Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Lord Redwood and Stewart Hosie

Wednesday 19th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)]

I start by welcoming a number of the measures that the Government announced, such as the increase in the revenue non-compliance budget, increased export funding and the further doubling of the annual investment allowance. If the Government carry on like this, we will be back to having an industrial buildings allowance policy, which should never have been scrapped in the first place. There is also the halving, at last, of bingo duty—my favourite cause. All these one-off measures are very sensible, could be implemented by any Government and ought to be welcomed by everybody.

However, that does not change this Government’s underlying direction of travel or the underlying shape of the economy as described to us in the Red Book. Scotland has suffered an 11% cut in the fiscal departmental expenditure limit, a 27% cut in capital and a real-terms 9.9% cut in the overall budget. The numbers announced today imply a further real-terms cut in the budget. I do not want to speak too much about Scotland, but it is important that we get on the record just how damaging this Government continue to be.

What the Budget speech and the Red Book tell us is that, by every measure the Chancellor has set for himself, he has failed. In his first Budget, he told us that in 2013-14 the current account deficit would be 2.3% of GDP, borrowing would be reduced to £60 billion and the net debt would be 70% of GDP. Today, he told us that for the same year, the current account deficit is higher, borrowing is actually at £95.6 billion and the net debt is around 75% of GDP.

Let me be generous: any Government can make a mistake for one year, so what about the big targets the Chancellor set for himself? They were: that debt would begin to fall as a share of GDP by 2014-15; that the current account would be in balance the following year; and that in the same year, public sector net borrowing would fall to £20 billion. Debt will not begin to fall until 2016-17—two years late. The current account will not be back in the black until 2017-18—two years late. Public sector net borrowing in 2015-16 will not be £20 billion; rather, the forecast figure—£68 billion—is more than three times that. Not a single one of the Chancellor’s key targets has been met.

[Mr Redwood]

Has the hon. Gentleman noticed the forecasted very sharp fall-off in petroleum revenue tax, and is that reflected in SNP plans?

[Stewart Hosie]

It is extremely convenient that, once again, we have a “North sea oil price crash” story on Budget day, some six months before the referendum. If the right hon. Gentleman keeps saying it, I am sure someone somewhere will finally believe him. I am not dreadfully convinced.

The bottom line is that—just like the right hon. Gentleman’s intervention—the Chancellor’s speech was hugely political. He did not tell us about recovery; he did not tell us that he is trying to lift the burden from hard-working families; he did not apologise for trying to rebalance the economy on the backs of the poor. This Budget speech was a political platform for the next election, and if it was supposed to be a vindication of his policies, then it failed, because the policies have failed.

The Chancellor did of course have a deal to say about tax. He is right to increase the basic rate threshold to £10,000, and then to £10,500. Raising the threshold from £6,500 to £10,000, resulting in savings this year of £700 for the average person, is sensible, but of course, that is only part of the personal tax story. This Government have pushed ahead with a tax cut for millionaires and have continued to squeeze the middle—the genuine middle class. The threshold for those paying the 40% rate of tax has come down from £37,500 to under £32,000, so for every penny saved at the bottom, they have had to pay more than a penny at 40%. I therefore welcome the fact that the 40% threshold is going to be increased, but that is not until 2014-15. It will not change the fact that the proportion of people paying the 40% tax rate has doubled over the past two decades, and there are now 2.1 million more people paying a rate of tax that was previously only for the rich.

It is not just the middle: it is the poorest in society who have been hit hardest. We know—the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) told us—that the proportion of tax cuts to tax rises is 4:1. We knew from previous Budgets that the impact of the discretionary consolidation would be £155 billion. Interestingly, the Government have removed that figure from the Red Book: they have removed the year 2016-17 from the forecast, and are now telling us that the discretionary consolidation will be only £126 billion. However, that forecast goes only to 2015-16, and I am concerned that they are not making a longer forecast, so we can see the real scale of the damage they are trying to do.

We in the SNP know where the pain of this Budget and of this Government’s policy direction will be felt. It will be the 144,000 households in Scotland who are losing some £3,500 each through changes to incapacity benefit. It will be the 372,000 Scottish households who have seen tax credits reduced to the tune of £800 a year. It will be the 620,000 families hit by changes to child benefit, who have lost an average of £360 a year. It will be felt by the 55,000 people who are losing an average of £3,000 a year as disability living allowance is removed. Those are the people whom we should be thinking about and who should be helped. Instead, the Government continue to try to balance the books on the back of the poor.

