Financial Services and Markets Bill

Harriett Baldwin Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 7th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Griffith]

I thank the hon. Member for his point. I had that conversation with the FCA precisely to try to achieve that purpose. If there are other ways to do that that will help him, I am happy to do so.

I was talking about the financial advice boundary, which is a real concern and speaks as much to financial inclusion as to the work of the advisory sector. My hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire, when she was in this role, undertook some important work on the comprehensive financial advice market review, which led to some important improvements in the market at that time. Unlike me, however, she was not blessed with the Brexit freedoms of being able to influence our own rulebook.

I completely agree with my hon. Friend that it cannot be right that only the wealthiest can access financial advice. The situation today is a good example of the unintended consequence of well-meaning regulation that we should be alive to. I thank the Investing and Saving Alliance and others for their efforts to promote reform in this area, and it is something that I will take forward and see what I can do to progress. We will revisit the issue and work closely with the FCA and the industry. I assure her that there is nothing in the Bill that would impede any of the things that she seeks to do.

[Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)]

The Minister is making some encouraging sounds about new clause 11. In addition to the commitments that he has just made, will he instruct officials to look at the matter with the greatest urgency?

[Andrew Griffith]

I am happy to confirm that we will pursue it with great urgency, as the Government should be doing with everything in this important domain. Although the Government will not be supporting new clause 11 today, it goes some way to address the issue, so I will look at it as a basis for potentially moving forward. The Bill enables us to do that, so we do not have to do it today. I commend the other amendments tabled in relation to preventing consumer harm.

--- Later in debate ---

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. My plan is this: because there is a lot of pressure on time, I intend to prioritise those hon. Members whose amendments have been selected. It is really important for everybody to stick to six minutes. I am sure that the Chair of the Treasury Committee will lead by example so that I do not have to impose a time limit.

[Harriett Baldwin]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will try not to gabble.

I rise to speak to new clause 11, which stands in my name and in the name of many right hon. and hon. Members; I am pleased to hear from the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq) that the Opposition support it too. I should clarify that I am speaking in this debate as an individual Back Bencher, rather than as Chair of the Treasury Committee.

As the Economic Secretary has highlighted, one of the many benefits of being able to bring financial regulation back into the UK is that we can create rules that will help to unleash growth and investment here. My new clause highlights the opportunity that reviewing MiFID presents for us to look again at the boundary between regulated advice and guidance.

I am proposing personalised guidance on financial matters. As we all know, the implementation of the retail distribution review about a decade ago has meant that financial advice is now a very high-quality service that is very expensive. The vast majority of our constituents do not pay and are not willing to pay for it. Something like 8% of people—I confess that I am one of them—are lucky enough to afford a financial adviser, but 92% of our constituents do not have that luxury.

When I was Economic Secretary in 2015, I launched the financial advice market review, which came up with 28 recommendations to help our constituents. Many wise steps were taken at the time, including enabling people to use £500 from their pension savings to pay for financial advice when using their pension freedoms. Despite those measures, however, there is still an enormous gap for our constituents. For example, about 10 million people in this country are fortunate enough to have more than £10,000 in savings, but 58% of that money is just sitting there in cash, and we all know how inflation is eroding the value of those investments.

My new clause 11 approaches the problem from the other direction. I was pleased to hear the Economic Secretary commit at the Dispatch Box today to using the new flexibilities and seeing whether he can do something like a personalised guidance review with great urgency. That will help our constituents in the following generic examples.

A customer may be saving for a deposit for their first home, but doing so with a cash individual savings account. They could get a nudge from their financial institution to consider putting the money into a lifetime ISA so that they get the Government rebate.

A customer may be sitting on a large cash balance for many months, well above their normal three-month outgoings. They could get an alert to warn them about the detriment to the value of cash as a result of inflation and to narrow down some suggestions for getting a better deal for their cash. With many of our constituents, particularly our elderly constituents, there is a lot of inertia because they are not receiving very much on their deposits. This approach would give them a nudge that there are better rates out there that they could be receiving.

A customer might have invested in a fund on a platform many years ago and have done nothing with it since. If the fund is poorly performing, they could get a nudge with some personalised guidance. A customer who opened a junior ISA, which by definition would have a very long time horizon, might get a nudge that cash was not the ideal investment, and that in his or her circumstances an investment with a longer time horizon might provide better protection from inflation.

