Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation
Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts(11 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. I remind the House that we will have a seven-minute limit on Back-Bench speeches.
Mr Ellwood
Before I reply to that, Mr Deputy Speaker, may I point out that the clock did not stop? I hope you will give me some injury time.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
The hon. Gentleman will get no injury time, because he has given way twice before.
Mr Ellwood
I stand corrected. I understood that I got an extra minute for the first two interventions and that after that, if someone intervened, the clock stopped.
It is disappointing that we have not heard any answers from Labour. It has offered nothing constructive; in fact, it is in a state of denial. Its strategy seems to be to employ a little inaccuracy and a spot of amnesia, and to avoid a ton of explanation. It is now apparent that under Labour, government was too big, too costly and too inefficient. Labour allowed banks to lend money to people who could not afford it, using financial instruments they did not understand. When the history books are written, it will become apparent just how much damage the former Labour Chancellor and Prime Minister did. He will probably go down as one of the most disastrous Chancellors in history.
The former Chancellor not only doubled national debt, but killed off British competitiveness and introduced the “something for nothing” culture that this Government are now undoing. Labour squandered their 13 years in office, and it is now left to this Government not only to solve the economic mess and make Britain more competitive again, but to simplify the tax system, curb immigration, modernise the benefits system and restore respectability to our pensions system. Labour has proven the adage that occasionally applies in this Chamber: the democratic right to be heard here does not include the right to be taken seriously.
In conclusion, this is a constructive and progressive Budget that will provide a further stimulus to the economy and help hard-hit families and individuals seeking to get on. From my days as a young officer, my philosophy in life has been not to complain about the weather, but to march with determination out of the rain. That analogy holds today, as this Conservative-led Government lead Britain out of the economic storm, while Labour, which created the mess, offers no helpful solutions whatsoever, other than to repeat past mistakes such as encouraging the spending of money we do not have. We will not stop reminding the public of the last Government’s mismanagement of the economy. Whatever speculation there might be about opinion polls, small parties or even possible Lib-Lab pacts, the bottom line is clear: either a Miliband or a Cameron will occupy No. 10. I know whom I would prefer to lead the country, and it is not the former adviser to one of the worst Chancellors in history.
Mr Deputy Speaker
I remind hon. Members that they get two hits with two minutes, but no extra time for interventions after that. Hon. Members should also be aware that every intervention could knock someone off the bottom of the list. If someone is desperate to intervene, therefore, they should understand if they do not get called in the end.
Jim Sheridan
As I have said, this industry employs people in areas where few alternative jobs exist. The Chancellor threatens jobs in such areas, as the Chief Secretary presumably told him. [Interruption.]
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. Mr Griffiths, you have already spoken. The Member does not want to give way and we do not need a running commentary from the Back Benches.
Jim Sheridan
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I have been heckled by better.
Perhaps the Chancellor will explain to pensioners enjoying a dram why they should have to pay 48% more duty for the alcohol they enjoy than their neighbours who prefer a beer. Only three countries in the EU penalise Scotch whisky more than the UK does. It is time to halt the duty escalator for all and to start backing, not penalising, our successful industries.
Let me deal briefly with pensions. Like many of my colleagues here, I have a large number of pensioners in my constituency, and I am concerned that this Budget will do nothing to reduce pensioner poverty, currently standing at 1.7 million people nationally. There are no proposals to help pensioners who are struggling with rising living costs.
Moving on to growth, in a written answer I received on 17 January, the Economic Secretary told me:
“The OBR forecast that real household disposable income will grow in each year from 2013 to 2017.”—[Official Report, 17 January 2013; Vol. 556, c. 866W.]
In December 2010, the Chancellor was equally confident, telling CNBC:
“Britain is on the mend. We got pretty steady and sustainable economic growth forecasts, pretty sustainable increases in employment, a steady decline in the deficit.”
Well, how wrong could this Government be? Real wages are set to fall by 2.4% over this Parliament. The OBR has also halved the growth forecast for this year and downgraded it for next year, too. I ask the Chancellor to see some sense and stop relying on the private sector to provide the boost to the economy that is needed. Millions will be squeezed by another year of capping public sector pay, while the private sector has simply not managed to perform as well as was needed at a time when growth has stalled.
