ANNE MARIE MORRIS IS THE CONSERVATIVE MP FOR NEWTON ABBOT
A new year and a chance to build on the positive economic outlook we received at the end of 2023, getting us back on the path to healthy and sustainable growth.
Inflation fell from a high of 11.1% in October 2022 to 3.9% in December 2023. There is now an anticipation that interest rates, which reached a 15-year high of 5.25% last August, will follow suit and fall too and be at 4% by the end of 2024.
We are more or less in line with our major trading partners across the globe, and the doomsters who continually seek to down play our country’s successes have been proved wrong once again! We must continue to build back better, starting with a strong economy.
Without a strong economy we become less attractive to invest in as a country. Without growth, which also increases tax take, we will not be able to invest in our public services to improve them. Low inflation is crucial to ensuring our country has a resilient economy, and that is why the Prime Minister pledged to halve it – and he has met that pledge.
But we cannot stop there. We must continue to bring down inflation further – high inflation weakens the purchasing power of the pound in people’s pockets. We now need to increase productivity and drive efficiency through everything we do. In effect we need to create more wealth – more products and services – using less assets and time.
The Chancellor made it very clear in his Autumn Statement that he would drive efficiency from within government departments. Slashing unnecessary administration is something he highlighted. There are many time-consuming tasks that tie up our public servants across departments, be that police officers, doctors or teachers. Slimming down the paperwork public servants have to produce allows them to get on with doing the job they’re employed to do, and that means that the level of the public service we are receiving for the money we are spending will improve.
Alongside doing things smarter, we will have to make some hard decisions about spending priorities. It was right to allow the national debt to grow to enable the country to survive the Covid pandemic and then the energy crisis. But that wasn’t free money. It is crucial for a country’s economy to be significantly larger than its debt. If it is not, debt becomes very expensive to service. The claims by the media that public spending is being cut by £19 billion are not true, government spending on public services is actually increasing in real terms by 3.2% year-on-year. The Chancellor is making the correct choices to steady the ship, sticking to a plan that is working as inflation falls is a must.
