Dr Ashok Kumar

Labour Party | Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland

A PEOPLE BUDGET FROM A PEOPLE’S CHANCELLOR – ASHOK KUMAR

Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland Labour M.P, today hailed a ‘bombshell’ budget – with the keynote announcement of a cut in basic income tax from April 2008

Ashok said “This was a budget for the future – and a future which will see Gordon Brown as Prime Minister. It was a people’s budget from a people’s Chancellor – and from someone who will soon be the people’s Prime Minister.”

“We should all be proud that the British economy is growing faster than all other G7 economies, with inflation still falling and the highest rate of growth in all of our G7 competitors.”

“There was a lot in the budget that will be good news for Teesside business. Crucially high tech industry can benefit from the increase of public investment in science that will rise from £5bn this year to £6.3bn by 2010. This translates into new support for R&D in industry and with – crucially for Teesside’s process engineering sector – new agreements put in place with China for the development of clean coal technologies.”

“The Budget was also good news for Teesside’s new biofuels sector with the announcement of the extension of reduced duties on biofuels and biogases.”

“In social terms I was very pleased to hear the Chancellor announce a big increase - from £2bn to £8bn • in the Government’s Financial Assistance Scheme for people who have lost their occupational pension through the collapse of their employers. That will be goods news especially for the deferred pensioners who worked at the BUSM Texon plant in Skelton, and for whom I have long campaigned for a fairer deal.”

“But above all, this has been a budget that - again – will help both our young people and our senior citizens. Working families with children will benefit from a rise in Child benefit, which for the first child, will rise from £17.45 a week to £20 a week by 2010. Education spending in England will rise from £60bn this year to £74bn in 2010 – and we will be seeing the evidence of this in the new schools now being built in my constituency”

“600,000 pensioners will be taken out of income tax altogether and a whole raft of new grants for home insulation will mean an end to cold winters for many local pensioners”

“Tomorrow’s headlines, of course, will centre on the basic rate income tax cut, but in the budget’s details are much that will benefit us all, and these initiatives, I would argue, are firm foundations for the coming Brown premiership.”