Home-ownership Rates
Debate between Baroness Penn and Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe(4 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, the noble Baroness is right that shared ownership represents an important part of our affordable homes programme and is an important part of helping first-time buyers, particularly younger first-time buyers, on to the housing ladder. We conduct extensive evaluations of our affordable homes programme and will always seek to learn what we can do to improve those schemes, including the users’ experience of them and whether their complexity creates problems further down the line. We will always look at improving where we can.
Baroness Penn (Con)
My noble friend is absolutely right that planning is key. Many measures in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act are targeted at supporting the planning system. We also had announcements at the Autumn Statement about improving the efficiency of the planning system and putting more resources into it. My noble friend is also right about small and medium- sized builders; part of the key to supporting them is ensuring that, when we have more difficult market conditions, we continue that supply chain and increase supplies. For example, the affordable homes programme can provide an important role in making sure that builders do not go out of business in tougher conditions.
Lord Best (CB)
My Lords, in the longer term it would clearly make homes more affordable for first-time buyers if there were enough homes to go round and current acute shortages were eased. In the short term, does the noble Baroness agree that it is ridiculous that so many young people pay more in rent to private landlords than they would pay for a mortgage to secure a home of their own if only they could persuade the banks and building societies to lend more sensibly? If she agrees, will the Government look at extending the new and useful mortgage guarantee scheme to reassure lenders and at the DWP’s support for mortgage interest scheme, which needs to be a benefit and not a loan, to pick up those rare cases where there are serious arrears?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I have good news for the noble Lord on the first point. The mortgage guarantee scheme has been extended to June 2025 to allow more 95% mortgages to be available to first-time buyers. We have also made changes on support for mortgage interest. Since April, we have allowed those on universal credit to apply for a support for mortgage interest loan after three months rather than nine. However, it is right that it remains a loan rather than a grant in these circumstances.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)
My Lords, may I finally get in with a question? The noble Lord, Lord Naseby, mentioned the benefit of complete full relief on all mortgage interest that many of us had when we were purchasing. Why cannot young people have that?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, we consider all different routes to supporting young people into the housing market. One drawback may be that support is less targeted at those who face the greatest affordability challenges when getting into the housing market. We have sought to refine in our programmes over the years where we can get the biggest impact for the investment that we are making on behalf of the taxpayer.
Local Government Finance
Debate between Baroness Penn and Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe(5 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Penn (Con)
The noble Lord talks about cut after cut. Since 2019, local authorities have had a real-terms increase in their core spending power, taking into account higher levels of inflation than anticipated at the time. In addition to that, we have provided money for the homelessness prevention grant and the rough sleeping strategy, and in addition to that we have provided the £750 million that I referred to in answer to the right reverend Prelate to begin to address some of the longer-term solutions to how we address housing supply in our country.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)
My Lords, there are avenues that the Government are not exploring. We have an increasing amount of retail accommodation which is now empty and an increasing amount of office space in many cities which is not being utilised. What is the Government’s policy around trying to put that to good social purpose? Why are they not thinking about trying to create public-private partnerships to use those, rather than worrying too much about looking to new builds?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I believe that that is the case. The Government are committed to revitalising our high streets, whether that is rejuvenating existing commercial property or making the best use of it in the local circumstances.
Corporate Profits: Inflation
Debate between Baroness Penn and Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe(10 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Penn (Con)
My noble friend is right that we are still feeling the effects of the Covid pandemic in a number of ways. This Government put in place unprecedented economic support to get people and families through that pandemic, and we have had to take difficult decisions about the public finances since. Another way in which we are still feeling the effects of the pandemic is in the unwinding of the measures put in place to control it. We have seen heightened pressure on global supply chains; that has been part of the driver of the increased inflation and higher prices that we are seeing.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)
Does the Minister agree that many of those factors affect the rest of the world, including other countries in Europe, yet this country is performing poorly in relative terms compared with them? Our inflation is higher and our productivity is lower—why is that so? Is this not to do with some of the points pressed about Brexit by people on the Tory Back Benches opposite and the 4% loss to our economy as a result of us coming out of Europe?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I have to disagree with the noble Lord. The higher rates of inflation that we see are seen in countries across the world. I believe there are nine EU countries with higher headline rates of inflation than the UK, and more than half of EU countries have higher rates of core inflation than the UK. The noble Lord talked about the importance of productivity to our future economic well-being; I could not agree more. We need greater investment to drive greater productivity, and we would not see that with the kind of policies advocated by the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, such as windfall taxes and other measures that would deter investment from our country.