I welcome the fact that the Budget forecast at least says that there will be some growth, but it is once again heavily predicated on business investment growth. In Budget after Budget, the Government have produced five-year growth forecasts. In 2010, growth was predicted to be between 8% and 10% a year, but by the time we got to 2011 it had turned negative and they had to set yet more ambitious targets for the next five years. So it went on, and we find in the Red Book that the forecast business investment growth for last year turned negative again. I am desperate to see positive business investment growth, and the jobs that come with it, but we keep seeing the same story from the Government. They keep failing.

What should the Government have done? There are any number of policies that they might have adopted. Instead of tinkering with air passenger duty, they might have cut it properly or acted sensibly to boost international connectivity. Instead of simply freezing fuel duty, they might have introduced a real fuel duty regulator to smooth out future spikes. They might have cancelled some of their austerity measures, or at least removed the cap on discretionary housing payments to help the poorest. There are so many things that they might have done.

In the North sea, the Government announced that they would implement the Wood review in full. That will save the industry some £45 million, and it is to be welcomed. However, they are keeping the offshore chartering regime that they announced last year, which will cost the industry £600 million. They keep getting it wrong every single time.

Section 5 of the European Communities (Amendment) Act 1993

Debate between Lord Redwood and Stewart Hosie

Tuesday 24th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Redwood]

As I shall make clear shortly, our policies are rather different. For one thing, the coalition Government decided to increase current public spending, which is running at £64 billion a year more this year than in the last year of Labour government. The Red Book shows that real current public spending has risen in each of the two years of the coalition Government, although not by very much. The Government are clearly not trying to deflate the economy by introducing massive current spending cuts, given that overall current spending has been rising.

[Stewart Hosie]

The right hon. Gentleman, who knows the Red Book inside out, will recall that it makes it clear that the Government’s projected discretionary consolidation by 2016-17 amounts to £155 billion a year, of which 81% will be delivered by cuts in services and the remainder by tax increases. The hon. Member for Preston (Mark Hendrick) was right: the Government are embarking on precisely the policies for which the right hon. Gentleman is criticising others.

[Mr Redwood]

I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman has not read the Red Book intelligently. The 80:20 statistic on which Members seem to rely relates to changes compared with much bigger growth in public spending that was in inherited programmes. It is not the reality. The reality of the Government’s strategy is a massive increase in taxes over the planned five years of the present Parliament to pay for rather modest increases in current public spending over the life of the Parliament, and to get the deficit down. The 2010 strategy suggested that tax revenues would be £171 billion a year more in year 5 than they had been in the last Labour year. The Government have now had to reduce that figure a bit because—as other Members have pointed out—the expected growth has not been forthcoming, for a variety of reasons.

We need to promote growth vigorously and actively, which is common ground between the Government, coalition Back Benchers and many Opposition Members. The argument, surely, concerns what measures are most likely to bring that about. It appears that over the last four years both Governments have operated policies involving actively increasing public spending, with the exception of capital spend—certainly overall spending has risen—and actively promoting massive borrowing, while at the same time the economy has bombed very badly. I am not suggesting that that is causal, but it should lead Opposition Members to ask why that fiscal injection—massive borrowing and an increase in current public spending—has not done the job. There seems to be some disconnection between the remedy that they recommend and the reality of what is happening.

When we look at the way in which other countries have pulled out of crises of this kind, and, indeed, the way in which Britain has pulled out of similar but, perhaps, less aggressively damaging crises than the one that we inherited, we see that there is nearly always a period during which public spending must be reduced or controlled quite strongly to make room for a private sector recovery, and that a series of measures to promote that recovery will then be necessary. As I have explained at length in the past, banking reform and competitive banking are crucial. The Government’s theory favours a tight fiscal policy and a loose monetary policy. They want to allow more money to circulate through the private sector through credit and through the banking system, and they want to lower the deficit gradually in the public sector so that the fiscal policy becomes a bit tighter.

Finance Bill

Debate between Lord Redwood and Stewart Hosie

Thursday 15th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Stewart Hosie]

I am a great supporter of innovative product design, marketing and pricing strategies, and I hope that all those things happen, but we are debating an amendment to the Finance Bill in which the Government are putting up IPT. I shall not strain the limits allowed by the Chair, but shall stick to the amendment and what is in the Bill, while supporting any innovation that the insurance sector, which is massively important in Scotland, might bring forward.

There is a deterrent effect on those who wish sensibly to insure themselves against many risks, and that effect will be enhanced as the cost of insurance rises. There are also specific consequences for individuals. Some 1.2 million people—about one in 20 motorists—regularly drive uninsured, and honest motorists pay the £30 premium I have mentioned, which is likely to go up. If someone is caught driving without insurance, the police are entitled to remove their vehicle from the road and charge them for the cost of transporting, storing or scrapping it. However, some cars may be worth less than the cost of insurance and there will be a burden on the public purse as a result of that removal, storage and scrapping of vehicles if people choose simply to abandon them.