A sensible Budget would have seen an intervention to legislate for a living wage, rather than giving the tax break to millionaires that is coming up in a few days’ time. That would not only be fair on working people, but could help inject the economy with consumer spending power. The most ironic part of this plan is that the Chancellor has not even succeeded in reducing the deficit—the golden goal that we have been suffering these tax cuts in order to achieve. Borrowing is now forecast to be £245 billion more than was planned at the time of the spending review. We will not have balanced books, but we will have low-income families paying the price, while millionaires continue to count their money.
I concur with the views of the TUC, which welcomes the British business bank but is calling for more resources to support businesses on a larger scale and for the bank to be able to raise funds in the capital markets as comparable banks do.
I and, I am sure, my constituents do not see this as an aspirational Budget, but as a desperation Budget.
Financial Statement
Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts(11 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Before I call the Chancellor of the Exchequer, it is convenient to remind hon. Members that copies of the Budget resolutions will be available in the Vote Office at the end of the Chancellor’s speech. It may also be appropriate to remind hon. Members that it is the norm not to intervene on the Chancellor of the Exchequer or the Leader of the Opposition.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr George Osborne)
This is a Budget for people who aspire to work hard and get on. It is a Budget for people who realise there are no easy answers to problems built up over many years—just the painstaking work of putting right what went so badly wrong. And together with the British people, we are, slowly but surely, fixing our country’s economic problems. We have now cut the deficit not by a quarter, but by a third. We have helped business create not a million new jobs, but one and a quarter million new jobs. We have kept interest rates at record lows.
Despite the progress we have made, there is much more to do. Today, I am going to level with people about the difficult economic circumstances we still face and the hard decisions required to deal with them. It is taking longer than anyone hoped, but we must hold to the right track. By setting free the aspirations of this nation, we will get there.
Our economic plan combines monetary activism with fiscal responsibility and supply-side reform, and today we go further on all three components of that plan: monetary, fiscal and supply-side reform. We also understand something else more fundamental. Our nation is in a global race, competing alongside new centres of enterprise around the world for investment and jobs that can move anywhere. What was the response of those who came before us? It was to expand the state in a way that we could not afford; to drive businesses overseas with taxes that became more and more uncompetitive; to let schools fail; to deplete our skills base; to let a bloated welfare system pick up the human casualties and assume that an uncontrolled banking boom would pick up the bill. To win in the global race, we are doing the exact opposite. We are building a modern, reformed state that we can afford. We are bringing businesses to our shores with competitive taxes. We are fixing the banks. We are improving our schools, our skills—[Interruption.]
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. Obviously the country is waiting to hear the Chancellor. I certainly want to hear the Chancellor, and I am sure that most people in the Chamber also want to hear the Chancellor. Please let us hear the Chancellor.
Mr Osborne
For years people have felt that the whole system is tilted against those who did the right thing: who worked, who saved, who aspired. Those are the very people whom we must support if Britain is to have a prosperous future. This is a Budget for those who aspire to own their own home, who aspire to get their first job or to start their own business. It is a Budget for those who want to save for their retirement and provide for their children. It is a Budget for our aspiration nation.
The forecast from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility today reminds us of the economic challenge at home and abroad, but it also—[Interruption.]
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. Let us start as we mean to go on. The shadow Chancellor may not have been the Chancellor, but he should observe the courtesies, and should know better. [Interruption.] We want no advice from the Government, and they should know better than to display it. I do not wish to see it. That is not a good position to put us in. Let us continue, and let this not become the circus of the day.
Mr Osborne
Since the autumn statement, the OBR has again revised down its forecast for global economic growth, and has sharply revised down its forecast for world trade. Growth in the United States and Japan was flat in the last quarter, while the eurozone shrank by 0.6%. That was the largest fall since the height of the financial crisis. The problems in Cyprus this week are further evidence that the crisis is not over, and the situation remains very worrying. I can confirm that, as the Prime Minister said, people sent to Cyprus to serve our country, in our military or Government, will be protected in full from any tax on their deposits.
The OBR today sharply revised down its future growth forecast for the eurozone, and expects it to remain in recession throughout this year. In its words, “the underlying situation” in the eurozone “remains very fragile”. I will be straight with the country: another bout of economic storms in the eurozone would hit Britain’s economic fortunes hard. Forty per cent. of all we export, we export to the eurozone. There is a huge effort across the Government to grow Britain’s trade with the fast-growing parts of the world, and exports to Brazil, India and China are up by almost two thirds. United Kingdom firms now export more goods to non-European Union countries than to EU countries. This is the first time that that has happened in over two decades. However, we are still very exposed to what happens on the continent. Indeed, last year domestic demand was actually stronger than forecast, but it is the weakness of net trade that helps to account for much of the weakness in GDP. As the OBR makes clear,
“the unexpectedly poor performance of exports is more than sufficient on its own to explain the shortfall”.
GDP for last year has turned out to be a little higher than the OBR forecast in December, but this year its output forecast is reduced to 0.6% growth. Despite the recession in the eurozone, the OBR’s central forecast today is that we will avoid a second quarter of negative growth here in the UK. While it is less than we would like, our growth this year and next year is forecast by the International Monetary Fund to be higher than that of France and Germany. That is a reminder of the fact that all western nations live in very challenging economic times.
The OBR expects the recovery to pick up to 1.8% in 2014, 2.3% in 2015, 2.7% in 2016, and 2.8% in 2017. Crucially, jobs are being created. Indeed, in the words of the OBR, the picture on employment
“continues to surprise on the upside”
in this forecast.
When we started the unavoidable task of reducing the size of the public sector work force, some in the House expressed doubts that the private sector would be able to make up the difference. I am glad to report to the House that their lack of confidence in British businesses has been misplaced. It is a tribute to the energy and enterprise of British companies that for every one job lost in the public sector in the last year, six jobs have been created in the private sector; the employment rate has been growing faster than in the US and three times as fast as in Germany. So, despite the weaker GDP, at this Budget the OBR has now revised up further its forecasts for employment. Compared with this time last year, the OBR now expects 600,000 more jobs in 2013, and there will be 60,000 fewer people claiming unemployment benefit. We have seen more people in work than ever before, including a record number of women; there are a quarter of a million fewer workless households than two years ago; and the unemployment rate is lower than it was when we came to office.
The deficit continues to come down. Three years ago, the Government were borrowing £1 for every £4 they spent—that was completely reckless and unsustainable. We have taken many tough decisions to bring that deficit down, and we will continue to do so. The deficit has fallen from 11.2% of GDP in 2009-10 to a forecast of 7.4% this year—that is a fall of a third. It will then fall further to 6.8% next year, 5.9% in 2014-15, 5% in 2015-16 and 3.4% the following year, reaching 2.2% by 2017-18. Those numbers all exclude the transfer of the Royal Mail pension fund to the Government, which reduces the deficit still further for this year alone. It is sometimes asserted in this House that borrowing has gone up under this Government—[Interruption.] As we have just seen again. The facts show the opposite to be true. The previous Government borrowed—[Interruption.]
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. We cannot have one side being told without the other. It is not a competition of who can shout the loudest. Let us hear the Chancellor. If you don’t want to hear your own Chancellor, I am sure your constituents would understand if you were to leave the Chamber. I suggest that nobody wants to leave the Chamber, so let us continue to hear the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Mr Osborne
As I was saying, the facts show the opposite to be true. The previous Government borrowed £159 billion in their last year in office and this year this Government are forecast to borrow £114 billion. So that is not more borrowing—it is £45 billion a year less borrowing. Borrowing then falls from £108 billion next year, and falls again to £97 billion in 2014-15 and to £87 billion in the last year of this Parliament, before falling again to £61 billion and £42 billion in the following two years. To ensure complete transparency, the OBR publishes the numbers without the asset purchase facility cash transfers. They show that on that measure, too, borrowing is just forecast to fall.
We committed at the start of this Parliament to a fiscal mandate that said we would aim to balance the cyclically adjusted current budget over the following rolling five years. I can confirm that the OBR says we are on course to meet our fiscal mandate—and meet it one year early. However, the likelihood of meeting the supplementary debt target has deteriorated. Public sector net debt is forecast to be 75.9% of GDP this year, 79.2% next year, 82.6% the year after, 85.1% in 2015-16 and 85.6% in the year after, before falling to 84.8% in 2017-18.
