Income Tax (Charge)
Debate between Edward Leigh and Mel Stride(3 weeks, 2 days ago)
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Mel Stride
My right hon. Friend is a sensible man to give way to, and I will do so in a moment.
The Chief Secretary to the Treasury recently admitted on Sky that putting up national insurance for employers will directly impact working people—of course it will. The Office for Budget Responsibility lays out in black and white that the consequence will be over 50,000 fewer jobs, with about 70% of the cost of this increase in taxation ultimately being borne by those who work, through lower wages. Are these not working people?
The Secretary of State mentioned her youth guarantee and the importance of youth. I simply observe that youth unemployment fell by over 40% under the previous Government, whereas it rose by over 40% under the last Labour Government. That is how successful the Labour party is.
Of course, because both the rate and the threshold have been increased, the national insurance increase will disproportionately impact those on lower wages, including the youngest workers.
Sir Edward Leigh
I warmly congratulate the new shadow Chancellor on his appointment. It is richly deserved, given his tremendous work as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in getting people back to work.
In opening this debate, the Secretary of State said that she is only attacking wealthy people. My right hon. Friend the Member for Central Devon (Mel Stride) is talking about working people, so will he emphasise that our party stands four-square behind working farmers? These people, with only 250 acres, just want to pass on their business to their son, but they are being cruelly attacked by this Government.
Mel Stride
My right hon. Friend is right that this is another broken promise. At the general election, the now Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs gave an unequivocal guarantee to farmers across the country that there was no question of farms being brought into inheritance tax. There is a good reason for the exemptions and relief, because if inheritance tax is levied on family farms that are passed down to another generation, those farms will have to be broken up, with parts sold off to pay the tax.
I am glad that my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) mentioned this, because the OBR has said that, by 2030, this measure will raise the princely sum of £520 million, which is enough to run the national health service for just one day. Has a more modest sum ever raised so much misery? I think not.
The Chancellor assured us that she will not fiddle the figures by changing the fiscal targets, yet we have seen the fiscal targets changed to allow this Government to borrow an additional £140 billion.
This is not a good time for the Secretary of State to talk about pensioners, but she mentioned them at the end of her speech. They were so badly let down by the means-testing of the winter fuel payment, and they were not told in advance to expect anything like it. Ten million pensioners across the country will lose up to £300 as a consequence of this measure. The Government claim that only the wealthiest, only the millionaires, will be affected, but two thirds of pensioners below the poverty line will have this benefit removed.
Economy, Welfare and Public Services
Debate between Edward Leigh and Mel Stride(4 months, 1 week ago)
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Mel Stride (Central Devon) (Con)
I congratulate everybody who has made their maiden speech in this debate. It is a big moment in one’s parliamentary career, but you are out the other side and nothing will be quite as traumatic as what you have experienced today. To go through them very briefly, I thank the hon. Member for Queen’s Park and Maida Vale (Georgia Gould), who told us that her great-grandfather—I think—came from Lithuania to set up a store in the middle of her constituency, which is her connection with it. The hon. Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Sarah Sackman) paid a very generous tribute to Mike Freer and the dangers and intimidation that he faced. She was also generous to Mrs Thatcher—she is clearly a very generous lady.
The hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Andrew Lewin) paid tribute to Grant Shapps and his numerous and frequent Cabinet positions, as well as his commitment to Ukraine. The hon. Member for Peckham (Miatta Fahnbulleh) paid tribute to the 190 Labour women MPs who are now in the House, as well as to Harriet Harman. My hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Bradley Thomas) managed to weave King John and A. E. Housman into his speech, and informed us that Hollywood is not a city on the west coast of the United States, but is actually within his constituency. If you want to see film stars, ladies and gentlemen, go to Bromsgrove.
My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Leicestershire (Mr Bedford) has the peculiarity of having three forebears who are still Members of this House. He was generous to each of them, which shows that he is a wise man and will go far. The hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Brash) stressed the industrial and shipping heritage of his constituency, and how it was indeed bombarded by the Germans in world war one, but it gave as good as it got. My hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy) praised his predecessor, Matt Hancock, of course focusing on racing and horses—although not, I noticed, on horseplay as such.
The hon. Member for Newton Aycliffe and Spennymoor (Alan Strickland) focused, with great pride, on the Hitachi Rail company in his constituency—shortly, I am afraid to tell him, to be seized by the Labour party and nationalised as part of its Government programme. My hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon (Greg Stafford) stressed defence spending, the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Rachel Blake) leasehold reform and the hon. Member for South Antrim (Robin Swann) the importance of agriculture.
I was out of the Chamber for the speech of the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover), and the Whip’s note simply says, “He said that there was a cat rubbing his legs”, or something to that effect. [Laughter.] Representing a highly rural constituency as I do, I know that strange things do occur, particularly late on those dull winter evenings.
The hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) stressed the importance of children in care. The hon. Member for Halifax (Kate Dearden) referred to her constituency as the new “Haliwood”, so another Hollywood reference there. I thought my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty) gave a very witty speech, and stressed the association with the RAF in his commitment to veterans. The hon. Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Lizzi Collinge) paid tribute to David Morris and his support for the Eden project, and I was particularly pleased to see her do that.