[Sir Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I agree with the case that the hon. Lady is making—indeed, I have signed her new clause. I wonder whether she has seen the report produced by the Work and Pensions Committee in September, which expressed concern about stepping across the advice-guidance boundary and constraining the ability of pension schemes and employers to give people helpful, sensible support as they make their choices about what to do with their pension savings. Would her new clause help in that regard?

[Harriett Baldwin]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for signing the new clause, and for his Committee’s excellent report. He is right to suggest that the workplace is one of the best places for people to be given these nudges, and for employers to explore that boundary between advice and guidance.

Our constituents are craving advice of this kind, especially during this cost of living crisis. They want more guidance from their financial institutions. They are turning to online sources of often unregulated information to help them navigate their finances. They are finding the process complex and confusing. They are choosing investments that are often very high risk and not suited to them at all, such as meme stocks, crypto or spread betting.

It should not need to be this way, because the technology exists for financial services and fintech firms to guide people towards making better financial choices and following good mainstream investment opportunities, but MiFID-originated legislation is getting in the way. My new clause would enable the Treasury to introduce, with great urgency, the necessary legislation to allow regulated financial services firms to offer UK households personalised guidance. It is a great opportunity to unlock investment in our country, it will help our constituents to earn more, and it will allow innovation. Financial technology will help our constituents to level up their own economic futures. I am therefore delighted that the Economic Secretary has agreed today to look into this as a matter of urgency.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

I fully support the proposed measure. Let me say something that is specifically for the ears of my hon. Friend and those on the Treasury Bench. Just is a company in Reigate, formed from a company called Just Retirement and Partnership, which provided products that challenged the existing ones, involving, for instance, equity release and life insurance for smokers. As a provider of challenger products, it was anxious for people to have access to independent advice, rather than just being directed only to its own products.

[Harriett Baldwin]

Let me end by saying that personalised guidance would offer the Economic Secretary the chance to make his mark and help all our constituents to benefit from better financial information. I am very pleased that he has committed himself today to look into it with the utmost urgency.

[John McDonnell]

I entirely agree with what the hon. Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) has said, and I apologise for not signing her new clause; I wish I had.

I will be very brief, Madam Deputy Speaker. This is an appeal more than anything else. I am concerned about the way in which the Bill will undermine the constraints on commodity market speculation that were introduced during the financial crash of 2007-08. I was in the House before and during that crash. People remember that it was a banking crash based on the sub-prime housing market, but what is less discussed is what then happened with regard to commodity speculation. The funding shifted from housing to commodity and, in particular, food speculation, and we saw massive food price increases as a result. The price of wheat rose by 168% during that period, and the price of rice doubled. This was largely not to do with supply, which at that time was relatively stable; it was to do with commodity speculation.

We supported, on a cross-party basis, reforms to regulate the market. We gave the FCA the task of setting position limits. We also opened up the whole commodity market to greater transparency. I accept that there has been a watering-down of those regulations since then, particularly by the Trump Administration but also by signals from Ministers in the UK Government. That weakened regulation and weakened culture have opened the door to what is happening now, which is billions shifting into food commodity speculation. This is fuelling the cost of living crisis. It is not just about energy; it is now also about food prices, some of which have gone up by as much as 16%.

Of course, we cannot ignore Ukraine, climate change or the breakdown of supply chains with regard to covid, but another severe factor that is influencing this is commodity market volatility. Speculation is creating price rises, and this is making fortunes for individual speculators, but I have to say that the banks themselves are also making a killing at the moment.

I say this not as some kind of Cassandra—I was the first to raise Northern Rock in this Chamber, although others have claimed that too—but economists on both sides of the Atlantic are saying that this could be a systemic crisis unless we get to grips with it and accept that we need to strengthen, not weaken, regulation. One of the reasons I am concerned is that the Lighthouse report suggests that a lot of commodity investment is taking place by pension funds themselves. That could have an effect not only on prices but on the stability of people’s pensions.

