The Commercial Secretary to the Treasury (Lord Sassoon)
My Lords, as noble Lords are well aware, when this Government came into power they inherited the largest peacetime deficit in our history. We are doing everything possible to get the economy moving and to deal with the enormous debts we inherited. Last week’s Fiscal Sustainability Report by the Office for Budget Responsibility highlighted the importance of the Government’s plans to ensure the long-term sustainability of the public finances. Our consolidation plans build on last year’s public sector pensions deal, which the OBR has identified as instrumental in preventing further increases in public sector net debt over the long term.
This Bill implements further reforms to improve the state of the economy. Despite the challenging economic backdrop, we remain committed to supporting growth. The Bill introduces a number of changes to encourage growth in our economy and help businesses of all sizes. The Government have clearly set out their ambition to have the most competitive tax system in the G20. The competitiveness of our tax system diminished over the last decade, as our competitors cut their corporation tax rates. We have taken action to address this. Clauses 5 and 6 make further cuts to the main rate of corporation tax, to a rate of 23% next year. This will be followed by a further cut in the Finance Bill of 2013. A cut in the main rate of corporation tax benefits businesses right across the country. As the CBI said:
“The additional cut in the headline rate of corporation tax will help make the UK a more attractive place for companies to invest, do business and create jobs”.
The Bill also introduces new controlled foreign companies rules designed to improve the UK’s tax competitiveness. These reforms will ensure that this is done in a way that reflects modern, global business practices, significantly reducing the compliance burdens of business. As my right honourable friend the Chancellor said in his Budget Statement, this reform,
“will stop global firms leaving Britain, as they were, and encourage them to start coming here”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/3/12; col. 802.]
WPP and other major companies have recently announced that they are considering a return to the UK, or that they will move their tax domicile into the UK.
Alongside these reforms, the Bill also introduces a patent box to encourage innovative activity in the UK, but competitiveness is not only about the corporation tax rate. We had been told that the 50p rate of income tax was damaging to our competitiveness and that it would not raise revenue. Indeed, the HMRC report, published alongside the Budget, sets out that the 50p rate is distortive, is damaging to international competitiveness and is an economically inefficient way of raising revenue. In short, the 50p rate has failed. The analysis by HMRC shows that the yield would be, at best, £1 billion and, at worst, may raise nothing at all. This is because the behavioural response has been substantially larger than expected. The 50p rate has damaged the UK’s competitiveness at the very time we must do all we can to improve it. That is why we will reduce the additional rate to 45p from next year. As the CBI said:
“Reducing the 50p income tax rate will send a clear signal that Britain is open for business”.
We want to make the UK the best place in Europe to start, finance and grow a business. That is why the Bill introduces measures to enable greater investment in our small and medium-sized companies. The increases to thresholds and better targeting of the enterprise investment scheme and venture capital trusts in Clauses 39 and 40 will allow businesses to raise equity more easily. The Bill also establishes the new seed enterprise investment scheme to encourage investment into new, early-stage companies by providing tax relief of 50% to investors.
The Bill also provides for individuals. The increase in the personal allowance in Clause 3 will set the value at £8,105 from 6 April this year and we have announced a further increase of £1,100 next year, the largest ever increase in cash terms. The Government are taking 2 million people out of income tax and providing a tax cut to 24 million people. This is a major step towards our commitment to raising the personal allowance to £10,000 by the end of this Parliament.
The Bill also makes changes to the age-related allowances that support our objective to make the tax system simpler and easier for people to understand, but no pensioners will be worse off in cash terms as a result of these changes and this year our triple lock will see the basic state pension increase by over £275. This is £127 more than the previous Government’s plans.
This Government are responsive to the concerns of working families and businesses about the cost of living and the challenges of running a business. That is why we have deferred the fuel duty rise, so that road users are paying 10p a litre less in taxation than they would be doing had Labour still been in power. As RAC Foundation director Professor Stephen Glaister said:
“This is good news for drivers and good news for the country”.
As noble Lords know, this Government have also had to make difficult decisions so that we can tackle the deficit. This includes withdrawing child benefit from households earning more than £50,000. This is a fair way to make savings. We are also taking steps to ensure that the wealthy pay their fair share. The Budget package ensures that the wealthiest will pay five times more than the cost of reducing the additional rate of income tax. The introduction of a new higher rate of stamp duty land tax at 7% on properties sold for more than £2 million will raise over £1 billion in the next five years. The new stamp duty land tax enveloping entry charge rate of 15% will deter those seeking to put their high-value property into corporate structures to avoid tax. The introduction of the UK-Switzerland agreement will ensure that we address the tax loss from those who put their money into Swiss banks to evade tax, and we are tackling tax avoidance with measures in the Bill raising over £1 billion in total.
We will also raise revenue from those sectors that are better able to pay. The increase in the bank levy in Clause 209 will ensure that that the levy will raise around £10 billion from banks over the course of this Parliament, yield that is helping to ensure that we can reduce the deficit, which in turn ensures the stable, low interest rates that are of such benefit to our economy.
The Government are committed to greater consultation on tax policy changes. Most of the measures in the Bill were announced at Budget 2011 and have been subject to extensive consultation. We published more than 400 pages of draft legislation for comment in December and received more than 450 comments. This consultation has ensured better legislation with fewer changes required.
The Bill sets out changes to improve our competitiveness, encourage investment and support our businesses through the recovery. Of course, we always said that recovery would be choppy. In fact, last year the independent Office for Budget Responsibility revealed that the underlying damage to the economy, and our challenge in repairing it, was much greater that anyone had thought. However, we are doing everything possible to confront Britain’s problems, get the economy moving and deal with the enormous debts we inherited. The Bill builds on the progress that the Government have made to date to help families, help business and support economic growth, and I commend it to the House.