In response, there are those who would want to cut much more than we are planning to and chase the debt target. I said in December that I thought that with the current weak economic conditions across Europe that would be a mistake. We have got a plan to cut our structural deficit. Our country’s credibility comes from delivering that plan, not altering it with every forecast—and that is why interest rates remain so low. Our judgment has since been supported by the International Monetary Fund, the OECD and the Governor of the Bank of England, and I do not propose to change that judgment three months later.
I have also had representations at this Budget for measures that would add £33 billion a year extra to borrowing on top of the figures I have announced. That is from people who seem to think that the way to borrow less is to borrow more. They would return us to the double-digit deficits of the last Government and give us far and away one of the highest deficits in the western world. That would pose a huge risk to the stability of the British economy, threaten a sharp rise in interest rates and leave the burden of debts to our children and our grandchildren. I will not take that gamble with the future of this country, especially when those representations came from the very same people whose previous gamble with our economy led to the mess that we are clearing up in the first place.
The spending reductions that we promised have been more than delivered. Welfare reforms have been legislated for and are taking place, and here is a clear sign of progress: the proportion of national income spent by the state has fallen from 47.4% three years ago to 43.6% today; and it is on course to reach 40.5% at the end of the period. We have set out the deficit plan, and we are delivering that plan. Taken together, the measures that I will announce today are fiscally neutral overall. Ask the British people and they will tell you: our problem as a country is not that we are taxed too little, but that the Government spend too much. I agree with them. So the tax cuts in this Budget are not borrowed; they are paid for. That is our way, and it is the only responsible way to lower taxes.
It is the central plank of our economic plan that a tough and credible fiscal policy creates the space for an active monetary policy. Recovering from the financial crisis has exposed the shortcomings of conventional monetary tools. We in Britain have had to innovate and develop new tools; so have other countries. I confirm today that the asset purchase facility will remain in place for the coming year. We are now actively considering with the Bank of England whether there are potential extensions to the successful funding for lending scheme that will boost lending still further. We are also setting out our plans for lending from our new business bank, but I want to make sure that an active monetary policy plays a full role in supporting the economy, so I am today setting out an updated remit for the Monetary Policy Committee. Alongside it, we are publishing a review of the monetary policy framework.
This Budget confirms the primacy of price stability and the inflation target in Britain’s monetary policy framework. The updated remit reaffirms the inflation target as 2% as measured by the 12-month increase in the consumer prices index. The target will apply at all times, but as we have seen over the last five years, low and stable inflation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for prosperity. The new remit explicitly tasks the MPC with setting out clearly the trade-offs that it has made in deciding how long it will be before inflation returns to target. To ensure a fuller communication between the Bank and the Treasury, I am changing the timing of the open letter system, so that when inflation is above target the Governor will write to me on the day the minutes of the next MPC meeting are published to allow for a more substantive exchange of views.
The new remit also recognises that the Monetary Policy Committee may need to use unconventional monetary instruments to support the economy while keeping inflation stable, and it makes it clear that the committee may wish to issue explicit forward guidance, including using intermediate thresholds in order to influence expectations on the future path of interest rates. For example, that is what the US Federal Reserve has now done, making a commitment to keep interest rates low while unemployment is high, provided that inflation is not expected to rise too much. This can help the economy because it gives families planning their futures, and businesses wondering whether to invest, more confidence that interest rates will stay lower for longer. So I am asking the Monetary Policy Committee to provide an assessment of how intermediate thresholds might work in Britain, and to give that assessment in its August 2013 inflation report. That report will be the first issued under the governorship of Mark Carney. Whether intermediate thresholds are used will be an operational matter for the independent MPC. I can confirm that Mervyn King and Mark Carney have both seen the new remit and they have both agreed to it.
Active monetary policy can only operate freely when securely anchored by credible fiscal policy. That is the next component of our economic plan. We have instituted new public spending controls in government. When money is short, we make no excuses for the rigorous financial management we have run across Whitehall. Let me be clear with the House: that is one of the reasons why we have got forecast borrowing falling in this year and next. The traditional splurge of cash by Departments at the end of the financial year, just to get the money spent, has to be curtailed. And thanks to the tough financial control of my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary, Government Departments are forecast to underspend their budgets by more than £11 billion this year. If you want to bring borrowing down, you have to control spending, and that is what we have done.