The Government will say, “Don’t worry, we’re not scrapping the limits. We’re handing over control to the trading floors.” That is madness in itself. The trading floors have an interest in attracting traders, and the lesson of history is that they cannot be relied upon to regulate themselves. They do not worry about the interests of the whole economy. That is the job of the Government and Parliament. Also, I see no rationale for scrapping the transparency element of MiFID II. I would love to know what possible justification there could be for undermining access to more transparent information, because the markets are already opaque and this would make them worse.

A final comment from me—you will note that I am well under time, Madam Deputy Speaker—is one that I have made before. The best writer on the banking crash of 1929-30 was J. K. Galbraith, who said that, yes, we would put institutions in place to protect against a repeat of that kind of crash but one of the most significant things would be memory; people would remember what had happened. Unfortunately, I fear that we are now replicating the circumstances of 2007-08 and undermining the very regulations that we as a House put in place to protect against the food speculation, the price increases and, I have to say, the starvation that occurred as a result of that crisis. I never want to see that again. I think this is a mistake by the Government, and I hope that they will think again. I also think we might be able to bring forward some amendments in the other House that will help the Government to move along a more constructive path than the one they are on at the moment.

Autumn Statement Resolutions

Harriett Baldwin Excerpts

Monday 21st November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)]

May I start by apologising to the House and to the Chief Secretary for not being here for the beginning of the debate, having failed to end our Committee session on time? I caught most of what was being said, and I very much welcome the fact that the autumn statement has been accompanied by an Office for Budget Responsibility forecast, which is something the Committee has been asking for for many months. We have the OBR appearing before our Committee tomorrow.

I recognise that any forecast in and of itself will be inaccurate—it is, at best, a best guess of what the future will hold—but it will allow us to test the assumptions. These forecasts were brought in by the Conservative-led coalition in 2010 for a very good reason: to prevent the Treasury from exclusively marking its own homework. They have become one of the guardrails of fiscal responsibility. In the last few months we have learnt that that really does matter to the markets. I very much welcome the existence of the forecasts.

I also very much welcome the fact that the measures in the autumn statement appear to go completely with the grain of what is obviously the biggest economic challenge our country faces: the hideous inflation that we are suffering. We know that about 80% of that inflation comes directly from Putin’s evil invasion of Ukraine. The Committee recognises that inflationary pressures predated that invasion, and we have taken quite a lot of evidence over the last couple of years about those incipient inflationary pressures as we came out of the pandemic. At that time, the Bank of England had the monetary foot to the floor and the Government had the fiscal foot to the floor—one could not come up with a more successful recipe for inflation. Sure enough, it has become more ingrained in our economy.

Everyone in this House can see that inflation is the most insidious tax, particularly on the poorest. It is the most terrible scourge on our economy. I very much welcome the fact that fiscal policy will be brought in line with what the Bank of England is trying to do through monetary policy, to bring inflation back to the target level.

The third thing I want to highlight, because it is a matter of deep concern to everyone, is a line in the Budget that is up dramatically—perhaps not in cash terms, but because we have more debt. That is the debt interest bill, which is over £100 billion. Since 2000 the amount of this country’s debt that is linked to inflation rates has gone from 6% index-linked to the current 22% index-linked. That means the Government are short the rate of inflation, effectively, and they are now paying the price in that line item. My question for the Minister is this: was an explicit decision taken in the Treasury in those years to issue more index-linked debt. If so, who made it and was it announced to the House? It is really coming home to bite in the fiscal accounts, so it would be nice to know what the thinking was at the time—or was it something that we sleepwalked into as a nation?

The final point of my, I hope, suitably brief remarks is to reiterate the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom) about cliff edges. I fully accept that during the pandemic the Treasury was making decisions at speed and wanted to get money out to people as quickly as possible. Similarly, this year, with the energy crisis, the decision was taken to get money out as quickly and easily as possible to the lowest income households through the two payments of £325, which have been important in helping people with the cost of living this winter.

I am more concerned now—arguably, the Chancellor has not been in post that long, but Treasury officials have had the benefit of more time to think about these things—that the £900 payment next year will also be made with a big cliff edge. What kind of behavioural signals will that send through the benefits system? We have spent the better part of the last 12 years introducing universal credit precisely so that it has a linear impact, yet next year we will entrench a different way of paying the lowest income households. Hon. Members should not get me wrong; I support giving the lowest income households help, but it worries me that the £900 payment will go to people on means-tested benefit, but if someone is £1 above what is needed to get that means-tested benefit, they will not get it.

