Sewage Pollution

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Anthony Browne

Tuesday 6th September 2022 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Last question—the prize for perseverance and persistence goes to Anthony Browne.

[Anthony Browne (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

The discharge of sewage into waterways, including the beautiful chalk streams of South Cambridgeshire, is clearly completely unacceptable, which is why I welcome the package of measures the Secretary of State talked about earlier finally to tackle the problem. Enforcement is a lot more effective if we hit owners and senior executives where it hurts most: in their pockets. That is why I welcome the fact that, as the Secretary of State has mentioned, including in response to the previous question, Ofwat is consulting on linking dividend payments to environmental performance. Does he also agree that the Government should consider going further and banning water companies that are fined for illegally dumping pollution from paying any bonus to their senior management team or dividends to their owners for one year? When bankers break the law, they lose their bonuses. Should not the same happen to water company executives?

Financial Services: UK Economy

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Anthony Browne

Thursday 9th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Anthony Browne]

Madam Deputy Speaker, you were in the Chair on Monday night when we had a rather fractious debate on a different subject, and I think we all agree it is a nice contrast to have a debate on which there is such wide agreement.

To the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq), you mentioned a couple of times that you agree with me on a couple of things, and you almost sounded surprised. To the hon. Member for Wallasey (Dame Angela Eagle), who also sponsored this debate, I agreed with almost everything you said.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. Please say “she said”, not “you said.”

[Anthony Browne]

This has been a well-informed, thoughtful and good-natured debate, and it was great to hear the hon. Member for Gordon (Richard Thomson) talk about the importance of financial services to Scotland—I also made that point.

Many hon. Members raised points that I did not mention in my opening remarks. The hon. Member for Wallasey mentioned the importance of financial crime, which I thought about mentioning, and she is right that it is a big challenge we need to tackle. My hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) spoke about the importance of legal services and related financial services, which are all part of a package. My hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Bim Afolami) talked about the importance of getting the right skills and talent, which I did not address but is obviously completely true. And my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond) touched on the importance of access to EU markets, which is critical and unknown at this point. It was good to hear the remarks from the Minister in summing up; it is great to hear that the Government are clearly very supportive of the financial services sector, committed to getting international agreements and making incremental changes that we can all agree on.

I have one last observation to make. My hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon talked about the Minister being known as the one of the best City Ministers ever. I agree with that, but it is a misnomer calling him a City Minister because, as he said, and as everyone else has said, financial services are important for the entire country. So perhaps we need to change the informal name for that job. This has been an important and thoughtful debate, and it is nice to be part of a debate where there is a large consensus on the way forward.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House recognises the importance of financial services to the UK economy; and calls on the Government to provide adequate support to help create the right regulatory and operational environment for that industry to ensure that the UK is able to retain its competitiveness on the world stage.

Finance Bill

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Anthony Browne

Report stage & 3rd reading
Monday 24th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Anthony Browne (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I, too, will abide by your strictures, Madam Deputy Speaker, to keep my speech as short as possible.

When I was an economics correspondent a very, very long time ago, tax competition between countries was all the rage. There was a sort of mainstream consensus that it was a good thing because it helped give countries an incentive to be an attractive place to do business, but in the last couple of decades it has become clear how easy it is for international companies to run circles around national rules and reduce their tax bills by shifting profits to low-tax jurisdictions, and we end up with this outrageous, unconscionable position of some of the world’s largest companies paying some of the smallest corporation tax rates. That causes anger across the UK and on both sides of this House; we are all aligned in the objective of ensuring that big companies pay a fair share of tax.

This Government have been doing an awful lot, as the hon. Member for Ealing North (James Murray) recognised, to try to tackle this issue both within the UK and internationally, including through measures such as the diverted profits tax, the digital services tax and changes on tax to subsidiaries. When I was chief executive of the British Bankers Association, I was involved with a lot of the implementation of those rules.