People might also cut corners and opt for the “free” travel insurance offered by credit card companies, which might leave some travellers without the necessary levels of cover and might be costly in the long term. I do not intend to take up much of the Committee’s time on this issue, as this is a probing amendment, but this issue is more serious than I had initially imagined. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s comments on that last point in particular, because if people decide not to pay insurance premiums and instead settle for the “free” cover offered by their credit cards, they might be underinsured in certain circumstances. Also, business might be driven from the traditional, successful, good insurance companies, and I am conscious of what the net loss of jobs, revenue and profitability in that sector might be. So, putting up IPT will have consequences for the sector, for individuals and for jobs. All these points need to be answered properly and considerable comfort needs to be given that we are not going to turn into a nation that says, “We can’t afford insurance; we’ll do without it and let other people pick up the tab.” I shall listen very carefully to the Minister’s reply.

[Mr Redwood]

My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) has highlighted the two very important and different issues of health insurance and motor insurance. Let me start with motor insurance, which is a legal obligation that is imposed on everyone who wishes to own and drive a car.

Like my hon. Friend, and, I suspect, everyone else in the House, I think it quite right that there should be that obligation. It reminds people that driving a car is a serious business and that they could do considerable damage to others or themselves if they do it badly. It also means that, were someone to drive badly or to be involved in an accident that was not their fault, there would be redress and injured third parties who might need substantial compensation would not be left without it. For all those reasons, we think that car insurance is a very good idea and we accept that it should be a legal obligation.

The coalition Government think that one way of raising more revenue is to increase the tax on that compulsory purchase, but quite a lot of people in the House think it would be better to raise more revenue from the existing level of insurance tax on motor insurance by getting more people to be insured. We are rightly very concerned that, because of the way in which the insurance market works, a significant number of people, particularly younger people, may not be taking out any insurance or may not be taking out proper insurance for their circumstances, and that that places other people at risk and could mean losses that those young people could not afford to pay if they had an accident. That clearly means a loss of revenue for the Exchequer, because those people are not making their contribution by paying their share of insurance tax. We would like the Minister to consider whether better enforcement of the insurance rules could help with his task of filling the coffers and narrowing the deficit. That might be a better route than increasing the tax.

I am sure that the Minister will remind us that we are talking about a 1% increase and that it is quite a modest sum of money. We have been reminded a few times that young people with certain kinds of vehicles, or some young people with any kind of vehicle, can be required to pay a four-figure sum each year for their motor insurance, so we could be talking about £10 or more. The additional increase would not be welcome, because most young people find such sums of money quite large in the first place, and a further 1% would not be helpful.

Finance Bill

Debate between Lord Redwood and Stewart Hosie

Tuesday 6th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)]

I intend to finish my remarks by talking about the performance of the Chief Secretary, but I will start by commenting on what the shadow Chief Secretary said. He rightly pointed out that if the Government did not get the growth forecasts that they expected, the only option that they would have in meeting their deficit reduction targets would be to cut more. However, Labour’s policy to halve the deficit, again in a fixed time scale, suffered from precisely the same problem. If the growth forecasts of 3.25% for four of the next five years had not been met—indeed, if there had been a downturn—there would have been no room not only for a fiscal stimulus but, perhaps, for the use of the automatic stabilisers. The Government’s plans and Labour’s previous plans have that problem in common.

Let me start by commenting on the things that we agree with in this very thin Finance Bill. I am pleased that the Bill seeks to bring down corporation tax. The phased reduction in the headline rate will provide an incentive for businesses to locate in the UK, although I am not convinced that paying for this through the changes to investment and other capital allowances might not yet prove to be a problem for growing businesses. As the hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones), who is not in her place, said, this may help businesses that are up and running, but not those that seek to grow. I am disappointed that she is not here, because if she were, I would have the opportunity to ask whether she now regrets the Labour Government’s abolition of the industrial buildings allowance—another key allowance to help industrial investment that went some time ago.

[Mr Redwood]

The hon. Gentleman and I made common cause against the previous Government for not adjusting for the cycle in their Budget plans. I believe that this Government have said that if things were to go wrong and we headed into another global recession, they would adjust the plans accordingly for the cycle.

[Stewart Hosie]

Indeed. It is worth making the point, though, that on paper there is a rigidity about this. I remain concerned that if growth forecasts, downrated sensibly, are not met, there will have to be these necessary adjustments.