I wonder whether the Treasury could look at something that goes more with the grain of the type of work incentives that we are trying to put in through universal credit. We have heard about the withdrawal of labour in the labour market. Perhaps this aspect could be considered in the Stride review, so that we can ensure that we are not making the problem worse through the decisions in the autumn statement.

Autumn Statement

Harriett Baldwin Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the Chair of the Treasury Committee.

[Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)]

It is good to see the return of the forecast from the official Office for Budget Responsibility. We all remember why a Conservative Government had to set it up. We will have the OBR in front of our Committee next Tuesday, when we can question the underlying assumptions of the forecast.

I welcome the fact that the Chancellor confirmed today that his announcements go with the grain of what the Bank of England is trying to do in bringing down inflation. That surely is the most important economic challenge for our country at the moment. But can he elaborate a bit more on his thinking? He has tasked the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions with helping back into work those who have left the workforce and he has announced welcome support for those on the welfare system of £900 next year. Can he talk us through his thinking on some of those cliff edges and incentives to work?

[Jeremy Hunt]

I welcome my hon. Friend to her chairmanship of the Select Committee; I know she will do a brilliant job. She makes an important point. It is essential that we work hand in glove with the Bank of England to bring down inflation. Today, the OBR confirmed that inflation is lower because of the decisions we take. She is right to focus on the worrying increase in the economically inactive, which is not just causing supply chain problems for businesses, but driving inflation. That is why we are lucky to have an excellent Work and Pensions Secretary who will make this his top priority in the work he is doing for the Prime Minister and who will bring his conclusions to this House as soon as possible.

Financial Services and Markets Bill (Ninth sitting)

Harriett Baldwin Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 3rd November 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Dame Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

I add my voice to those supporting new clause 1. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle for her speech on this very important issue and my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow, who has long campaigned to bring buy now, pay later credit companies into some form of regulation. Obviously, their emergence has been assisted by the shift to online shopping, which we all have experienced and which was turbocharged during the lockdowns.

The consumer credit legislation that protects customers from taking on unaffordable levels of debt and paying over the odds for credit, in a way that is often quite opaque, did not anticipate the existence of online shopping or the explosion in the kind of credit that is now easily available to those who roam the internet or look at TikTok and see lovely things that are just within reach. I speak as someone who has been around for quite a while and whose parents used to put money away in shops so that they could afford Christmas presents, before consumer credit exploded in the way that it did. The Consumer Credit Act tried to make that fair and to regulate it. This is another switch in velocity, capacity and the availability of things, and it is very difficult to discern what the price is when you take something out.

We are now in an instant gratification culture, rather than the place where we said, “Put money away months before and hope you can afford to get the Christmas presents you want for your kids.” It is now a case of instantaneous availability—literally a click on a website. Klarna and various other of the buy now, pay later organisations are everywhere that it is possible to spend money. It is very difficult to imagine how that might be adding up—what the price of it actually is—when a person is in the middle of a purchase, particularly a younger person who is used to that kind of instant availability. It is very difficult for anyone to argue sensibly that the people who are clicking and making those purchases have a good idea of the price of the credit and the burden of the repayments they are taking on.

New clause 1 seeks to bring the new fintech ways of getting access to consumer credit—if I can put it that way—within the existing consumer protections in the Consumer Credit Act 1974, which admittedly is now pretty long in the tooth. Clearly, it is important for those to whom we give the job of protecting consumers to think in detail about how that can best be done, but it is pretty difficult to argue that we should allow the current circumstances to persist. I am interested to hear what the Minister has to say about that.

It is important that people have time to think about what they are doing and that the pricing of credit is obvious at the time of the click, so that people can make genuine decisions and not feel that they have been conned, that the price is wrong or that they have got themselves into a vortex of increasing costs that were not in front of them at the time. The consequences of allowing an entire generation to have access to that kind of consumer credit without protections are too dire to contemplate.

I hope the fact that this Parliament has always put consumer protection at the heart of what it does and legislated for that purpose will prevail, and that the Minister will think about how we can sensibly and quickly bring this part of the growth industry of credit, including consumer credit, into the protected space.

[Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Sharma, for allowing me to contribute to the debate on new clause 1. My colleagues on the Treasury Committee have raised a very interesting and topical subject for us to debate regarding the best way forward. I must declare an interest, as someone who has bought things on the internet and has used this convenient way of paying for them. Clearly, when we have the FCA in front of us, we need to ask how it is approaching regulation in what has been an area of innovation, where fintech has really come to the fore.

It will be very interesting to hear the Minister’s reply to the points that have been raised, and what he sees as the best way forward. That innovation is supporting our retail sector, but at the same time, consumers deserve to know what they are getting into and to have good information when they make decisions. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s comments.

[Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)]

I, too, support new clause 1, not because I wish to stop buy now, pay later as a form of credit or to restrict people’s choice, but because I want people to fully understand what they are getting into before they do it. I did not understand what Klarna was. I like the Space NK website as much as the next woman who likes to spend too much money on skin products, but I could not quite understand why all of a sudden, about two years ago, Klarna was mentioned as a means of buying now and paying later. I thought, “How terrifying. If you cannot pay that ridiculous price this month, how are you going to pay that ridiculous price next month?”.

My hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow has done some brilliant work on this issue. Buy now, pay later is the form of credit for the under-30s. They use it more than store cards or credit cards. It is often used on clothing websites, primarily by young women who buy different sizes to see which dress they actually want.

The Growth Plan

Harriett Baldwin Excerpts

Friday 23rd September 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

As I reminded my right hon. Friend the Member for Central Devon (Mel Stride), and as I said in my statement, the OBR will be coming up with a forecast, certainly before the end of the calendar year, and I shall be very interested to see and hear what it has to say.

[Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)]

President Putin has weaponised the cost of energy against western economies, and the measures announced today will provide welcome temporary support for our constituents during this terrible time of invasion. Can the Chancellor confirm that the measures to support business that he has announced today will also allow incentives for investment in renewable energy to continue, so that we never again allow Putin to weaponise energy against us?

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

My hon. Friend has made an excellent point about renewables. It is always salutary for the House to be reminded that we have 11 GW—in fact, nearly 12 GW—of installed capacity of offshore wind, which makes us second only to China in terms of the offshore wind roll-out. There is no reason why we cannot continue to lead the world in offshore wind, solar, and other forms of renewable power.

Financial Services and Markets Bill

Harriett Baldwin Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 7th September 2022 Commons Chamber

[Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)]

It is an honour to be called to speak in support of the Bill. In a way, it is an advantage to be called at this time because so many excellent points have been made by so many wonderful people, and I am pleased to say that I agree with most of them and that they have been expressed better than I could have done, including by the former Chancellor and the former Economic Secretary to the Treasury, who was responsible, I think, for putting together quite a large part of this Bill.

I recall the milestone of when the country voted to leave the European Union on 23 June 2016, because I was Economic Secretary to the Treasury at the time. Many questions came to the fore about what would happen to the regulation of our financial services, which have been referred to many times in this debate as one of our most important export and tax-paying sectors, providing many hundreds of thousands of jobs up and down the land. It is a very important sector, and over the past six years we have flirted with the idea of equivalence.

It is, I think, the EU Commission that has decided that equivalence does not suit it. Frankly, I think it is the EU’s loss, because obviously we are equivalent—or we were equivalent. It is the EU’s small businesses and growing firms that will lose easy access to the United Kingdom capital markets, which is a shame for them. I also know that discussions were had about the EU-Canada trade agreement and about the chapter on financial services, which is not in our current trade agreement with the EU. Clearly that has been rejected as a way forward, although there is scope for much more mutual recognition and the opening up of markets.

I welcome the decisions that have been made before the publication of this Bill, and the opportunities for divergence that are being seized in it. It is also welcome that the industry has been very much consulted and brought along with us on how Solvency II and MiFID II changes can help our economy grow.

However, the point on which I wish to focus has not been brought up much in this debate: the freedoms that this Bill gives us to look once again at the market for advice and guidance in this country. We have heard about many of the challenges that consumers face when they are making financial decisions on their own behalf. The cost of financial advice is high, and the guidance itself can be very generic. There is, of course, access to the Money Advice Service and to Pension Wise, which I encourage constituents to use if they can, but the Bill gives us the opportunity to look once again at the financial advice market and to have more customised guidance because of how technology has evolved and the important role that the FCA’s regulatory sandbox plays in allowing people to experiment.

