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Mr. Cameron: I hope that my hon. Friend has read page 256 of the Red Book when studying the Budget. It states that the Chancellor is already planning an increase of 6 per cent.—three times the rate of inflation—in the council tax. For my hon. Friend's constituents in Buckinghamshire, will not the £100 be given with one hand while money is taken away with the other through the increase of 6 per cent. in their council tax bill, which is roughly £1,000? My hon. Friend should be careful to warn his constituents that what the Chancellor giveth, the Chancellor taketh away.
Mr. Goodman: My hon. Friend is right. I am several hundred pages behind him in my perusal of the Red Book.
Mr. Goodman: My hon. Friend says that he skipped, but I was about to make the same point as he did. The 15 per cent. rise that I mentioned was followed by a 5 per cent. increase last year. Those increases have hit pensioners on fixed incomes who receive low annuity payments. That group of people has suffered real cuts in income in the past few years. As my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron), who looked ahead in the Red Book, said, what the Chancellor gives with one hand, he takes back with the other.
Secondly, I want to make a brief point about Equitable Life.
Mr. Clifton-Brown: Does my hon. Friend agree that it was a mean payment with strings? As I understand it, the £100 payment will be only £100 per household, it will apply to pensioners only when they reach the age of 70 and it is a one-off payment, not an ongoing payment to meet the considerable increases in council tax.
Mr. Goodman: In the light of my hon. Friends' remarks, I am already beginning to regret my generosity to Government Front Benchers. My hon. Friend is, of course, absolutely right.
Mr. John Bercow (Buckingham) (Con): I have warned my hon. Friend before, and now have reason to do so again, against the tendency towards excessive generosity to those on the Treasury Bench. I hope that he will hold it in check. Does he agree that, in addition to the depredations from which pensioners in Buckinghamshire have long suffered under this Government, there is real grievance at the failure to pay child tax credit to all too many people in our respective constituencies who are entitled to it but have been deprived of it on account of Government incompetence?
Mr. Goodman: My hon. Friend is absolutely right to warn me of excessive generosity to the Government. I must in turn warn him that when he says, as he often does, that it is important to combine social justice and economic efficiency, he, like me, must be wary of echoing too much the language used by Government Front Benchers, but the point that he made was right.
Secondly, on the subject of Equitable Life, those on the Treasury Front Bench will not be surprised to hear that many of my constituents have expressed dissatisfaction with the recent statement on that subject by the Financial Secretary to the Treasury. That is why I wish to commend on their behalf the early-day motion tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin), the shadow Chancellor, which calls on the Government
- "to find a way in which either the Parliamentary Ombudsman or Lord Penrose himself can now examine possible maladministration by the Government Actuary's Department and other regulatory bodies, in order to make recommendations on compensation."
Thirdly, I want to make some brief remarks about the Budget in relation to health spending. Many of my constituents in Buckinghamshire will be asking where all the money has gone. A consultation paper has been published in relation to children's services at Wycombe hospital and to other services. It is proposed that the children's ward, maternity services and the special baby care unit all be moved to Aylesbury. That is in the context of a £15 million deficit across health bodies in Buckinghamshire.
I realise that all health bodies and other bodies have to live within their budgets but there are some startling figures against which those proposals must be seen.
Health spending in Bucks is some £400 a head. In Liverpool, for example, it is some £900 a head. It is legitimate to ask whether the assumption that we truly have a national health service is right because what the Government are effectively saying to my constituents in High Wycombe and Marlow is that, in health terms, they are worth less than half what the people of Liverpool are worth. It is in that context that we must see those plans.I say to those on the Treasury Bench that, whatever the Chancellor may have said in his Budget statement about health care spending, we face a danger in Bucks. I want to put it no higher than this. It is possible that babies could die because of the extra length of the journey from the middle of High Wycombe, where deprivation is concentrated in the town, to Aylesbury. It is a deeply worrying prospect and I heard nothing in the Budget that will do anything to address that.
I turn to poverty in the light of my work on the Select Committee on Work and Pensions. At the risk of rousing the wrath of my hon. Friends, I point out that I have before in the House paid tribute to the Government's intentions in relation to poverty. I think that they are admirable and that it does no one in the House any good when political parties impugn each other's motives unfairly. I am, however, a little more critical and questioning of the means to be used. We now know that the Government are likely to meet their 2004 child poverty target, which is welcome, but like many of my hon. Friends I am a little dubious about the value of relative poverty measures, because they produce perverse results—a point that was not cleared up in the Budget. If there was a collapse in median incomes, we would have the perverse outcome that we could be said to have solved our poverty problem because incomes at the top had fallen. That is the difficulty with all relative poverty figures, so I have always been dubious about the measure on which the 2004 target is based.
The Government could have answered in the Budget several questions that surround the 2010 target. First, they say consistently that they are committed to eradicating child poverty, but I have never heard Treasury Ministers clearly explain what that noble objective means. Does it mean eradicating absolute poverty, eradicating severe or persistent poverty, or eradicating relative poverty? The latter is surely impossible without complete equality of outcome, a task that even old Labour would have found extremely ambitious.
Secondly, the Chancellor could have cleared up ambiguity in the new measure.
Mr. Webb: I am listening with care to the hon. Gentleman's comments. He says that to eliminate relative poverty we would need absolute equality. However—and this is not just a nit-picking point—the relative poverty line is generally at 60 per cent. of the median, whereas there are Scandinavian societies in which deviation from the median of greater than 40 per cent. is regarded as extreme. That sort of relative poverty is much narrower. Such a modern society is conceivable, even in the west, and does not require absolute equality.
Mr. Goodman: The hon. Gentleman is right to say that relative poverty can be interpreted in several ways,
and it could be interpreted as it is in Scandinavia. However, I put it to him that if we spoke to the man or woman in the street, who perhaps does not study the arcana of these matters as he does, about the abolition of relative poverty, they might indeed believe that any Government who sought that were aiming at absolute equality of outcome.
Mr. Clifton-Brown: Again, my hon. Friend is being too kind to the Government in relation to child poverty. The number of families with children who are homeless continues to rise substantially and, in particular, the number of families with children living in bed-and-breakfast accommodation has almost doubled under the Government. For a family with children to be in such accommodation is a miserable way of living.
Mr. Goodman: I completely agree, and when I have finished my canter through the Government's rather dubious and undefined measures, I intend to come to such points; but I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point now.
Mr. Bercow: I agree with my hon. Friend that it is unwise to focus on relative conceptions of poverty. We are all familiar with W. G. Runciman's "Relative Deprivation and Social Justice", which is an interesting thesis but does not, I think, advance the cause. Is it not wiser to focus on absolute poverty and the significant number of people in our country today who still lack the basic essentials, to one of which my hon. Friend the Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown) alluded? It is that phenomenon with which the Government should principally be occupied.
Mr. Goodman: My hon. Friends are putting me to shame: my hon. Friend the Member for Witney is familiar with the Red Book and my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow) has read even more widely. He is absolutely right. That was the very point that I was about to make, because in relation to the 2010 target, the Government have replaced their single measure with a triple measure. They intend to measure relative low income, absolute low income and material deprivation and low income combined, and I join him in agreeing that the second and third of those measures are far better than the first. However, my point is that the Government have not made it clear in the Budget whether they will hit their target only if they move in the right direction on all three of those measures at once. The Chief Secretary might be able to tell us something about that later.
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