UK Automotive Industry

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Jesse Norman

Monday 18th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Jesse Norman]

An economist of my right hon. Friend’s distinction will know that it is futile to predict the activity of private markets, because they so often move faster than we would imagine. A classic example of that is the way in which electrification has moved up the range and weight curves over the past few years. It is certainly true that at the moment, electric vehicles rely on fossil fuels for part of their charge, meaning that they are less green than they will be when those fossil fuels are removed from our electrical charging system. Nevertheless, those vehicles remain significantly lower-emission over their life cycle than equivalent petrol and diesel vehicles, including the production and disposal of batteries.

Capacity-building projects for important areas of our connected and autonomous vehicle supply chain are already starting to take place. This country remains one of the first to explore the business case for connected and autonomous mobility as a mass-transit solution. Connected and autonomous mobility will be the future; it will be an electric future, a zero-emission future, and one that is powered by the investments and leadership being provided now, with the private sector, by this Government.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the UK automotive industry.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Yes, it would be impossible to manage an electric car without Moto Rugby.

Sanctions

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Jesse Norman

Thursday 22nd September 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Jesse Norman)]

I beg to move,

That the Russia (Sanctions) (EU Exit) (Amendment) (No. 11) Regulations 2022 (SI, 2022, No. 792), a copy of which was laid before this House on 14 July, be approved.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

With this we shall consider the following motions:

That the Russia (Sanctions) (EU Exit) (Amendment) (No. 12) Regulations 2022 (SI, 2022, No. 801), dated 14 July 2022, a copy of which was laid before this House on 18 July, be approved.

That the Russia (Sanctions) (EU Exit) (Amendment) (No. 13) Regulations 2022 (SI, 2022, No. 814), dated 14 July 2022, a copy of which was laid before this House on 18 July, be approved.

That the Russia (Sanctions) (EU Exit) (Amendment) (No. 14) Regulations 2022 (SI, 2022, No. 850), dated 18 July 2022, a copy of which was laid before this House on 20 July, be approved.

[Jesse Norman]

The instruments before us were laid between 14 and 20 July under powers provided by the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018. They make amendments to the Russia (Sanctions) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019.

As the last debate demonstrated, this House stands absolutely resolute in its opposition to the illegal and aggressive invasion of Ukraine by Russia. In co-ordination with our allies, the United Kingdom continues to play a leading role in introducing the largest and most severe economic sanctions package that Russia has ever faced. The measures that we are debating are designed to isolate Russia’s economy still further and target key industries that support President Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine. The measures are somewhat technical, so I hope that the House will forgive me if I go through them in a little detail.

The No. 11 regulations ban the export of goods and technologies related to the defence, security and maritime sectors. They also prohibit the export of jet fuel, maritime goods and technologies, certain energy-related goods, and sterling and European Union banknotes. In addition, they ban the import of goods such as fertiliser, metals, chemicals and wood, depriving Russia of a key export market. Together, those markets were worth some £585 million last year.

The Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments concluded that three provisions in the Russia (Sanctions) (EU Exit) (Amendment) (No. 10) Regulations 2022 would not be inside the powers conferred by the Sanctions Act. His Majesty’s Government have resolved that by revoking the 10th amendment and replacing it with the 11th. I thank the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments for its continued engagement as we introduce further secondary legislation rapidly in response to this abhorrent war.

The No. 12 regulations place fresh restrictions on investments and services in Russia. They are designed to hit revenue streams of critical important to the Russian economy. The new measures prohibit persons from being involved directly or indirectly in acquiring land and entities with a place of business in Russia, in establishing joint ventures with persons and entities connected with Russia, and in opening representative offices or establishing branches or subsidiaries in Russia. The measures also restrict the provision of investment services related to these activities. There are some exceptions to the provisions to prevent overlap with existing regulations as well as licensing and enforcement powers.

Health and Social Care Levy Bill

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Jesse Norman

Committee stage & 3rd reading
Tuesday 14th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Jesse Norman]

It is very hard for me to comment on such a remote hypothetical, but the fact of the matter is, as the Prime Minister said, no political party had a pandemic in their manifesto and we have to deal with the situation—

[The Chairman of Ways and Means (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. I would be grateful if the Minister would address the Chair.

[Jesse Norman]

I am so sorry, Dame Eleanor. I am rightly chastised and thank you for that point.

My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch asked why the Barnett formula applies and what will happen once it is abolished, but once again he takes the Committee to the outer reaches of speculation. The fact is that it does apply and it has thoroughly beneficial effects for the devolved Administrations as regards this piece of legislation.

