Finance Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading
Tuesday 8th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise with the unusual luxury of 10 minutes’ speaking time, given because we have only a dozen Back-Bench speeches on this crucial taxation issue. I hope that some Peers in your Lordships’ House who specialise on issues of poverty and inequality—indeed, on any issues at all—will join these debates in future. Taxation, or the lack of it, shapes our societies. As the richly informative and powerful speech of the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, outlined, decades of decisions about taxation have helped to give us our deeply unequal, poverty-stricken society. We have been taxing the poor and allowing large companies and rich individuals to get away without paying.

The noble Lord, Lord Leigh, suggested that your Lordships’ House may need more experts in tax, finance and business, but this is a far broader issue that needs a far broader input. I quote the American historian Albert Bushnell Hart:

“Taxation is the price which civilized communities pay for the opportunity of remaining civilized.”


It is clear now, on the streets of London, that there are strong and rich debates about how the people who benefit from the investments of this and previous generations—in roads, public buildings, electricity supplies, and the services that we all pay for such as schools, hospitals and policing—make a fair contribution to the maintenance and restoration of our degraded physical and social infrastructure, and the impacts of austerity that we see in potholed roads, closed libraries and inadequate social care provision. These are not technical issues, but are at the very foundation of our society.

Noble Lords might worry about where they get sources of information. I thank Tax Justice UK for an excellent briefing and for drawing attention to the work of the Women’s Budget Group, which has identified how women, people on low incomes and BAME communities will benefit least from the tax breaks in the Bill and bear the chief brunt of the scheduled spending cuts.

It is interesting that, in the debates so far, the failures of regulation and of culture in our financial sector have come up again and again. Noble Lords who took part on the then Financial Services Bill might reflect on this. The noble Lord, Lord Bridges of Headley, talked about umbrella companies, which is an area where the UK is world-leading in entirely the wrong direction. The noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, talked about the “many-headed Hydra” of tax-dodging schemes, as did the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, in great detail. The fact is that we have too large a financial sector, which is milking not just the UK but the entire world and particularly the global south. The centre of global corruption is on our doorstep.

It has been suggested that we all live in social media bubbles these days, but in your Lordships’ House I feel like I am in the vigorous Atlantic surf of strong disagreement on economic issues. I particularly disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, about their entire economic commentary. The ways and means mechanism and its implementation have existed for many years and show how the rules of the game have changed and that the old economic approaches failed disastrously and gave us the global financial crash. We are finally looking differently at how the economy works and what it is for. The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, and many others said that we need to get the economy going again and focusing on growth. I remind your Lordships’ House, in the country that is the chair of COP 26, that we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. That is not politics; it is physics.

The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, recommended some reading to us. I have some alternative reading to suggest, a book I reviewed this week in the House magazine by Professor Tim Jackson. He is quite a mainstream economist and his book Post Growth is well worth a read. I also pick up on the points of the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, which focused on the importance, as he sees it, of giant multinational companies. I stress that 61% of employment in the UK is in small and medium enterprises. The Government talk of levelling up, but I would rather talk about spreading out prosperity. The foundation of prosperity for every community in this land needs to be built on strong local economies of small independent enterprises and co-operatives—a different and stable kind of economic model.

Having set the scene, I turn to some details in the Bill. I take the point made by several noble Lords about the thickness of the paperwork but, when you look at the measures, you see that it is actually a modest Bill. It talks about tidying up some Northern Ireland and VAT Brexit issues—another reminder that Brexit is by no means done. There are some modest measures that noble Lords have referred to about plastics, red diesel and cycling—very modest again for the chair of COP 26, when you think about the need to act on the climate emergency. We also have an increase in stamp duty land tax for overseas purchases of residential property in England and Northern Ireland which, should your Lordships take an imaginary scan of the boroughs around where we sit today, might be best described as shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

The headline measure is a super deduction for the largest companies, many of which have done very well out of the great tragedy and suffering of the global pandemic. This is estimated to be going to cost the Treasury £25 billion. That would be a lot of social care or a large injection that our education sector so desperately needs. The Office for Budget Responsibility said that £5 billion of the spending that would be covered by this will be spent on previously planned investments. The Times reported that tax advisers specialising in capital allowances have pointed out that jacuzzies are listed as one investment that could receive a 130% rebate.

Perhaps we also need to think about what is not in this Bill. It is interesting that, despite widespread debate in society now, both in the Bill and in the debate around it in the other place, no amendment was put down about a wealth tax. There was no real discussion of it in the other place despite that now being a major topic of discussion among even some quite mainstream economists and certainly among the public.

Of course, there is a lot of discussion about the levels of corporate taxation, led not by the UK but by Joe Biden’s America. When I asked the Minister on 14 April about the US President’s plans, he effectively gave me a “no comment” response when I asked what the UK stance would be. I am pleased to see that we have now signed up to the US initiative. The noble Lord in his answer to my supplementary question then said something very interesting. He said the Government had always been one that wanted to reduce taxation wherever possible. Perhaps he might like to consider the words of the Chancellor in deciding to end the race to the bottom in corporation tax by increasing the headline rate to 25% in 2023 after Her Majesty’s Treasury found that the cut in the headline rate since 2010 did not drive inward investment. To quote the Chancellor, it

“might not be the most effective way to drive capital investment up”.

I also refer to the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, about those statistics. He referred to inward investment. I would say that that inward investment very often has been the selling off of the family silver, whether that is our water companies, publicly held land or, indeed, the family beds when it comes to selling off our care homes to the hedge fund industry.

If we did have, let us say, a wealth tax, where might it go? Despite the Government’s talk of an end to austerity, a £15 billion cut in annual government departmental spending is planned. These budgets are already cut to the bone and, of course, are being hit by the huge and continuing impacts of the pandemic.

There is some very useful information about who is paying and who is not. I have referred noble Lords to a report from the CAGE institute at the University of Warwick. In 2015-16, a quarter of people who had more than £1 million in taxable income paid less than 30% tax, while one in 10 paid just 11%—the same as a person earning £15,000 a year. This is a key issue.

I come back to the inequality and the poverty in our society, issues so well covered by the noble Lord, Lord Sikka. We are talking about capital gains tax and inequality in the way income is taxed. These issues are all missing from this Bill. They will need to be confronted soon.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Pitkeathley) (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, and the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, have withdrawn, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer.