National Insurance Contributions (Secondary Class 1 Contributions) Bill

Debate between Baroness Lawlor and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Committee stage
Tuesday 4th February 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to contribute to this, the third day of Committee on this very important Bill. I say at the outset to the Minister and noble Lords that, again, this is a commencement amendment and does not seek in any meaningful way a permanent exemption to this jobs tax. It is merely an opportunity for the Government to think again, based on up-to-date and more contemporary empirical evidence, so that they can study properly a full impact assessment, as the Bill has an impact on a very important part of the healthcare sector: community pharmacies.

The Minister will know that there is significant concern across the whole NHS and the wider healthcare sector about the implications of these fiscal changes for community pharmacies. The figures produced by Community Pharmacy England suggest that these changes alone will generate an extra burden, an extra encumbrance, on community pharmacies of approximately £50 million, even with the changes in the employment allowance. If you strip out the employment allowance, the figure is approximately £74 million. If you add the two other cumulative factors to these fiscal changes, the encumbrance for community pharmacies is going to be very heavy.

Of course, on its own, we welcome the rise in the national minimum wage—we believe that low-paid people should be paid more and have a decent standard of living—but, remember, these burdens are falling on a particular part of the community. This will mean an extra cost of anything between £115 million and £152 million per annum, according to Community Pharmacy England. If you also add in the reduction in the business rates relief as it impacts on operating costs, the overall, universal impact on community pharmacies will be in the region of £200 million—that is, one-fifth of £1 billion.

Let us remember what community pharmacies are: an adjunct to the NHS, in that they are a neighbourhood health service. I accept that Governments have to make tough decisions; in fact, my own party, when it was in government, was not able to support community pharmacies to the level that we would have liked. There has been a real-terms reduction in pharmacy funding from central government since 2015. The lowest number of pharmacies are now open to the public at any time since 2009, which is 16 years ago: 1,250 pharmacies have closed since 2017. What we are talking about today is a policy decision that has at its heart the very viability of this sector.

As noble Lords will know, doctors and dentists are able to defray the costs of their non-domestic rates by direct reimbursement from the National Health Service. That is not the case with pharmacies; in fact, 90% of pharmacies’ work contracts are for NHS reasons and projects, such as dispensing advice and consultancy—principally dispensing.

Let us think about what community pharmacies do for their local communities. They are a lifeline. Flu immunisation, smoking cessation, sexual health services, alcohol misuse interventions, substance misuse services, healthy lifestyles, diet and nutrition, and generic health education—these are all vital functions that community pharmacies carry out. They take a sizeable burden off NHS acute hospital trusts—clinical commissioning groups as was—and, of course, primary care facilities.

They cannot put their prices up. Because they are locked into contractual arrangements, which are fixed, they cannot pass the costs on to the consumer. Often, they cannot make cuts in staffing or the services offered, or make redundancies, without in effect closing the facility—or at least hugely reducing the service that they deliver. They have, over the past 10 or so years, increased service delivery massively. They will put most public services to shame in terms of delivery of productivity in that period; indeed, they are the safety valve for the NHS.

We on this side of the Room are asking not for special favours or for the policy to be junked but for an opportunity for the Government to think again about the special circumstances of community pharmacies. My noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe made an important point: the impact note that the Minister prayed in aid is out of date. I do not think that it has the up-to-date, topical data that it should have for the Government to properly consider, with the evidence available, the policy.

Incidentally, I should tell your Lordships that, naturally, I support the other amendments in this group: the employment allowance variation amendments, in respect of dentists and doctors, and, of course, Amendment 46 on pharmacies especially.

To conclude, this is about using an evidence-based analysis to create an impact assessment; to review the policy, at least; to inform the fairest and most sensible policy formulation; and to protect the interests of a vital part of our healthcare sector. If we do not do that, it will have a major impact on very vulnerable people who are NHS patients and who use the important services of community pharmacies. For that reason, I ask your Lordships to support this amendment and beg to move.

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend’s amendment on pharmacies. We must think of the impact. I have spoken to those who have been impacted already and worry that there is an impact not just on community pharmacies, which employ more pharmacists, but on small providers. When we look at what happens in towns and villages across the country, we see that, when a pharmacy closes down, elderly people, families and people looking for their prescriptions have to take a bus and go somewhere else. The impact on town centres of this sort of change can be quite significant. We have 3,560 independent pharmacies today.

In all of our debates today, we have spoken about the impact on each sector and how it might be alleviated, with amendment after amendment proposed from these Benches and from the Liberal Democrats, who spoke earlier in Committee. Barring retail and hospitality, today’s groups of amendments cover what are usually called public services. They are provided by independent providers. Some, such as the early years and hospice sectors, are charitable as well as independent. If they do not provide these services, there will be greater costs to the taxpayer, and they will do so in a much more bureaucratic and less person-sensitive way. The quality will go down and the cover will be broader; in fact, it will not meet the kind of person-to-person approach that we see offered by many independent providers.

I support my noble friend Lord Jackson because we are talking about people and their jobs: 80,000 pharmacists were employed in 2023-24. As well as them, we are thinking of pharmaceutical technicians, of which there are 34,300. These are real people and real jobs, and they are on top of the jobs that we have spoken about day in and day out in this Committee. I implore the Government and the Minister to think about what happens when people’s jobs go: not only do we as communities lose the services that are vital and which we have spoken about; we see an impact on our streets and our communities, and we increase the cost to the taxpayer—that will go further, in addition to the high hike in borrowing and the tax rises that the Government intend. We will see the further damage that will be caused to the economy. I implore the Government to think again.

Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Debate between Baroness Lawlor and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Committee stage
Monday 12th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her interjection. I am referring to the treaties emerging from the post-Second World War world, which was very much a European world at that time, to deal with circumstances such as the Holocaust and others, which had been left over from and arisen from it. I agree that there has been constant movement in this area. For instance, the European court at Strasbourg continues to make judicial interventions that sometimes try to push the European Convention on Human Rights much further than it was initially drafted to cover.

However, if I might continue, these treaties were conceived for a European world, by and large, and circumstances very different from our own. As I have said, these arrangements provide for potentially unlimited numbers of people from outside this country to command priority over the express and explicit wishes of its citizens.

Today, mass immigration threatens the democratic arrangements of western countries, the political systems on which they rest, and the stability on which societies and their economies depend. The threat does not stand over Britain alone. The failure of Governments all over Europe to stop clandestine or illegal immigration is destabilising them and their political arrangements. The difficulty of controlling long land borders all over Europe and the difficulties thrown up by the Schengen rules—now, I fear, ignored in many cases—have brought instability and undermined the democratic order. So too have international obligations embedded in domestic law and constitutions. The Sweden Democrats, who advocate tight controls on immigration, have shot to being the largest party in the centre-right governing bloc. For Denmark’s left and its social democratic Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s greatest challenge is non-western immigration. Italy can no longer process the volumes of asylum seekers arriving in small boats in Lampedusa and has called on the EU to help. France passed a measure on immigration, only to have the very amendments that had allowed it to pass, after 18 months to two years of wrangling, struck down by the constitutional court.

The UK is in a more fortunate position than these countries, since it is subject neither to Schengen nor the constraints of EU membership. This country and its people have the power to make their own laws. Their legitimacy derives not from arrangements made for times and circumstances different from our own—for a Eurocentric world, to be interpreted by internationalist institutions at a remove from democratic accountability that are often unaccountable for the consequences of the rules they liberally apply. I refer to my noble friend Lord Howard, who is not in his place: the question of democratic accountability must be central to any debate on controlling the UK’s borders.

Our Government have indeed recognised this in drawing up the present Bill, but they have held back from the final measure needed to make it effective. My amendment, like the same one proposed in the other place, will ensure that the Bill is fit for purpose—a purpose fervently desired by the people of this country.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to support the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lady Lawlor. I will speak generally about the Bill very briefly, and the amendment, and also say why I strongly oppose the amendments in the names of my noble friend Lord Hailsham and the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, which are pernicious and dangerous. I cannot believe that, when my noble friend Lord Hailsham sought election in the county constituency of Sleaford and North Hykeham in 2010, he would have told his constituents that he would seek to disregard the rights and privileges of Parliament in favour of supranational legal entities and international treaties, because I suspect that that would not have been a very popular point of view to take. But that seems to be the logical implication of the amendment he has put forward today.

The Bill does contain some important statements of principle, in that it reasserts the sovereignty of Parliament and its right to legislate to cut through the morass of alleged international norms which currently frustrate the ability of the United Kingdom to control its own borders, in Clause 1(4). The partial disapplication of aspects of the Human Rights Act—

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Debate between Baroness Lawlor and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Report stage
Wednesday 17th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Noakes on this issue, and I am delighted to have had the opportunity to support her by adding my name to the amendment. Noble Lords will remember that during the passage of the EU withdrawal Bill there was a great deal of discussion about whether this House sought to gain for itself executive powers—that is, to become the Government in directing government policy with respect to the withdrawal Act and exiting from the European Union, rather than performing its proper constitutional role, which we all concede is effective scrutiny and oversight.

This amendment is a helpful compromise in seeking to direct Ministers, the Government and the Civil Service to a place where we can all agree. I am sure that noble Lords who earlier this week supported Amendments 2 and 4 and spoke to Amendment 76, which I gather later today we are likely to divide on, will welcome this amendment—you need congestion charging on the road to Damascus, because the traffic is quite heavy at the moment. Those who were happy to turn a blind eye to the huge corpus of EU legislation from 1973 to 2020 are now praying in aid the importance of scrutiny and oversight. That being so, this is a good vehicle to give effect to that, particularly the need for periodic reviews of the Government’s progress on the dashboard.

As I made clear when I spoke earlier in the week, people are watching how this House and the Government ensure that the decision they made in 2016 is given proper effect. While I understand that this House cannot instruct the Government, this is a good way of achieving compromise. I expect a majority on all sides of the House to give my noble friend’s amendment their strong and emphatic support, and I fully expect, since the Minister has an opportunity so to do, an amendment to be laid at Third Reading that consolidates this amendment. If that is possible, I think there will be a strong consensus as the Bill goes forward. In the meantime, I strongly support the amendment and I hope noble Lords will give it their support.

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

I have added my name to my noble friend Lady Noakes’s Amendment 51A, and I would like to follow on from what she has said. It is important that the legislative momentum for sunsetting, removing or revoking EU legislation be kept up. The reporting requirement on the Government will, as she said, keep up the momentum and help the Government and indeed Parliament to keep track of what has gone, what is yet to go and how further regulations, if any, will be modified.

There is a very good reason for doing this, and it relates to cost. Ultimately, it is people who bear the costs, either through what they pay for goods and services or through their taxes for government compliance costs in dealing, as now, with two systems of law: EU retained law and our own common law.

I hope the reporting requirement will enable us all to know where we are going and help us keep track of getting rid of that which the Government have pledged to get rid of or modify where necessary. That is very important in the interests of efficiency, for everyone, not just businesses. It is also important for transparency. Not only does regular reporting help the momentum; it will make for fairness so that we are all clear about the rules. I hope it will mean greater prosperity, which we need to encourage. In my view, we need to move back more thoroughly to our common-law system, and that is something on which I hope to touch when we consider the next group of amendments.