Alcohol Duty Bands
Debate between Baroness Penn and Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe(1 year, 3 months ago)
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Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe
To ask His Majesty’s Government whether they have any plans to increase the top rate of the new alcohol duty bands, forecasted to take effect from August 2023.
The Parliamentary Secretary, HM Treasury (Baroness Penn) (Con)
We aim to keep alcohol duty rates under review during the yearly budget process and to balance the impact on businesses with public health objectives. In December we announced that the freeze to UK alcohol duty rates had been extended for six months, to 1 August 2023, providing businesses with certainty and aligning with the implementation date for our historic alcohol duty reforms. The Chancellor will reserve his decision on future duty rates for the Spring Budget 2023.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for her reply but she seems to have missed the Question; the Question is about the top band, and she made no mention at all of that. The reality is that a new system is coming in, which I generally welcome, that will actually yield less tax to the Government—which is a surprise, given that we cannot pay nurses enough but are not taking the taxes that we should be. We should be increasing taxes there, not reducing them, which is the case with the top band; in relative terms, it is going down. Would the Government please review this, and change it and increase it, so that alcohol such as vodka is taxed at a higher level than is presently proposed?
Economic Downturn
Debate between Baroness Penn and Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe
Baroness Penn (Con)
My noble friend is right that the UK remains a great place to start a business and we will always want to make sure that our tax regime is incentivising businesses to start here. I am sure that he would agree that measures such as the super-deduction are a great initiative to help support that.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)
My Lords, can the Minister tell the House what she has discerned, having watched the interviews with the candidates to be Prime Minister, about their long-term thinking? None of them has talked about climate change. Is it not time, particularly on a day like this, that we started thinking about the need to travel less, to use less water in due course and to eat less? There is a whole range of areas where we need to do less, not more. When will we start that kind of debate and thinking?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I was doing some other things this weekend, such as celebrating my daughter’s first birthday, and I will not comment on the leadership race. The noble Lord raised the need to have greater hybrid working, for example, and to look for other opportunities for efficiency in our economy and I absolutely agree with him on that.
Economy Update
Debate between Baroness Penn and Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, on my noble friend’s first point, she tempts me to comment on the operation of monetary policy by the independent Bank of England. The only comment I will give is this: since control of monetary policy was taken out of the hands of politicians 25 years ago, inflation has averaged precisely 2%. On my noble friend’s second point, I do not have those figures. I am not sure that they would necessarily be available, but I am happy to find out. If they are, I can write to her and supply them.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)
My Lords, I would like to follow up on the latter point about the tight labour market. Estimates are that we have between 400,000 and 1 million illegal workers in this country. None of them is paying tax, national insurance or into the Exchequer. Could the Government spend a little time looking at that? One solution would be to have an amnesty in the next six months for everyone who is an illegal worker to register. It would make their lives safer. They are here and would come into the system, and it would increase the flow of revenue and national insurance. I hope the noble Baroness will be prepared to take that away. Secondly, we look again at flows of income on page 5, with the “excess savings” we have in the country and what people are doing with them. I suggest we have a look again at what we did at the end of the Second World War, when we introduced post-war credits and raised substantial money as a country for investment. That was of great benefit to the country, and I am sure that people would be prepared to participate in an event of that kind if the Government were prepared to stimulate one.
Baroness Penn (Con)
On the noble Lord’s second point, the Government always welcome new or revisited ideas and I will certainly pass that back to the Treasury. On people who may be working in the black economy or working without paying tax and national insurance, the noble Lord is right that this is an issue. The Government have taken significant steps over recent years to ensure proper minimum wage enforcement. We also have a Director of Labour Market Enforcement because, as well as ensuring that people pay proper taxes, we need to ensure that they are not vulnerable to exploitation and that the proper rights they should have at work are also offered to them.
Biodiversity: Dasgupta Review
Debate between Baroness Penn and Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I disagree with the PAC conclusions, but I agree about the importance of the financial sector in making progress on this issue. In December, the Chancellor announced the UK’s intention to make climate-related financial disclosures mandatory across our whole economy by 2025 and to have a significant portion of mandatory requirements in place by 2023—becoming the first country in the world to make these disclosures mandatory. This will be an important step, but not the only step; we will also need government action on this issue.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab) [V]
My Lords, the report identifies the tripling of the world population, from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 7.6 billion in 2019, as a major contributor to unsustainability. As well as the need to look at family planning policies, Professor Dasgupta asks what else the review should consider in developing options for change. Is not voluntary euthanasia an option that could be considered? Would the Government ask him to look at that? That would reduce the numbers in the world.
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, that question has taken me into unchartered territory on the topic of biodiversity. We will consider all the findings of the review very carefully and come back in due course.