The hon. Member for North Down (Alex Easton) made I think one of the most moving maiden speeches that we have heard in this House for a very long time. He spoke very movingly about his parents, and we all know what pride his dad would have had in the fact that he has been successful in his fourth attempt to join us here in the House of Commons. The hon. Member for Harpenden and Berkhamsted (Victoria Collins) referenced the fact that a Roman road—Watling Street—runs through her constituency and spoke passionately about the importance of community and tolerance.
Finally, the hon. Member for North Durham (Luke Akehurst) spoke warmly of Kevan Jones, whom all of us who have been in this House for a while remember with great fondness, and the importance of skilled and well-paid jobs in his constituency. I hope that I have pretty much covered everybody and said the main things that needed saying.
Let us now turn to the debate itself, and it seems to me that the right hon. Member for Leeds West and Pudsey (Rachel Reeves), while I congratulate her warmly on being the first female Chancellor—I think that is a huge achievement and is to be very warmly welcomed—is, I am afraid, suffering from some level of amnesia. She appears to have forgotten the legacy that we have bequeathed to her. Inflation, which was up at over 10% last autumn, is now back to target. Mortgage rates are softening, real wages have been growing in each of the last 11 months and taxes have been coming down more recently under the previous Government. When it comes to debt, we were on target, as we handed over to the right hon. Lady, to see debt falling in line with her own fiscal target at the end of the fifth year, and we of course have the fastest growing economy in the G7.
One wonders where this amnesia is coming from, and it is of course nothing more than smoke and mirrors. It is to cover up the fact that the Chancellor is rolling the pitch to raise taxes. Against all the commitments she made during the general election, she will be raising those taxes in the autumn. It will not be because we have bequeathed her something of which she was not aware in advance. The IFS has made it very clear that the books were “open”, as Paul Johnson said, for all to see.
When it comes to public services, we have a proud record. On education, we have the best readers in the western world. We have been going up the PISA scales for mathematics and sciences, something that did not happen under the last Labour Government. Crime has been halved, broadly speaking, across the period from 2010 to the present day. When it comes to work and welfare, we have a near-record level of employment, and we have a low level of unemployment. And economic inactivity is lower than in every single year under the last Labour Government. What was Labour’s record? When they left office, unemployment was double the level that it is today. Under every single Labour Government in history, unemployment has been higher when they left office than when they came in. Most disgraceful of all is that youth unemployment was up 43% under the last Labour Government; under the last Conservative Government it was down by over 40%.
As for welfare, under Labour there were 1.4 million people languishing on long-term benefits for almost a decade. On pensions, we saw the 75p pension increase and the Gordon Brown raid on private pensions of £180 billion—from which the pension system never fully recovered. It is, therefore, no surprise that, under Labour, we ended up with the fourth highest level of pensioner poverty across Europe. Under Labour there were 1 million more people in absolute poverty after housing costs. There were 200,000 more pensioners in poverty and 100,000 more children in poverty under the last Labour Government than there are today.
We will be a responsible Opposition: we welcome the commitment to growth in the King’s Speech; we welcome the commitment to building houses, as long as that is with sufficient local consent; we welcome the Budget responsibility Bill in principle; and we welcome the announcements that the Chancellor has made regarding pensions: consolidating pensions and ensuring that we get better returns for pensioners and that we invest in long-term pension capital.
But there are too many echoes in this King’s Speech of the Labour of old. The nationalisation of the railways. The consolidation of GB Energy. The long hand of Government reaching—[Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] Labour Members cheer now but they won’t be cheering in a few years’ time. They have short memories; I remember when the railways were nationalised and it was not a pretty situation. They are bringing forward French-style employment laws that will lead to less efficient businesses and to tribunals. They will be increasing the freedoms of trade unions, who are their paymasters. And they will be dispensing with minimum service levels; that will lead to more strikes and the inconvenience of the public, but certainly not greater growth.
What have we heard in the King’s Speech on welfare, one of the biggest challenges of the modern age? Zip, absolutely nothing, nada, diddly squat—absolutely nothing from the Labour party. They talk about moving the National Careers Service from the Department for Education to the Department for Work and Pensions; well, I hardly think that will move the dial. Their back to work plan is named exactly as our back to work plan was that my right hon. Friend the Member for Godalming and Ash (Jeremy Hunt) the shadow Chancellor and I launched last autumn, but it has nothing standing behind it—not the billions of pounds of support we put in place to encourage people to go into work and to transform lives.
All we have heard from those on the Government Benches is a denigration of our job centres; these are described as places of fear by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, and by the Minister for employment the hon. Member for Birkenhead (Alison McGovern) as places that do not offer real help. What an insult to the tens of thousands of hard-working people up and down our country who go into those offices to help people improve their prospects and improve their lives. They are against what they call punitive sanctions; it will cost hundreds of millions of pounds to remove those and it will result in less engagement with the help that is available and diminish people’s life chances. There have been no comments whatsoever from the Government Benches on our work capability assessment reforms, that according to the Office for Budget Responsibility will see 400,000 fewer people on long-term sickness benefits. They opposed in poetry; they have to govern in prose. They have not even picked up the pen, but let me be clear: we made mistakes in government and we have paid the price at the ballot box, and it is right that my party now faces a period of reflection and does so with humility. The electorate has spoken, and we must listen. But that is not the same as saying that the vision that is Conservatism has died, even if of late it has been too often obscured. That vision still burns bright. It burns bright as a beacon of freedom, enterprise, opportunity and, yes, stability and hope in the face of—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Edward Leigh)
Order. Will the shadow Secretary of State please curtail his remarks now?