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Angus Robertson: It is a backhander, not a bribe.
Mr. McWalter: The hon. Gentleman mutters about backhanders rather than bribes. What do Opposition Members want? Do they want us to say that we will not address the issue because if we do, people will think that we are doing so for awful motives? We should tackle it because that is the right thing to do.
Sir Robert Smith: The hon. Gentleman is right—at least the Government have, at the very last moment, recognised the seriousness of the problem that people have been telling them about for a considerable time. However, it is a sticking-plaster solution and it is only available this year—it is not promised for future years. Surely, the Government should promise to reform the way in which we fund local government and, in particular, make sure that taxation for local government is based on people's ability to pay.
Mr. McWalter: I agree with the hon. Gentleman, although I suspect that I disagree with him about the way in which those funds are to be procured. The most difficult issue in the Budget to address is ability to pay. The hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman) made an excellent speech about the way in which we understand and deal with poverty, which is a problem in Wycombe and my constituency of Hemel Hempstead. I am constantly sounding off to the Chancellor about HIND—high income, none disposable—people. Some individuals do not have any disposable income because their housing costs are so high that de facto they are in poverty, even if on paper they do not appear to be.
I dealt with a case in my constituency involving a single mum with two children. She drove a fairly new BMW 5 series, but in fact she had almost no disposable income, and her company required her to drive that car because it wanted her to portray a certain image to clients. The taxation that she paid on her income and the car meant that the family—and I visited their home—were in desperate straits. What constitutes poverty is therefore not always clear, and we must look at disposable income. I am not chastising the Government—it is a hugely difficult issue. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has pointed out in the past that it is difficult to make benefits sensitive to housing costs, which contribute to the problem of achieving a fair system. As those housing cost difficulties are addressed—and I welcome the emphasis in the Budget on the Barker report and the Miles report—the housing system will become more manageable and housing costs will bear down less harshly on people in Wycombe, Hemel Hempstead and other constituencies. The contract between generations, the emphasis on housing and the attempt to provide appropriate resources will be important in future and are integral virtues of the Budget.
I touched on the current difficulties facing the older generation when I spoke about relief on council tax, but it would not be right not to say something about the pensioners, particularly in my constituency, of the Dexion company who are victims of a measure that I call the "The Dangerous Dogs (Pensions) Act 1995". It came into force on 6 April 1997, less than a month before the Government took office, and established a system in which pensioners of companies that went bust got their pension if the fund could manage it. If, however, people were not quite pensioners, they would be at the end of the line and might well end up with nothing. That is a most extraordinary injustice.
I have a constituent who is a pensioner now but was not yet a pensioner at the time the company went into liquidation. He had paid for 38 years and was two days away from getting his pension when the foul Pensions Act 1995 bit him. Progress has been made on the issue and, as the debate continues, I hope people will see that just as we must do the right thing by future generations to protect their interests—I have suggested that there are various ways in which the Budget does that—we must do the right thing also by the current generation who have been the victims of a major injustice.
I shall conclude by saying something about the resources that the Budget generates. I have spoken about science and welcomed the tremendous new initiative, but suggested that there should be close parliamentary monitoring to ascertain whether those resources are used wisely and well or foolishly and badly. The Opposition always assume that if we set out to raise money, that is the propaedia to throwing it all in the bin. We must ensure here in Parliament—all of us, Opposition, Back Benchers and Front Benchers—that the money is used wisely and well.
I welcome the Chancellor's emphasis on resource accounting, but I sometimes wonder whether we do it well enough. I am particularly worried about some of the things that are going on in the health service, and I hope that those on the Front Bench will take heed of the fact that a Labour Back Bencher sometimes worries about whether the money coming into the system is
being spent as effectively as it might be. I have in mind the fact that the budget of my local strategic health authority is scheduled to go up from £900 million a year to £1.6 billion. That is a huge increase, which takes us out of a condition of deficit financing, to which the hon. Member for Wycombe referred—a condition of always being in debt and of people always making decisions based on the fact that the books do not quite balance and we must make more cuts. We are not in that position now, I am told. The debt-ridden health system should finally be a thing of the past and we should have the resources to tackle the recommendations of the Wanless report.I very much welcome that, but the question is whether we are making the best use of the resources, the capital, the investment and the people we have. If we do the resource account badly, we could end up with the situation that we experienced at Hemel Hempstead hospital. For all I know, my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Treasury may have been born there. His mother still lives in Hemel Hempstead. The new maternity unit is nine years old and still sparkling new, with a wonderful special care baby unit. What did management do? They said, "Well, it's very nice and it cost us quite a bit of money, but unfortunately we're a bit debt ridden and it's very hard to get staff these days. It's an expensive part of the country and people always want to go somewhere else because their quality of life would be better, so sorry about this, but we are going to put the slammers on it. We're going to shut it."
If we have built up resources costing millions of pounds and we shut them early, that is as close to stupidity as policy making ever could be. We must ensure that, if we are going to do resource accounting, it is not merely a technical exercise that we do on a piece of paper with a quill but something that we do in practice by using the judgment of those who understand the bricks and mortar, who see the capacity, and who talk to the people involved. We also need active Members of Parliament and those who assist them to try to monitor all this expenditure, to ensure that it is used wisely and well.
On my own patch, I want to see the Wanless agenda introduced. I welcome the extra money because, once we get away from a deficit health system, the issues that are never addressed, such as mental health, geriatric help or dementia—issues that are always right down at the far end of the food chain under a deficit health system—can now be addressed. However, they will not be addressed if we do not do our resource accounting properly.
Mr. Mark Francois (Rayleigh) (Con): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. McWalter: I was just about to give up, but I would be happy to take the hon. Gentleman's intervention.
Mr. Francois: I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way just before he sits down. Does he agree that a particular problem associated with NHS expenditure is the fact that private finance initiative projects are often so bureaucratic that it takes a long time for the system to spend the money, and that a great deal of that money
is therefore wasted because of the time that it takes to get through it? Surely something can be done to make the system more efficient.
Mr. McWalter: I am amazed that the hon. Gentleman's intervention was so tame and tender. I agree with what he says, but there has also been a lot of talk from Members on his own Benches about how wonderful PFI is. In my local health trust, the local PFI outgoings for this year are zero, but it still has a huge problem managing its resource base. I hate to think what would happen in grandiose systems in which such outgoings were quite substantial. The problem of being in chronic debt would simply be regenerated all over again. I understand why the Government sometimes want these projects to be managed at so-called arm's length. The trouble is, however, that if the arms get too long, the projects end up out of sight of those who are committed to the process of parliamentary scrutiny. We must make very sure that that never happens.
I began by making certain points about science and about justice between the generations. This is a wise Budget, in that much of what it does seeks a balance of interest between the generations. I welcome the resources that it proposes and I look forward to the intensive process of scrutinising in great detail all the projects that will emerge from those extra resources.
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