I urge everyone who has spoken about consumers in this debate to support an amendment that I am planning to table with the help of the Investing and Saving Alliance. It would allow the provision of much more personalised guidance through the use of innovation and technology, helping consumers through difficult decisions such as moving pensions when they change employer. That would create a better informed consumer who would not necessarily fall so easily for some of the scams that we have been hearing about during today’s debate. We need to arm our consumers to be able to tackle those scams.

My final point is about the role of the regulator. Time and again in this debate Members have asked who regulates the regulator if it puts in place something with which we as MPs or our constituents disagree. There is an important role here for the Treasury Committee, on which I sit, and we will take that responsibility of scrutinising changes very seriously.

I also think one of the great strengths of our country is our common law; I know the Minister has been looking at the opportunities that have been outlined for bringing in some further rights of appeal through the common-law system against some decisions that regulators make. I know he has taken these points seriously, and I look forward to his responding to them at the end of the debate.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Just to inform everybody, the wind-ups will begin no later than 6.40 pm, and anybody who has spoken in this debate will be expected to be here at the wind-ups. With five minutes, I call Siobhain McDonagh.

Oral Answers to Questions

Harriett Baldwin Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Rishi Sunak]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his typically thoughtful question. He is absolutely right about the circumstances we face. The data this morning shows record numbers of people on payroll, and that is to be welcomed. Indeed, the unemployment rate is now back to the levels we saw before the pandemic, thanks to our plan for jobs. There are record vacancies, and we want to get people into work. The best way to do that is to give them the skills they need and cut taxes to increase incentives. That is exactly what this Government are doing, and I expect us to make more progress in the months ahead.

[Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)]

With council tax being one of the biggest items in household budgets, could the Chancellor remind the House which party tends to be the best, in a local council, for setting council tax?

[Rishi Sunak]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent and timely point. She knows that I know that, in this country, if people want good local services delivered for the lowest possible council tax, they need to vote Conservative.

Oral Answers to Questions

Harriett Baldwin Excerpts

Tuesday 1st February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Rishi Sunak]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. With regard to sanctions, absolutely nothing is off the table. We are working extremely closely with our international allies to make sure that we can send a robust signal to deter Russian aggression, and we continue to explore diplomatic solutions at the same time. He should rest assured that nothing is off the table.

[Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)]

I visited the citizens advice bureau in Malvern and people there were sharing with me the fact that they still have tens of thousands of pounds in household support grants that they can give away between now and the end of March. Will the Chancellor join me in encouraging families who are struggling with the cost of living to apply for the help available?

[Rishi Sunak]

My hon. Friend, as always, makes an excellent point. I join her in encouraging all those local authorities and others to get those funds out to people who need them as quickly as possible. That is why we have created the household support fund: half a billion pounds to provide £100 or £150 to millions of our most vulnerable families. It is there to help, and I hope we can get the rest of the money out as quickly as possible.

Household Energy Bills: VAT

Harriett Baldwin Excerpts

Tuesday 11th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

We want to make Brexit work. We have this power, so let us use it now. A VAT cut is something practical that the Government could do right now, and it would be felt automatically in all our constituents’ bills. It would give security to people across our country, and I urge all hon. Members to back Labour’s motion today.

[Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)]

Does the hon. Lady accept, however, that cutting VAT on household energy bills would give a disproportionate tax break to those with the biggest houses and the deepest pockets?

Oral Answers to Questions

Harriett Baldwin Excerpts

Tuesday 7th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Steve Barclay]

As my right hon. Friend knows, the Prime Minister will make a statement on this matter shortly, but what he and I would agree on is that the best way is to grow the economy, drive productivity, get people into work and skill them up through work. That is what the plan for jobs is doing, alongside the £600 billion investment in infrastructure over the course of this Parliament as part of levelling up and our commitment to net zero. We need to grow the economy, skill up the workforce and get those who have been impacted by the pandemic back into work as quickly as possible.

[Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)]

I wonder if the Chief Secretary has had the opportunity to read a recent report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies that says:

“Material living standards held up surprisingly well through the pandemic…This is an astonishing outcome given the scale of economic disruption”.