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, as I respond to this debate on the Finance Bill, I thank the dedicated band of noble Lords for contributing to this short and, what was until the last intervention, rather focused debate, before the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, went off in many different directions. This year’s Finance Bill follows an unprecedented degree of consultation and engagement, and implements many of the changes announced at the Budget. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, that there were some 200 measures in the Budget and on three of them, after consultation, we made appropriate changes. Therefore, I think that his characterisation of the Budget-making process, and the changes since, is way off the mark.
First, I will address one or two of the specific points raised before returning to the bigger picture. I start by thanking my noble friend Lady Kramer for pointing out what the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, seems not to recognise—that we are now engaged in the most progressive tax strategy of any Government in recent years. I completely agree with her. Not only is that the case but it is demonstrably the case. No previous Government have put distributional tables into the Budget document so that it is completely clear where the majority of the pain is falling, which is on those with the broadest shoulders in the top percentiles of the income distribution. I can assure my noble friend that as we carry on the progress on these many issues, we will make sure that we are very alive to loopholes. On stamp duty, for example, there are clearly questions, with possible ways of doing sub-sales avoidance and so on.
My noble friend mentions one offshore financial centre. I think that the agreement with Switzerland, which I referred to in my opening speech, shows that we will work tirelessly to take all appropriate action on that front. The noble Lord, Lord Browne of Belmont, makes a powerful case in relation to marriage. I would not go as far as the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, in rebutting that case. The coalition agreement commitment remains in place. We keep that commitment, as we do all taxes, under review. The noble Lord would not expect me to say any more this evening, but he has put on the record very clearly his feelings on this matter.
As to the IT systems of HMRC for transferable allowances, again it is an area of questioning that has been raised in another place. There is nothing I can usefully add. We do not tend to give a running commentary on HMRC operational matters. If there is anything more I can do to shed light on the specific questions that the noble Lord, Lord Browne, raises, of course I will write. However, my strong feeling is—as I suspect he realises—that I will not be able to give him anything more on that, but he makes his points very clearly.
My noble friend Lord Flight made some very technical but important points around EIS and VCT schemes in particular. He made the important point that some £12 billion of equity has been raised. These schemes have been extremely successful. As I outlined in my opening speech, we want to expand them. At one point my noble friend characterised them as giving with one hand and taking with the other. We do not see it like that. We have consulted extensively on detailed rules. Many industry groups contributed to the consultation and strongly supported the complete package of changes. However, my noble friend made his point very clearly. We keep these matters under continual review and if there are ways of making the guidance clearer and more helpful, I am sure that his thoughts will be taken on board. I will draw them to the attention of relevant officials. I also take the general point about clearer English, which is something of which we need to be reminded on a regular basis.
The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, launched a quite extraordinary attack—with which I agreed on a number of matters. My principal point of agreement was with the statement at the end of his speech that this is a recession made in Downing Street. I completely agree. The structural deficit that caused the recession to be as deep and severe as it is came from the overspending in the six years up to the financial crisis of 2008, when the previous Government diverted from the plans they had been left by my right honourable friend the previous Chancellor but three, Kenneth Clarke, who left the nation’s finances in a fine state. If the previous Government had carried on with his plans for a few years more, things would not be in the state that they are.
Lord Davies of Oldham
Would the noble Lord extend the same criticism to all the other advanced countries that face exactly the same issues?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, we were left with the largest structural deficit in the G20. We have brought it down from more than 11% to 8%, so we are making good progress—but the size of the task was bigger than in any other major economy.
Without rebutting the full litany and charge sheet—noble Lords would not thank me for keeping them much longer tonight—I absolutely rebut suggestions that we are insensitive to the societal and distributional effects of our measures. I explained the transparency with which we set out the effects of the Budget. It is those on the highest incomes who will pay most. The real results of what we are doing are the 800,000 new jobs that the private sector has created in the past two years. It is only by the private sector creating new jobs that we will be able to afford the better public services that the country needs and the lower taxes that we deserve. New jobs, falling unemployment and falling inflation are the things that the Government are concentrating on, and which the Budget continues to underpin.
Finally, the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, referred to today’s announcement by the IMF that downgraded global growth prospects. He was right to draw attention to it. The IMF forecast minus 0.3% growth for the eurozone this year. It forecast that the Italian economy will contract by 1.9% and the Spanish economy by 1.5%. It forecast that US growth would be only 2%, and it downgraded forecasts for emerging economy growth. It is in the face of those very strong headwinds that we have to carry on with our deficit reduction programme of tight fiscal discipline and loose money. I am very happy to talk about the 1930s. We do not have time to do it in detail, but tight fiscal discipline and loose money is precisely the prescription that caused a significant increase in growth through the 1930s.
In conclusion, this Government have taken difficult decisions to eliminate our structural current deficit over the coming four years and stimulate a private sector recovery. This strategy has been endorsed by the IMF, the OECD, the European Commission, ratings agencies and UK business organisations. We have always said that recovery would be choppy and our plans would necessarily incorporate a degree of flexibility. This Bill further delivers our commitment to improve our competitiveness, encourage investment and support our businesses, large and small. At the same time, it removes hundreds of thousands of individuals from income tax and helps reduce the cost of living for families across the country, and makes these changes in a way that is fairer and more consultative than any Finance Bill before. I commend this Bill to the House.