With that, I ask those who have tabled amendments and new clauses to withdraw them. I commend the Bill to the House.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 1 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 2

Destination of proceeds of health and social care levy

Amendment proposed: 4, page 2, line 29, leave out from “as” to end of line 30 and insert “determined jointly by the Treasury and the devolved governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.”

The amendment would require joint agreement between the Treasury and the governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as to how the levy proceeds are to be shared between the four areas and between health care and social care.—(Alison Thewliss.)

Question put, That the amendment be made.

Capital Gains Tax

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Jesse Norman

Wednesday 28th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Jesse Norman)]

I beg to move,

That the draft Double Taxation Relief (Federal Republic of Germany) Order 2021, which was laid before this House on 15 March, be approved.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

With this it will be convenient to discuss the draft Double Taxation Relief (Sweden) Order 2021, which was laid before this House on 15 March.

[Jesse Norman]

Both orders insert important provisions recommended by the OECD’s and G20’s base erosion and profit shifting project—BEPS—into existing double taxation agreements. For those Members who may, surprisingly, be unfamiliar with the BEPS project, it was an international effort to equip countries with the right domestic and international regulations to tackle tax avoidance. The BEPS provisions ensure that double taxation agreements fulfil their main purpose of facilitating global trade and investment. In addition, the provisions simultaneously limit the opportunity for the agreements to be used for tax evasion or avoidance.

Usually improvements to our bilateral double taxation agreements recommended by the BEPS project are made under a treaty commonly referred to as the multilateral instrument, which makes it possible to modify double taxation agreements in line with BEPS project provisions without the need for bilateral renegotiation. However, the domestic legal systems of both Germany and Sweden mean that it is much simpler for these countries to modify their double taxation agreements through amending protocols rather than through a multilateral treaty. As a result, the UK Government have agreed with both Germany and Sweden to implement these modifications through the protocols attached to these orders. These changes included introducing minimum standards to prevent avoidance through the abuse of tax treaties and improving the resolution of disputes.

The protocols with both Germany and Sweden give effect to the minimum standard on preventing treaty abuse. This is achieved by inserting a general anti-treaty abuse rule known as the principal purpose test into the double taxation agreement. Both protocols also changed the preamble of each double taxation agreement, which sets out its overriding purpose in order to clarify that the parties do not intend for the agreement to be used to avoid tax. The orders also make changes to the articles in both double taxation agreements that govern how disputes are avoided and resolved. These amendments ensure that the articles are in line with the minimum standard on improving dispute resolution. However, the Germany protocol implements a rule to prevent the artificial fragmentation of activities that might result in an overseas business avoiding a taxable presence. Sweden is not in favour of this provision, which is why it is absent from that protocol.

These orders make good on the Government’s international commitments to tackle tax avoidance and evasion and to improve dispute resolution. They strengthen the integrity of the UK’s network of double taxation agreements, which plays such an important part in facilitating the cross-border trade and investment that benefits all our nations. I commend the orders to the House.

Taxation (Post-transition Period) Bill: Business of the House

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Jesse Norman

Wednesday 9th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Jesse Norman)]

I would simply say this in response to the right hon. Gentleman: the Government have been moving at great speed, and much of the regulation is already in the public domain, together with an enormous amount of further communications and support systems. The Government are putting in front of the House today a Bill that encodes the Northern Ireland protocol and a Command Paper that has been in the public domain for many months, and if the right hon. Gentleman wished to have more scrutiny, he perhaps might have considered not having a debate on this motion.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I am aware that some Members would like to make points on this, but I am afraid that it is not in order for them to do so, because under current rules I have to stick to the speaking list. Just as a matter of fact, interventions would have been fine, but not speeches.

Question put and agreed to.

Cross-border Trade and Accounting

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Jesse Norman

Wednesday 30th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Jesse Norman)]

I feel almost embarrassed to be intervening on the promising discussion between my hon. Friends the Members for Ochil and South Perthshire (Luke Graham) and for South Thanet (Craig Mackinlay); it is almost as though one would be intruding by saying anything from the Treasury Bench, given the degree of conversation that was going on. I thank them both for a most engrossing and expert discussion.

