Chancellor Philip Hammond was in bombastic mood for delivering his second Budget of 2017, making jokes despite the Office of Budget Responsibility's projections that listed productivity as down and growth falling. He brushed past those figures with lots of Brexiter-placating language and an opening salvo of £3bn put aside to get the country Brexit ready.
In the build-up to the Budget, Sarah Ann Harris in The Huffington Post UK posted an article listing those measures that charities said would be needed to address Britain's varied crises. Together, they would have required at least £10bn of new funding.
In the Budget, Hammond acknowledged the pressures and hardships and said that he was prepared to invest. But when the announcements came, they ultimately offered no more than half of the requested amounts to alleivate hardships.
On the disastrous impact of Universal Credit, Hammond went halfway towards the requests, even of MPs on his own benches, of reducing restraints on claimants - taking one week rather than two out of the waiting time to receive funds. With other easing measures, Hammond called this a £1.5bn package of support. Yet this was step didn't even reach the minimum requests for alleviation.
On the NHS, the Chancellor offered up some large numbers. These break down to smaller numbers, though. The figure of £10bn, for capital spending - infrastructure, buildings, etc - is spread across the five years of the Parliament, meaning no more than £2mn-£3mn a year. Another £2.8bn will be spread over three years, with just £350mn front-loaded to avert crisis this winter.
There was an olive branch to nurses in the form of a commitment to fund a pay rise for nurse, but this was conditional on negotiating a new contract settlement with the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt.
To address the housing crisis, and in particular affordability, the Chancellor announced a £44bn fund. This was, however, then broken down. This fund would be only partly public funding, with the other parts being loans and guarantees, and was intended to run through to the middle of the 2020s.
That could stretch that £44bn over eight years, or even more, meaning the yearly amount would actually be much lower, at around £5bn-£6bn - of which only a part would be a public funding rise.
At most this overall package, to tackle a range of social crises in Britain, will come to £2.4mn/year, plus only a part of the around £6bn/year package being invested in the housing market. That looks like being a long way short of the £10bn minimum requested.
The Chancellor found some money to invest, with £500m for various areas of tech, a few billion more to extend the Nation Productivity Fund, and a new £2.5bn fund to support new innovative, knowledge intensive, companies. Another £1.7bn was found for cities and city regions for various local infrastructure projects. The reality though, is that most of that will be spread over several years.
The Conservative Chancellor framed this as rejecting extra borrowing and instead using some of the headroom within his fiscal rules. However, there are still questions over how the Chancellor is going to fund these and the reality is there will still be lots more borrowing, with the process of eliminating the debt and deficit extended over a longer period.
The headline offer made by Hammond was to end Stamp Duty for first time home buyers on homes up to £300,000. While this was trailed as a boon to young people, the reality is that it will serve current homeowners best - likely helping and subsidising current people who are, on the face of it, more likely to already be Tory voters.
The cautious Chancellor had hedged his bets with this Budget. He has tried to appeal to all sides, to make everyone feel like they came out of this Budget with a little something. The reality is that no one has gotten what they wanted, although Brexiters may have been midly appeased by £3bn and adopting their rhetoric.
Social pressures in Britain demand a response, but the Chancellor has decided not to act. Hammond has stuck with cheap salves rather than paying for the solutions. To make real progress, we need more from the Exchequer.
References
'Budget 2017: Hammond gets a second attempt at Budget 2017, but will he act?'; from The Alternative; 20 November 2017.
Sarah Ann Harris' 'Budget 2017: Charities And Think Tanks Give Their Wishlist For Philip Hammond - Will the Chancellor spend or save?'; in The Huffington Post UK; 21 November 2017.
'Summary of Budget 2017: Key points at-a-glance'; on the BBC; 22 November 2017.
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