Savings (Government Contributions) Bill

Debate between Gareth Thomas and Robert Jenrick

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Monday 17th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I am interested in the point that the hon. Gentleman makes, and I will say more about the lifetime ISA in a moment. The point of it is that many of us in our 20s and 30s—I am just about in that category—are more preoccupied with getting on the housing ladder than we are with looking out for our retirement, and that is a major worry for the Government and for future Governments. The lifetime ISA is flexible, however, because it enables people to spend money in the early years to try to get on the housing ladder, and later to convert the product into something else with a view to retirement. The hon. Gentleman raises a major problem, and we need to look at many solutions; this, I am afraid, is only one.

There needs to be a fundamental change in all our attitudes. We should not purely seek instant gratification; we, as individuals, and the Government must promote ways in which to defer gratification through saving, in contrast to our present, quite corrosive, consumer attitude.

I warmly welcome the lifetime ISA. It is an extremely popular product and there has been a lot of interest in it. I do not represent a particularly wealthy constituency— the average wage is just below the national average—but many of my constituents have said to me that they would like to take up the lifetime ISA. Clearly, offering a 25% top-up as well as the usual tax advantages of an ISA gives us all a strong incentive to save. ISAs are popular, as we know from the millions of people who have taken them up over the years. Contrary to some of the comments that we have heard today and comments in the press, ISAs are simple. We all understand them, and they are part of our saving culture.

I welcomed the news in April that the limit would be raised on the standard ISA from £15,000 to £20,000 a year. That might sound like a great deal of money to many people, but as the problem of insufficient saving affects all income levels, it is an important measure. This is an exciting development for those of us—particularly the younger generation—who will not benefit from generous final salary pension schemes. Although the scheme is not intended to take over from pensions, it creates more flexibility in the sector. Under the previous Chancellor, we saw that across a whole range of issues to do with pensions, flexibility is key.

The lifetime ISA will help younger people to save for a deposit, which is, as we all know, the primary preoccupation of every young person with more than a basic level of income. If this vehicle allows us to help any of them to get on to the housing ladder and then to convert to a product that will help them to save for the rest of their working lives, it will be very useful.

Help to Save explicitly does the same job for those on very low incomes. I appreciate that there are many people, including many in my own constituency, for whom saving seems like another country; it is extremely difficult for them to do. But the alternative is to do nothing and to accept that we live in a country where people cannot save in that jam jar, and where the Government cannot create mechanisms to incentivise them to do so and top up what they have saved. The 50% contribution rate is clearly a great incentive, which we should all appreciate and welcome.

Rather as the IFS has said, it would be helpful for the Government to do more work on understanding which groups are the most critical in terms of saving, and to develop more products that specifically target the core group that we are most worried about—the people who have only £100 or £1000 in the bank as a rainy day fund. That is a very worrying state of affairs.

What else should I raise? One area we should look at is savings interest tax. I am in favour of simple and bold tax reforms that will not complicate the already far too complicated tax code even further, but send everyone in society the extremely clear message that the Government believe we need to save more and will back that up with action. I would strongly welcome a further move to take more people out of paying savings interest tax. The announcement in April, creating a £1,000 threshold for those on the basic rate and a £500 threshold for higher rate taxpayers—was excellent, and we should look at more changes, not least because current levels of interest rates are so pitifully low that the Government are receiving very little, and rapidly declining, tax revenues from savings income. In 2013-14, the income to the Treasury was £2.8 billion, but it is estimated to be £1.1 billion this year and to continue to decline further. Those are obviously large sums, but what would create a greater incentive and give a stronger signal than to say that we will no longer charge tax on savings interest?

My last point is simply to reiterate the one made in debates in recent weeks, which is that interest rates are too low in this country. That has had a very corrosive impact on pensioners and anyone trying to save in this country, on the gap between the rich and the poor, and on the wider economy. I, like many others, was delighted to hear the Prime Minister imply in her speech in Birmingham that she would like to take action on this matter.

[Mr Gareth Thomas]

The hon. Gentleman is making a very powerful application to serve on the Public Bill Committee. Given his point about low interest rates, does he not share the concern of many outside the House—indeed, it is a concern of mine—about the fact that the qualifying period to get the Government’s bonus payment under the Help to Save scheme is two years, rather than just 12 months? Would not a shorter period be a further and more sensible incentive to get people saving more quickly?

[Robert Jenrick]

I listened to the hon. Gentleman’s intervention earlier, and I would be interested to hear the Minister’s views on that. We want to create as many incentives as possible for everybody—from the rich to the poor, from the young to the old—to save because, as I hope I have made the principal point of my remarks, this country is facing a crisis and we all need to take responsibility for it.

On interest rates, the Bank of England now needs to take action. I did not believe there was any real cause to lower interest rates earlier this summer. It misread the initial signals after the referendum and acted too soon. We have already seen that the consequences of the referendum, at least in the short term, will not be as severe as it imagined. I hope the Bank of England—of course, it is independent—does not reduce interest rates further, and that we can now move away from the policy of quantitative easing as soon as possible for many reasons, but particularly for the sake of pensioners and savers.

I want the Government to create a long-term strategy on saving that tries to change the culture in this country towards looking to the future and putting money aside. The Government need to back that in many ways, some of which will involve extremely difficult decisions. One of those decisions will, of course, be to continue to raise the state pension age to protect the triple lock, which I would like to happen as soon as possible. The two schemes we are considering today are excellent. I fully support them, and I hope that they will be the first of many from the new Administration.