chief executive of the New Economics Foundation
Katy Balls: Hunt still faces pressure from Tories on taxes
Ahead of the spring budget, there were three areas where Tory MPs were the most concerned: childcare, defence and tax. Each is seen as an electoral vulnerability at the next election. Jeremy Hunt has tried to provide on all three – but each comes with a catch.
The Ministry of Defence received a spending boost, but the pledge to raise defence funding to 2.5% will only come into effect “as soon as fiscal and economic circumstances allow”. That could be some time.
With Labour trying to make childcare a dividing line at the next election, the government was under pressure to act. It was drawing criticism both from Trussites upset that the former prime minister’s plan to slash childcare ratios had been shelved and “one nation” Tories who were angered that nothing had been provided to replace it.
The promise of 30 hours of free childcare a week from nine months old for working parents has been welcomed in the party with relief. However, it will only be introduced in full in 2025 – after the next election.
But the trickiest area for Hunt with his own party relates to tax. He ignored calls to halt the planned rise in corporation tax from 19% to 25%. Hunt has been privately telling MPs that the capital allowance he announced means it is a win for low-tax Tories as “it’s the effective rate of corporation tax that counts”.
However, it’s a position that leaves many in the party frustrated. While Hunt echoed Rishi Sunak in declaring the need to first bring down inflation, they will soon struggle to use this defence. One of the best pieces of news today comes not from Hunt, but the Office for Budget Responsibility forecast that inflation is due to fall by more than half to 2.9% by the end of the year. It means that there is a growing expectation that Sunak and Hunt will embark on a range of tax cuts closer to the election. If they don’t, they will face the wrath of already impatient MPs.
Katy Balls is the Spectator’s political editor
Frances Ryan: Work is a virtue, Mr Hunt? Compassion is too
“Work is a virtue,” Jeremy Hunt declared ominously, setting the tone for a “back to work” budget that revved up pressure on the long-term sick and lowest earners.
Childcare was one of the few areas to see a genuine boost. But look at the details: many carers on universal credit will have to meet more work search requirements to receive any help.
The plan to finally scrap the much criticised work capability assessment is on paper a relief to disabled people, but recipients must wait anxiously to hear what replaces it.
That the government will be “rigorously” extending the toxic benefits sanctions regime shows that, under the Tories, the poorest will always get more stick than carrot. Stepping up a policy that is proven to push people to food banks is particularly cruel at a time when many are already struggling to eat and heat.
Hunt proudly giving £100m to support charities to help them with the most disadvantaged was classic Conservatism. Forget the dignity of state entitlement – give the poor piecemeal charity and call yourself generous for doing it.
Yet the real insight came as much from what wasn’t in the budget as what was. Hunt rejected pleas to create a social tariff to help the poorest and disabled pay energy bills, or to raise meagre benefits to cover the soaring costs of living. Contrast that with the huge pension giveaway to the largely very wealthy.
This was a budget that tinkered at the edges of Britain’s crises, while making life harder for the poorest and disabled. Work is a virtue? Compassion is too.
Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist
Louisa Britain: So much for a ‘back to work’ budget
Disappointingly, this “back to work” budget proposed no plan to match unemployed people in Britain into sectors suffering from post-Brexit shortages. More than 70,000 visas were issued to foreign nationals to work in the care sector last year, not to mention construction, hospitality, logistics, agriculture or the NHS.
Increased benefit sanctions for unemployed and underemployed adults means rises in sudden extreme harms such as utility disconnection, eviction and suicides, which will only deepen barriers to work in Britain’s most vulnerable communities. Meanwhile, the £10m for suicide prevention charities will not fill the hole left by the aggressive erosion of social security, ever-rising rents and underfunded NHS mental health care facilities.
The promise that disabled people will be able to keep benefits, and that the work capability assessment will be scrapped leads to the obvious question – will that also mean the scrapping of the limited capability for work and work related activity premiums currently offered to those of us who aren’t well enough to return to work? Zoom working is still not an avenue for our most unwell and incapacitated.
Improved childcare payments available to working families in receipt of universal credit will come as a welcome boost to parents on low wages, but only where those parents do not face additional challenges. So, too, will lowering the age for free or supported childcare. This might eventually go some way to the “back to work” mission statement. Little else here will.
Louisa Britain is a commentator and campaigner focusing on disability and low-income issues. She is the editor of the forthcoming collection One in Five
Rebecca Long-Bailey: Gimmicks and spin instead of real help
For a multimillionaire chancellor to deliver a budget that offers so little for hard-pressed families during the cost of living crisis is outrageous. On a day when so many of Britain’s key workers were forced to strike over poverty pay, Jeremy Hunt’s offering to them is an insult.
Instead of using the budget to announce a thoroughly deserved pay increase for the doctors, teachers, university, rail and public sector workers, on strike today and throughout the week, Hunt has given us more of the same.
There is little for the low-paid or poverty-stricken households. All we get are pathetic gimmicks and spin. The announcement that energy bills will be kept at the same rate for just three months is ridiculously inadequate. Hard-pressed families need a guarantee that after three months the cap will be lowered significantly to reflect the falling wholesale energy costs already seen.
Increasing the living wage to £15 an hour, a major improvement in benefits for the poorest, and much better pay deals for all public sector workers, should all have been in the budget. A genuine tax on oil and gas companies and the introduction of a wealth tax on the assets and profits of the super-rich, could easily fund a massive injection into our public services.
Widespread “in work” poverty and cuts to workers’ pay are the reasons why so many dedicated public servants are forced to strike. But instead of seeking to make the super-rich pay more, the Tories are imposing more cruel sanctions on benefit claimants instead.
Once again, the Tories have delivered a budget that makes struggling families pay for the crisis they themselves caused. Britain desperately needs a budget to tackle the cost of living crisis, and this didn’t come anywhere close.
Rebecca Long-Bailey is the Labour MP for Salford and Eccles
Lucy Pasha-Robinson: The crisis in childcare is finally impossible to ignore
At last, the Conservatives are waking up to the transformative potential of affordable childcare for Britain’s bottom line. Better late than never. Jeremy Hunt’s plan to invest £4bn in free nursery places for one- and two-year-olds looks like it could offset some of the untenable financial pressures facing parents, and stem the flow of women leaving the workforce to care for families. But as always, the devil is in the detail. The earliest that parents will be able to access those extra hours for two-year-olds is April 2024 – and then, just 15 hours.
Deliberate underfunding of “free” places for three- and four-year-olds has picked every last scrap of meat off the bones of our early years provision. Widespread nursery closures, owners operating at a loss, a staffing and retention crisis: a fat question mark remains over how exactly early years providers will cope with any influx in demand for extra places, even if they are funded at cost.
Hunt is hoping to shore up the ailing sector by injecting £288m into the existing free childcare scheme for three-year-olds by 2024-25. Could that be enough to restore the sector to full health? It’s unlikely when the government’s own pre-pandemic estimates found it would cost an extra £2bn to fully fund the existing provision.
Relaxing staff to child ratios is part of Hunt’s plan to reduce financial and staffing pressures on early years settings, but there are concerns for the quality of care provided to the children at the heart of these plans, not to mention their lack of evidence basis.
There are reasons to be hopeful. The economic argument for fixing our childcare woes is becoming impossible to ignore. Britain’s two main parties are now jostling with increasing urgency to come up with the best childcare reform package ahead of the next general election. The Tories’ plan is far more radical than many would have imagined – finally, a concession their future depends on.
Lucy Pasha-Robinson is a writer and commissioning editor
