National Insurance Contributions (Secondary Class 1 Contributions) Bill

Debate between Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest and Baroness Kramer

Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons
Monday 24th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak in favour of these amendments and to speak very briefly about hospices—which I know many noble Lords have already done. Our hospices support over 300,000 people, mostly in the community, and this tax will cost the sector hundreds of thousands of pounds. Beds will close and outreach services will be decimated. Where will people go to die? Yes, hospitals offer palliative care, but only four out of 10 hospitals have the services that are necessary seven days a week, despite this having been a national standard in 2004.

The assisted suicide Bill is being debated in the other place. Assisted dying is what hospices do: ensuring that people can die in dignity, are properly cared for and can live as fully as they are capable of right to the end of their life. We only die once. I agree with what my noble friend Lord Leigh of Hurley has said previously: that not exempting hospices from this tax is shockingly cruel. But it is worse than that, because it shows a lack of compassion and an absence of humanity that are truly shocking. It leaves me speechless, and I have nothing more to say.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, we on these Benches do not dispute that the Government were handed a dire fiscal situation; the question is what taxes they choose to raise to remedy it? We feel that they have made the wrong choice in this instance.

With these amendments in lieu—certainly those from my noble friend Lord Scriven and the noble Lord, Lord Londesborough, from the Cross Benches—we have proposed that, in key areas, power is provided to the Government and to the Treasury to reverse that decision in these narrow circumstances if they discover, as they see this event play out, that the choices they made were not those that they thought they had made. It is very unusual from these Benches for us to be willing to provide what is, in effect, a Henry VIII power to the Government, and that we do so reflects our deep anxiety. This is not political game playing; we are deeply anxious about what will happen with community health, social health, small businesses and the knock-on consequences of all that.

I want to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, because it was her thought in Committee that one way to at least find some common ground would be to pass powers over to the Secretary of State. That is the pattern that we have followed. I hope that the Government will see that they are not forced to act in any way by two of these amendments in lieu; they are being given the opportunity and the possibility, and we hope they will accept them in that spirit.

The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, has proposed an amendment in lieu which would require an impact evaluation. I have to say to the Minister that, when he spoke at the opening of this debate about how few businesses would be impacted by the increase in employer NICs, I began to think that he had not been given the central information that he should have been given. If he were to look, he would discover that that vast number of companies that are not affected are those with three employees or fewer, but that those small companies that we look to for scale-up and to drive growth are impacted.

Again, this underscores the fact that to roll it out effectively—and I fully accept that this is new and has not been the pattern of past Governments—we need to move to a time when we get much more detailed impact evaluation as we deal with these issues in this House. We on these Benches hope very much that the Government will accept the three amendments in lieu. If they do not, then we will support all three.