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Mr. Purchase: My hon. Friend makes a good point. I worked for the truck and bus division of British Leyland, and the management there did not exactly cover itself with glory. My abiding memory is of building the chassis of trucks and buses. Management were confident that people all over the world would buy them and that no one would make them except us. It was a miracle; we survived for about 20 years believing that, before everybody overtook us.
It is hard to describe the track we worked on as a track because when the lads had got so far with a bus or a truck, they would say, "We'll have a tea break now, but somebody had better move the track along." It was not a moving track; someone had to wind the damn thing. We worked with that sort of kit in the mid-1970s. Management were amazed when suddenly we could not sell buses and trucks. Why were the buses in Latin America, the sub-continent of India and the far east suddenly gleaming and new when we no longer had the technology or the investment? We had genuinely lost the plot. As my hon. Friend said, much of that was due to lack of management drive, perception and vision.
Matters have improved, but we have deskilled massively. Part of the answer is education, education, education. However, a new co-operation and a new vision is also required to replace current activities at Rover and elsewhere.
My next point is not frivolous. Announcements were made about maternity pay and services today. They are most welcome. We should do as much as we can for
women who have babies and return to work. However, the Chancellor made no mention of provision for paternity pay. I am worried that he might expect companies to make such payments for time off. The bad news is that, in my constituency, across the west midlands and no doubt in other constituencies, there are innumerable companies that have perhaps six or 20 workers, half of whom are young men with the engine running. They are bound to have more and more babies.
Imagine a press shop where a skilled fitter, a press setter and four or five operators work. Two of the lads announce, "Well, the missus is pregnant and I'm off for this month." That means that the other five will be idle. Small companies cannot sustain the loss of one or two young men for three, four and five weeks at a time. Neither is it possible for the state to pay. When we consider proper provisions for maternity pay, we should also consider the effects on small companies whose workers are predominantly male, where key workers such as tool setters may be off for a month. That will hurt, and we must be careful.
Mr. Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham):
The Budget was heralded in many of the leaks to which we have become accustomed as a Budget that had something for everyone. Taken with the many announcements that were made before today, there was something for everyone.
I represent the part of Worthing that my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing, West (Mr. Bottomley) does not. We do not have young men with their engines running, as the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mr. Purchase) put it, so much as older pensioners who are having their engines overhauled. As my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing, West said, those people, especially those whose birthdays happened to fall from 5 April 1945 onwards, stand to lose £500 a year through the abolition of the married couples allowance. I strongly endorse my hon. Friend's suggestion that if the married couples allowance has to be abolished, the changes should be phased. That would be preferable to the current cliff-edge arrangement.
The abolition of mortgage interest tax relief at source constituted another aspect of the something-for-everyone Budget that was trailed. There is something for 10.5 million mortgage payers in this country--the loss of tax relief on their mortgages.
The Budget contains something for everyone who happens to work in or own a business: the energy tax. They will face additional burdens that will make manufacturing businesses in particular uncompetitive, especially when compared with other businesses overseas. There is much more in the Budget for those who have a pension fund--the continuing raid on pensions that the Government started a couple of years ago.
The Budget was also described as a Budget for hard-working families. However, hard-working families will be £600 worse off through additional taxes. They will have to work harder and longer to stand still because of this and previous Budgets.
The Chancellor took a dismal rearguard action to defend the mantra, which we hear so often from the Dispatch Box, that the tax burden is falling. We all know that that is not true. At last, the Prime Minister's press secretary has admitted that the tax burden has been rising and will continue to increase during this Parliament.
Ms Keeble:
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the figures that he cites appeared in last year's Red Book and that they refer to tax take as a percentage of gross domestic product? When people talk about tax, they usually mean the amount of money that they pay in tax and the benefits that they gain.
Mr. Loughton:
There is no point in trying to fudge the issue again; the cat is out of the bag. The Prime Minister's press secretary has admitted that the amount of tax taken as a percentage of GDP has been increasing and will continue to do so. It was 35.3 per cent. when the previous Government left office, it is currently more than 37.5 per cent. and it will be more than 37 per cent. at the end of the Government's five-year term of office if they stay for the whole term. Yet the Prime Minister said, "We are cutting taxes" and also that the Government had no plans to increase tax. The hon. Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble) should throw in the towel, because the tax burden is increasing. Even after the Budget, it will continue to increase.
It is difficult to get to the bottom of any Government figures. The chief economist of the Confederation of British Industry recently said:
Mr. Loughton:
The hon. Gentleman is being even more selective than the Chancellor. He knows that the tax take fell in all but one Parliament under the Conservative Government. Every year under this Government, the tax take has increased. It is predicted that that will continue. Labour Members should stop trying to re-fudge the figures on which the Front Bench has at last come clean.
I want to move on to some of the announcements that the Chancellor made today, because there was a lot of recycling. It is favoured by the Environmental Audit Committee, of which I am a member and a great fan. The Government are exceedingly good at recycling--not waste, but spending announcements that they have made before and continue to make time and again. We welcome the announcements on increased spending on health and schools--my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition made that absolutely clear--but nobody in my constituency and nobody out there in the real world believes that public services are getting better.
Nobody believes that the health service is delivering a better service, and we are waking up to the fact that the number of people who have to wait to get on waiting
lists has doubled. My constituency has the longest waiting times in the country for the oldest population in the country and nobody believes that waiting times are coming down, because they are not.
Nobody believes that class sizes in most schools are coming down, because they are not. In most cases in my constituency, successful schools are bursting at the seams and people are trying to get their children in. Class sizes are going up. Nobody believes that the service offered by the police force, in very difficult circumstances, is getting better when police numbers are coming down and, for the first time in the past six years, the crime rate, particularly for serious crime, is going up.
It has become extremely difficult to analyse the Red Book . . . The document is now far too political and this can conceal what the numbers are really saying . . . The book's become unreadable. The thing might as well be published by Millbank Tower.
Mr. Andrew Love (Edmonton):
Opposition Members have a theme. I have also read the Red Book, and chart C3 on page 204 shows that in the early 1980s, at the height of Thatcherism, the tax to GDP ratio was 2 per cent. or 3 per cent. higher than it is now. If it was right for the previous Government to raise taxes in a recession, why are we tarred with the brush of doing something unusual?
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