When I was thinking about this debate, I did a little research into the background of my hon. Friend the Member for Ochil and South Perthshire and discovered that part of his life had been spent not merely as an accountant at Tesco and Marks and Spencer, where he started to develop the considerable personal knowledge he has demonstrated, but involved an outfit called Tough Mudder. I do not know whether you have come across Tough Mudder, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is an organisation that specialises in ultra-long obstacle courses of 8 to 10 miles, or possibly longer. It holds some rather interesting events. I bring your attention to the “arctic enema” in which participants plunge into a dumpster filled with ice water, dunk themselves underneath the plank that crosses the dumpster and then pull themselves out on the other side. There is also “electroshock therapy” in which live wires hang over a field of mud that participants must traverse. Above all—this is especially important in the context of the House of Commons—there is “Everest” in which participants run up a quarter pipe slicked with mud and grease; just the thing to ascend the ladder of career opportunity in Government and Parliament. It does not surprise me at all that my hon. Friend should have acquired those important skills; he is demonstrating them so brilliantly in his parliamentary career.

It is also quite interesting how my hon. Friend has deployed precisely those Tough Mudder tactics so successfully today in calling for an Adjournment debate on cross-border trade and accounting systems and then taking us into the highways and byways of the tax code. I call that classic bait-and-switch of the kind that the founders of Tough Mudder would be delighted with.

Let me mention a few of the things we have touched on before coming to the main thrust of the topic. My hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight Making Tax Digital for VAT, not merely as a success for HMRC—although it has had some delay, it is clearly proving to be that in relation to VAT—but because of its wider effects. More than 1.25 million businesses are signed up to Making Tax Digital for business, and very nearly 1.75 million VAT returns have been successfully submitted through the service. Some 81% of all businesses mandated from April are now signed up to it. That is a tremendous achievement, and it fully bears out the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet. When the British people are presented with a challenge, particularly on taxation, they rise to it and overcome it. That is an important and valuable characteristic, and it is one we rely on.

There are also wider benefits, and they are becoming quite evident. There are potentially quite significant productivity benefits—we are still measuring them in HMRC. The benefits are starting to become sufficiently well known within the smaller business community to result in many signing up for Making Tax Digital VAT voluntarily; they are not captured by its mandate because they are not above the threshold. That is an important aspect of the wider picture of improving productivity and audit and accountability that goes with these developed processes.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ochil and South Perthshire also rightly mentioned the concerns and opportunities created by new methods of managing and valuing intangibles. That is always of great interest to Revenue and Customs, as he might imagine. He talks about the importance of transactional barriers and the need to avoid them; of course, I agree. He rightly focused on extracting an appropriate level of tax from the very largest companies and platforms—he and I have written about this in other contexts. It is important to level the playing field, with platforms using their power for good rather than yielding to the temptation to exploit insider information and one-to-many power to create an unlevel playing field. In part, that is exactly what our digital services tax is designed to do.

My hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet quite rightly mentions cigarette excise losses. If it is of any reassurance to him, I personally have sat with the HMRC fraud team tracking of some of these gangs in real time. I can tell him that it is an enormously impressive operation and one that yields great benefits to the Revenue and to this country’s Exchequer.

Turning to the issue at hand, let me say a few things about the very important question that my hon. Friend the Member for Ochil and South Perthshire asked about cross-border change and the role that accounting systems can play in that. He will be aware that the Government are committed to an efficient and effective customs system that minimises administrative burdens on people who trade. He will also know that HMRC has invested some £34 million to fund training for individual businesses and—this is the key point—to develop and grow the customs intermediary sector so that it embeds greater expertise and institutional capacity to sustain our customs over the longer term. Indeed, I spoke at the launch of the UK Customs Academy, funded by HMRC, only last month.

It is also important, as my hon. Friend has stressed, to make customs processes as simple as possible. The current declaration system, known as CHIEF, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet mentioned, is being replaced with a new customs declaration service that is much more modern, much more flexible and able to anticipate vastly larger volumes of trade, and much easier and quicker for traders to use. The digital and streamlined processes committed to in the 2018 Budget are already coming into play and the specific commitment to halve the time it takes to receive authorised economic operator status is a further exemplification of that.

Let me come, slightly more widely, to the question of VAT. My hon. Friend the Member for Ochil and South Perthshire is right to ask whether VAT systems can be used to facilitate cross-border trade. This is an issue that officials within HMRC have explored in relation to HMRC’s own VAT regime and whether that can be deployed to facilitate customs processes. The House should be clear that there are specific challenges arising from that. The first has to do with the monitoring of goods, and the UK is under an obligation to demonstrate its control over goods imported and exported from this country. The Government need to be able to monitor the movement of goods in real time, but the trouble is the current VAT system, which is of course typically run on a quarterly returns basis and does not meet the real-time requirement, as VAT is accountable after the movement of goods.

