Daniel Hooker from Northwood in London has been named as the winner of the “Chance to be Chancellor” competition which invited students to prepare a mock budget.

As Alistair Darling prepared one of the most hotly anticipated budgets in decades on Wednesday, Daniel recognised some of his own ideas. Mr Darling emphasised the need for more money to be spent on education and training, one of Daniel’s key policy themes. But Daniel would have gone slightly further on winter fuel payments, opting for a rise this year.

Daniel is also gloomier about the outlook for the economy this year, forecasting that GDP will fall by 4.1 per cent, compared to Mr Darling’s forecast of 3.5 per cent. But he too sees growth next year, of 1 per cent, although this is more circumspect than Mr Darling’s forecast of 1.25 per cent growth. “People underestimated the bust, and I think they are underestimating the boom part of the cycle too,” he said.

Hundreds of students entered the competition, run by the Citizenship Foundation, the charity, and Norwich Union in conjunction with The Times. Daniel, 17, who attends Merchant Taylor School, receives a Nintendo Wii Console Sports Pack along with a £250 charity voucher to give to a charity of his choice. The nine runners up will win an iPod Shuffle and a charity voucher worth £100.

Here is the full version of Daniel Hooker's speech

“Mr Deputy Speaker: This budget is announced during a serious global recession. Urgent steps must therefore be taken to help businesses and households through this difficult period. The Government will invest in public works to reduce unemployment and re-stimulate the economy towards renewed growth. However these measures will not just create employment in the short-term but also ensure the UK economy is well placed to meet its two most crucial long-term challenges - lessening our reliance on fossil fuels from abroad and ensuring that our workforce has the high skill level necessary for a developed economy to thrive in the 21st century.

The current liquidity crisis has not just affected bad banks and bad businesses, but has seen perfectly viable small companies dragged down as well due to their failure to access the sort of everyday credit required to keep businesses of that size runningregardless of wider economic circumstances. This situation threatens to cause the unnecessary failure of hundreds of small businesses across the country and this combined with the potential attendant job losses risks putting our economy on a downward spiral towards deflation and an extended recession.

The Government will therefore run a finance scheme allowing viable small businesses access to the credit they require to see them through the darkness of their balance sheets today to a brighter tomorrow. Another group which has been an innocent victim of the downturn is the elderly, who have seen the interest on their hard earned savings eroded by the necessary interest rate cuts of recent months while their energy bills have almost simultaneously risen by up to 50%.

We will therefore increase winter fuel payments for all over 60's to ensure that the most vulnerable in society are protected from the chill winds of recession without risking their financial security. However in times of economic difficulty, this Government cannot just act to mitigate the problems it causes but must actively attempt to restore full employment and stable growth while using the investment required for these two things as a springboard for making the long-term structural changes which the UK economy requires.

The most important of these changes is to move away from an economy reliant on foreign fossil fuels whose supply is uncertain and limited and whose effects threaten our environment. To this end, the Government will invest heavily in a new generation of nuclear power and nuclear power stations. This will provide significant employment, both in the short term as the power stations are built and in the long term as the power stations are manned and new technological solutions are sought, while also ensuring that Britain has access to a secure, clean and plentiful energy supply in a post-carbon world. Nuclear power is the fuel of the future and by investing now when it is a choice, and not later when it is a necessity, this country will be best placed to reap its benefits.

In a further attempt to reduce the country's carbon footprint while creating much-needed jobs, the Government will undertake a comprehensive updating of the rail network to improve its speed and safety as well as building 200 new carriages to increase capacity. This will ensure a better passenger experience, encouraging commuters to use trains instead of cars and therefore lessen our reliance on fossil fuels, while the re-laying of new tracks and building of new carriages will provide much needed jobs in the construction industry which has been one of the hardest hit by the economic downturn.

Another programme to generate increased employment and reduce the country's energy dependency is the insulation of 600,000 homes. The large number of homes involved will ensure that the programme will give the economy a significant short-term boost as a result of the jobs created while lowering energy bills and carbon emissions which in the long-term will give a noticeable number of households greater spending power, lessen our reliance on unreliable foreign energy sources and reduce the damage caused to the environment by the burning of fossil fuels.

As well as dealing with the threat and opportunities posed by climate change, the other major challenge we as a country and an economy face today is equipping our workforce with the high skill level necessary to thrive in our modern service-based economy. To this end the Government will continue its links with the private sector in building four new National Skills Academies to ensure that there is one of these centres for every business sector in the UK, a building programme which will have a further positive effect on the ailing construction industry. These centres are run by businesses themselves to ensure that graduates have exactly the training required to thrive in the specific area they choose to study. This project will be particularly beneficial to those who have not achieved their full potential in academic education and is positive proof of this Government's commitment to ensuring that everyone in the UK is given multiple opportunities to improve themselves, eve! n once they reach adulthood.

In further pursuit of this aim, each adult will be given means tested vouchers to allow them to pay for additional or re-training to improve their skills and therefore their employability in the modern knowledge based economy. While this scheme will be implemented as quickly as possible to allow workers whose jobs are under imminent threat from the recession to re-train and get back into work as quickly as possible, its ultimate purpose is to foster a culture of improvement within the UK workforce and to encourage lifelong acquisition of new skills resulting in a generation of higher trained and better motivated employees ready to meet any future challenge this economy may face.

In conclusion, this Budget addresses the need for immediate help for those at risk of losing businesses and jobs during the recession while combining it with long-term structural changes which our economy requires to adapt to the post-carbon, high-skills future and I therefore commend it to the House.

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