We need to take measures internationally as well; this is an international problem, so ideally we need an international solution. The difficulty, though, is getting an agreement between a large number of different countries. Normally these sorts of discussions go through the OECD, which is so big that it is difficult to get agreement and progress is absolutely glacial. That is why, on things such as the digital services tax, the UK has opted to act unilaterally before an international agreement can be agreed. I very much welcome the fact that the initiative is now being led by the G7, because we are far more likely to get agreement from seven major countries, and then to expand that out to the G20 and then to the OECD.

As we have heard tonight, particularly from my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond), these are complex negotiations. There are two interlinked pillars at the OECD: the scope of the tax and the level of the tax if there is a global minimum rate of corporation tax. As my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Danny Kruger) said, there is no point in agreeing a global level of corporation tax if all we are doing is taxing companies in California; the two parts of the negotiations are intertwined. I very much welcome the fact that Government are involved in these negotiations. I completely respect that they may wish to negotiate more in private than in public, as that is often the best way; I know that their intentions are absolutely right.

That brings me to new clause 23. It is the wrong review at the wrong time. The new clause asks the Government to review the corporation tax set at 21%, but, as the hon. Member for Ealing North said, it actually looks like Joe Biden and the US are now looking at 15%, so this proposal is already out of date and it has not even been voted on yet. It is also at the wrong time because what we do not want to do in the middle of an international negotiation is tie our hands, display all our cards and show what we are doing. It could create a dynamic in the negotiations that would actually set back the UK’s ambition to ensure that companies pay a fair rate of tax. I therefore fully support the Government in rejecting the new clause. I also fully support them on reaching a strong global agreement to ensure that the world’s biggest companies pay their fair share of tax.

I hope that that was less than five minutes.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Definite brownie points for the hon. Gentleman.

Protection of Jobs and Businesses

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Anthony Browne

Wednesday 9th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Anthony Browne]

I will carry on.

We are at a time when we must look to the future, not try to preserve the past. The great Andrew Bailey, the new Governor of the Bank of England, said recently in an interview that the Chancellor is

“right to say we have to look forward now. I don’t think we should be locking the economy down in a state that it pre-existed in.”

The shape of the economy will change, as we have heard today. It will not be in the same shape in a few years as it is now. The companies and people working in the aviation sector face a very difficult time over the next few years. E-commerce, on the other hand, is thriving. We have seen airlines cutting jobs, but we have seen Amazon recruiting. Inner-city sandwich shops have been hit really hard and will be for some time as people carry on working from home. Supermarkets are thriving. Pret a Manger has cut 1,600 jobs, but Tesco has just announced that it is recruiting for 14,000 jobs.

The focus of Government should not be on “prolonging the inevitable”, as the chief economist of the Bank of England said. The focus of Government should be on helping with the transition, as my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates) said, by helping the people who are losing their jobs into the new jobs that are being created. We must ensure that short-term unemployment does not move into long-term unemployment and that when people come out of work, they have relevant skills, motivation and contacts in industry. As soon as people become long-term unemployed—after six months or one year—they lose motivation and contacts, and the likelihood that their unemployment will carry on for much longer increases. That is why the Government are right to focus on their plan for jobs, through measures such as the kick- start scheme, support for apprenticeships, increased training and advice from Jobcentre Plus. That is the right approach.

Finally, many Members have been praising the international comparisons. We heard earlier the list of countries that have already announced the ending of their furlough schemes. I like statistics, and I have been looking at the Eurostat website, which is very good but could be a bit more user-friendly. The UK’s employment figures from Q2 to Q1—the key employment figures—dropped by 0.7%. That is after a very long period, and every job lost is bad news. However, Germany’s employment figures in Q2 to Q1 this year dropped by 1.4%, twice as much as the UK. In Ireland, the employment rate dropped by 6.1%, nine times faster than in the UK. In France—there seems to be a liking for France on the Labour Benches—there was a 2.6% drop in employment from Q2 to Q1, four times the rate here. We do not have that much to learn from the French employment market ,and I really do not think we should start doing so now.

Finally—[Interruption]—I want to say that Treasury Ministers have made the right decisions at the right time and I am confident they will in the future.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. There is no “finally”. “Finally” has to come before the end of three minutes—I am sorry.