The second challenge is a related one and bears on assurance. It is an underlying principle of the World Trade Organisation and the World Customs Organisation that tariffs should exist as a trade policy tool and must be applied in a fair and reasonable way. Real-time controls are a way of satisfying authorities that the correct tariff has been applied and collected on goods and, of course, it is important not to lose the credibility that border controls confer when they are deployed on the UK as a trading partner. That would potentially be put at risk by this suggestion.

Real-time controls of course also help to ensure that goods that do not comply with regulatory standards or that pose a security risk—of course there are such goods—do not enter this country. Without some customs processes, it would be difficult to identify and check goods that pose a risk to this country. It could be a phytosanitary risk, one from hazardous materials or, of course, one from weapons and other things of that nature.

The final challenge I would identify is that we are under an obligation to show that we have applied trade policy in a fair and uniform manner, and customs controls allow us to differentiate countries that have free trade agreements from those that are subject to most favoured nation status. Of course, any future customs facilitation for UK-EU trade will be a matter for negotiation once we have left the EU. Both we and the EU envisage putting in place ambitious customs arrangements to make use of all the available facilitative arrangements and technologies that we can.

Let me reassure you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and colleagues across the Chamber that we are preparing for that negotiation and will work with Parliament, the devolved Administrations and others to ensure a successful outcome in the interests of all parts of the United Kingdom.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Thank you. What an interesting debate. It’s all right—I am a lawyer, so I understand accountants.

Question put and agreed to.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Jesse Norman

3rd reading: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Monday 29th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Jesse Norman)]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

New clause 2—Public facility operators: provision of public charging points—

‘(1) Regulations may impose requirements on owners and operators of public facilities falling within a prescribed description, in connection with the provision on their premises of public charging points.

(2) Regulations under subsection (1) may, for example—

(a) require owners and operators of public facilities to provide public charging points;

(b) require owners and operators of public facilities to work with local authorities on the provision of public charging points;

(c) require public charging points to be available for use at prescribed times; and

(d) require services or facilities prescribed by the regulations to be provided in connection with public charging points.

(3) In this section “public facilities” means—

(a) supermarkets;

(b) public car parks;

(c) airports;

(d) train stations; and

(e) such other public facilities as prescribed in regulations.’

This new clause would provide the Secretary of State with the power to make regulations requiring owners and operators of certain public facilities to work with local authorities to provide public charging points and to ensure that public charging points are maintained and easily accessible to the public.

New clause 3—Charging points strategy: public transport and commercial vehicles—

‘(1) The Secretary of State must, within 12 months of this Act receiving Royal Assent, lay a report before Parliament setting out a comprehensive UK charging points strategy for public transport and commercial vehicles.

(2) The report must, in particular, consider the establishment of charging points for—

(a) buses;

(b) electric bikes and other mobility vehicles;

(c) haulage vehicles;

(d) commercial vehicle fleets; and

(e) such other public transport and commercial vehicles as considered relevant by the Secretary of State.’

This new clause would require the Secretary of State to set out a strategy for establishing charging points for public transport and commercial vehicles.

Government amendments 1 to 3.

[Jesse Norman]

Following a fruitful debate in Committee, the Government decided to table new clause 1 to part 2 of the Bill. Smart charge points will play a vital role in managing the demand on the grid created by charging electric vehicles. Estimates from the national grid suggest that the increase in peak demand caused by electric vehicles could be significantly reduced by smart charging. Less electricity generation and fewer network upgrades would be required, thereby reducing energy costs and costs to bill payers. Smart charging can not only ensure that vehicle owners receive the required amount of electricity within the time required, but adapt power flow to meet the needs of consumers and various parties in the energy system.

Superfast Broadband

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Jesse Norman

Monday 12th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Jesse Norman]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for the diligence and energy with which he has pursued this topic into this debate and I apologise for missing the start of it. As he may be aware, my Committee is still interested in taking evidence on the universal service obligation and in receiving submissions from constituents and from colleagues across the House. The work will begin fully next month.

May I share with my hon. Friend a thought on BT? It is not just a question of whether the relationship of BT to Openreach is supporting competition. It is also a question of whether Openreach is itself being starved of capital because it is located within BT with its new, emerging consumer and retail orientation. If it at least had its own balance sheet it might be able to borrow at very low rates and therefore support capital roll-out with it.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. Even the hon. Gentleman, who makes extremely good arguments, must make them quicker and briefer than that. We will never get through this debate if people keep making long interventions. It simply is not fair.