Now we want to ensure Departments have budgets that are more closely aligned to what they actually spend. So both next year and the year after, we will reduce resource departmental expenditure limits by the equivalent to a 1% reduction for most Departments. The schools and health budgets will remain protected, because our promise to our NHS is a promise we will keep. Local government and police allocations for 2013-14 have already been set out and will not be affected. We will also deliver in this coming year on this nation’s long-standing commitment to the world’s poorest to spend 0.7% of our national income on international development. We should all take pride, as I do, in this historic achievement for our country. As previously, the Department for International Development budget will be adjusted to ensure we do not spend more than 0.7%.
Departmental budgets have yet to be set for the year 2015-16, which starts before the end of this Parliament. This will be done in the spending round that will be set out on 26 June. I said last autumn that we would require around £10 billion of savings from that spending round. I confirm today that we will instead be seeking £11.5 billion of current savings. We have got to go on making difficult decisions so that Britain can live within its means. And because we make those decisions, we can get our deficit down and focus on our nation’s economic priorities.
Total managed expenditure for 2015-16 will be set at £745 billion. How the savings will be achieved will be a matter for the spending round, but existing protections apply. We are also taking steps to help all Departments to achieve the savings required. Together, my right hon. Friends the Chief Secretary and the Minister for the Cabinet Office have indentified that a further £5 billion of savings in efficiency and cutting the cost of administration can be made. This will go a huge way towards delivering the spending round in a way that saves money but protects services.
So too will action on pay. The Government will extend the restraint on public sector pay for a further year by limiting increases to an average of up to 1% in 2015-16. This will apply to the civil service and work forces with pay review bodies. Local government and devolved Administration budgets will be adjusted accordingly in the spending round. We will also seek substantial savings from what is called progression pay. These are the annual increases in the pay of some parts of the public sector. I think they are difficult to justify when others in the public sector, and millions more in the private sector, have seen pay frozen or even cut. I know that is tough, but it is fair. In difficult times with the inevitable trade-off between paying people more and saving jobs, we should put jobs first.
Today is also the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. The awarding of a posthumous Victoria Cross to Lance Corporal James Ashworth this week reminds us of the courage and sacrifice that all who serve in our armed forces are still making to defend our country. We will exempt our military from changes to progression pay. We are also accepting in full from 1 May this year the armed forces pay review body's recommended increase in the so-called X factor payment made to military personnel to recognise the particular sacrifices they make. And I can also announce that further awards from the LIBOR banking fines have gone to good military causes, with money for Combat Stress to help veterans with mental health issues and funds for Christmas boxes for all our troops on operations this year and next. Those who have paid fines in our financial sector because they demonstrated the very worst of values are paying to support those in our armed forces who demonstrate the very best of British values.
Ultimately as a country we will not be able to spend more on the services we all value, from our NHS to our armed forces, or invest in our infrastructure, unless we go on tackling the growth of spending on welfare budgets. The public spending framework introduced by the previous Government divided Government spending into two halves: fixed departmental budgets and what is called annually managed expenditure—except in practice it was annually unmanaged expenditure—and it includes almost the entire welfare budget as well as items like debt interest and payments to the EU. I can tell the House that according to the OBR forecast today, the European budget deal secured by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has saved Britain a total of £3.5 billion. We will now introduce a new limit on a significant proportion of annually managed expenditure. It will be set out in a way that allows the automatic stabilisers to operate, but it will bring real control to areas of public spending that had been out of control. We will set out more detail on how this new spending limit will work at the spending round in June. All decisions, on welfare, pay and Departments are tough, and they affect many people. But if we did not take them, what is a difficult situation for them and for the whole country would be very much worse.
Active monetary policy and a responsible fiscal policy are two components of our economic plan. We also need supply-side reform, to throw the full weight of our efforts behind the entrepreneurial forces in our society. Our fundamental overhaul of the planning laws are now helping homes to be built and businesses to expand. Our reform of schools, universities and apprenticeships is probably the single most important long-term economic policy we are pursuing. Our support for European free trade agreements with India, Japan and the US is a priority of our foreign policy. And we are building the most competitive tax system in the world. But now we need to do more.