I welcome the phased reduction in corporation tax, but question whether it makes sense to pay for it through changes to capital and other investment allowances. The Road Haulage Association has said:

“We are concerned about the reduction of the investment allowance for small firms to £25,000 from £50,000 which will have a detrimental impact on small haulage companies.”

That trade body probably speaks for many in its approach to the change to the annual investment allowance.

I am pleased by the way in which the Government have handled the capital gains tax changes, keeping the rate unchanged for basic rate payers to encourage and allow modest investment but increasing the rate for higher taxpayers. Closing the gap removes a perverse incentive to take income that could be taxed as capital rather than through income tax, but keeps a sufficient distance between the rates of income tax and capital gains tax to encourage real investment. That was handled quite well.

I have a question, though, about the rationale for the increase in insurance premium tax. I heard the explanation that it has previously mirrored the VAT rate, but there is no reason why that should still be the case. It will bring in some £2 billion in additional tax over the next five years, and I can only hope that that decision does not come back to haunt this Government in the way that the abolition of advanced corporation tax on pensions came back to haunt the Labour Government. The Conservative party in particular has made a great many criticisms about how that pension change was made and the impact that it had. Indeed, it was a smash-and-grab raid that the Chancellor described as “disastrous” in Accountancy Age last year. I hope that the insurance premium tax increase will not be described in that way in future.

Incidentally, in the same interview, on 6 October, the Chancellor also stated his aim to get the country saving again, which makes it even more difficult to explain the coalition Government’s intention to scrap the child trust funds. We have spoken about savings and savings ratios in the past, and the Red Book forecasts future ratios of just over 5%. However, that is about half the savings ratio that the Labour Government inherited and about the average through the whole of 2004 and 2005. It is not particularly ambitious, if the Government’s intention was to get the country saving again.

However, the real damage in this Finance Bill, as many Members have mentioned, is the determination to put up VAT. That directly contradicts the stated intention of both coalition parties to create a fairer society. Although it may well be the case that in cash terms the wealthiest will pay more VAT, it is clear that the poorest 10% will pay nearly three times higher a percentage of their disposable income than the richest 10%. That is all because of the wrong-headed view, to some extent shared by Labour, that deficit consolidation must be achieved quickly. That is based, I believe, on a flawed assessment of the Canadian model, rather than a credible one perhaps based on the New Zealand model, which certainly worked. The consequence of the VAT changes, at least according to Save the Children, is that the VAT bill for the poorest could rise to more than £31 a week.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Lord Redwood and Stewart Hosie

Tuesday 22nd June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Redwood]

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that we have much less power to reduce or improve regulation from Brussels than we do with what is homespun. However, so much crass and foolish regulation has been put on British businesses over the past decade by the home legislators—the then Labour Government—that we can get quite a long way by removing, amending or changing that. In the meantime, we need to summon up a bit of courage and tell those in Brussels that they, too, should join in the process, as that would benefit their businesses as much as ours.

I have often said in this House that, from the point of view of running a business, reducing regulatory cost is a good way of offering something that is just like a tax cut without reducing the public revenue. Indeed, it is even better: not only is there no revenue loss, but public sector costs can be reduced, as the enforcement and monitoring costs of needless or over-the-top regulation can themselves be reduced. That means that businesses get a cash flow benefit, and that there is a reduction in the costs of Government.

The previous Government regulated too many things, and they did so too much and too often. They often regulated in a way that made things worse rather than better. We often found ourselves opposing them, even though we did not disagree with their aims. Like them, we wanted people to have nice lives and decent jobs, and to be free from risk in the workplace and so forth, but we often found that the regulation that the former Government proposed was very expensive and did not achieve the required result.

A tick-box culture means that people get very good at ticking boxes and writing memos, but that they do not manage in the proper way. A factory can be made less safe if the process is merely bureaucratic. Instead, the notion that safety comes first, second and third must be inculcated in all the senior people in that factory. They must manage safety intuitively, as ensuring that a workplace is safe cannot be achieved by tick boxes, inspectors or regulators.

Safety must be inherent in every workplace, and what we can do is to set a tone by saying that it matters above all else. We can have laws at a high level on safety but we need not go into as much detail as the previous Government did. Their approach often made things worse, and much more expensive.

The most important table in the Red Book can be found on page 45. It is one that we must discuss and understand, as it sets out the expenditure patterns for the forthcoming period of Government. The information in the table will come as a pleasant surprise to many neutral people outside the House, although it may worry Labour Members, who seem to be in denial about it. The table shows that total expenditure in the last year of the Labour Government reached £669 billion, and that expenditure will rise steadily to £737 billion by 2014-15.

[Stewart Hosie]

The right hon. Gentleman is accusing Labour over this cash-terms expenditure increase, but I am sure that he will remember that the Chancellor explained early in his speech that ever-increasing debt repayment costs were included. I have no doubt that, for the sake of completeness, he will want to remind the House of the gross domestic product deflators of 3.2%, 2.1%, 2.1% and 2.6% over the next four years.

[Mr Redwood]

I was going on to say that we are talking about a big increase in cash. If all of us in the public sector can get better at managing that cash, we should be able to do a good job for people because the amount of spending is going up.

What could go wrong? Well, the hon. Gentleman has mentioned two things that could go wrong. If public sector inflation is as high as, or higher than, forecast general inflation, that will eat away at the value of the money that we are spending and make it more difficult to sustain good public services. However, Ministers tell us that they will be very tough on wage increases. That will help, as it will share the work and mean that we can keep more people doing more worthwhile things for our constituents, without all the money being eaten away by wage increases.

After all, that is what the private sector had to experience for two or three years, during the worst of the recession. In that regard, I pay tribute to the many work forces and unions in this country that did not merely accept that there would be no pay increases; instead, they often accepted pay reductions and very tough work-sharing schemes. They did so because they understood how dire the position of their industries and companies were, and they helped their managements to see their companies through.

We do not have to go that far in the public sector, but there is something that we need to tell all our public sector employees, and I think that this is a task for Opposition MPs as well as Government MPs. We need to say, “Things will be less painful and better for all of us if we can keep costs down and wages and salaries under control. More jobs will be preserved and a better service delivered to the people whom we serve, because more of that cash increase is going to go into helpful spending.”

As the hon. Gentleman says, the rising interest charges are also a worry, albeit one that makes the coalition Government’s case rather well. If we do not tackle the rising deficit now, more and more of the money will go on paying interest bills for past spending, rather than being available for paying teachers’ or nurses’ wages, which is what we would rather be doing with it. His point therefore makes the case strongly that the more action that is taken at the beginning, the better, because then more of the quite large sums of extra money that will be available will go on buying real improvements or maintaining a decent quality of public service, instead of going on the rising interest bill.

The Government have had just one piece of good fortune with their rather bleak inheritance, as well as quite a lot of bad news from outside the United Kingdom. The one piece of good fortune is that over the weekend the Chinese Government announced that they were going to allow their currency to start to move upwards against the dollar. We have had quite a long period of the yuan/renminbi being pegged to the dollar. That has meant that China has been super-competitive. China works hard, she is developing much better technology and she produces good products. With the managed exchange rate that we were experiencing, with the pound sticking around with the dollar in recent months, we discovered that China was getting more and more competitive. Indeed, there has been another huge surge in Chinese exports in recent months.

Let us hope that the Chinese will now allow their crawling peg to crawl up quite a bit. The last time they had a crawling peg, it started a bit slowly, but then there was a 20% revaluation of the currency, which was quite helpful. We need all the help that we can get, because Britain has to export more and earn more money in overseas markets. The world’s No. 1 colossus—the dominant, most competitive exporter—is China, and any currency revaluation would be helpful. We still have to work hard—we have to get smarter and control our costs—but that revaluation might take some of the pressure off.

However, the bad news is that the European market is getting worse. We had hoped that European countries would have a normal, cyclical recovery, such as that which the United States is enjoying. However, it now looks as if their recovery will be slow, with quite a number of countries going backwards this year and early next year, because of their deficit problems and difficulties with the euro. Indeed, those countries’ economies might continue to fall or start to fall again. That is difficult for Britain, because euroland is an important marketplace for our physical goods—it is not nearly so important for services or inward and outward investment, but it is important for physical goods. It is therefore in our interests that euroland starts to mend itself as soon as possible. I therefore hope that the Chancellor will continue his negotiations and work with his European partners, because it is important that we allow them to take the actions that they need to take to start mending the euro.

The euro is a single currency in search of a single country, and that has been its tragedy ever since it was first created. Those of us who warned that we could not have a single currency without a single economy, a single budget and a single Government were told that we were quite wrong and that we had misunderstood things. Apparently all that history that we had read was a waste of time. However, all the history of currency unions that I have ever read shows that they work only if there is control of the borrowing and spending levels through a central power, which is what we are now told our friends and colleagues in euroland are learning. They have discovered that they cannot allow Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain to free-ride at the expense of the rather more prudent core. Those in euroland are learning that, if they allow those countries to borrow and borrow at the lower common interest rate that Germany has granted them, there comes a point when the markets no longer believe in those countries and they start to blow their debt markets apart.