First, we can provide the economy with the infrastructure it needs. We are already supporting the largest programme of investment in our railways since Victorian times, and spending more on new roads than in a generation. We are giving Britain the fastest broadband and mobile telephony in Europe. And the Treasury is now writing guarantees to major projects from supporting the regeneration of the old Battersea power station site to building the new power stations of tomorrow. We have switched billions of pounds from current to capital spending since the spending review to mitigate the sharp decline set in train by the last Government. But on existing plans, capital spending is still due to fall back in 2015-16, and I do not think that is sensible. So by using our extra savings from Government Departments, we will boost our infrastructure plans by £3 billion a year from 2015-16. That is £15 billion of extra capital spending over the next decade, because by investing in the economic arteries of this country, we will get growth flowing to every part of it. And public investment will now be higher on average as a percentage of our national income under our plans than it was in the whole period of the last Government.
In June, we will set out long-term spending plans for that long-term capital budget. And we will use the expertise of Paul Deighton, the man who delivered the Olympics and who now serves in the Treasury, to improve the capacity of Whitehall to deliver big projects and make greater use of independent advice.
The second thing we can do to support enterprise is to give our great regional cities and other local areas much greater control over their economic destiny and to back sectors that are a global success. Businesses have created more jobs in areas such as the west midlands in the first three years of this Government than they did in the first 10 years of the Labour Government. Private sector employment has been growing more quickly in the north-east, the north-west and Yorkshire than across the whole country.
But we can do much more, so I accept Michael Heseltine’s excellent idea of a single competitive pot of funding for local enterprise. I also fully endorse the report of Doug Richard to make the most of our apprenticeships. We have the second largest aerospace industry in the world. For the first time in 40 years, we manufacture for export more cars than we import, and our agritech business is at the global cutting edge. We are backing international successes like those with £1.6 billion of long-term funding for the industrial strategy that my right hon. Friend the Business Secretary launched this week.
Today we build on our new tax reliefs coming in this year for the creative industries such as high-end television and animation with new support for our world-class visual effects sector. To help small firms, we will increase fivefold the value of Government procurement budgets spent through the small business research initiative. We will fund the proposal to make growth vouchers available to small firms seeking advice on how to expand. We are putting new controls on what regulators can charge and giving the Pensions Regulator a new requirement to have regard to the growth prospects of employers.
A vital sector for our economy, and a cost of doing business for everyone, is energy. Creating a low-carbon economy should be done in a way that creates jobs, rather than costing them. The granting of planning permission yesterday at Hinkley Point was a major step forward for new nuclear. Today, with the help of my hon. Friend the Energy Minister, we are also announcing our intention to take two major carbon capture and storage projects to the next stage of development. We will support the manufacture of ultra-low emissions vehicles in Britain with new tax incentives. The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) has argued passionately, and on this occasion in a non-partisan way, about the damage that energy costs are doing to his city’s famous ceramics industry. He has persuaded me, so from next year we will exempt the industrial processes for that industry and some others from the climate change levy.
In the spending round, we will provide support for energy-intensive industries beyond 2015. For the North sea, we will this year sign contracts for future decommissioning relief, the expectation of which is already increasing investment there. But I also want Britain to tap into new sources of low-cost energy such as shale gas, so I am introducing a generous new tax regime, including a shale gas field allowance, to promote early investment. By the summer, new planning guidance will be available alongside specific proposals to allow local communities to benefit. Shale gas is part of the future, and we will make it happen.
We can help companies grow and succeed by building infrastructure, backing local enterprise and supporting successful sectors, but nothing beats having the most competitive business tax system of any major economy in the world. That is what this Government set out to achieve. That is what we are delivering. The accountants KPMG does a survey of investors that ranks the most competitive tax regimes in the world. Three years ago we were near the bottom of that table; now we are at the top. But in this global race we cannot stand still, so today we step up the pace. Our seed enterprise investment scheme offers generous incentives to investors in start-ups. My hon. Friend the Member for Braintree (Mr Newmark) and David Young have done a great job helping to promote it across the country. They have asked me to extend the capital gains tax holiday, and I will.
Employee ownership helps create an enterprise culture, so we are making our new employee shareholder status more generous, with national insurance contributions and income tax relief, and we are introducing capital gains tax relief for sales of businesses to their employees. Companies that look after their employees and help them return to work after periods of sickness will also get new help through the tax system, and we will double to £10,000 the size of the loans that employers can offer tax free to pay for items such as season tickets for commuters. That is a great idea from my hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) and I am happy to put it into practice. My hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois) and others have put forward proposals to help investment in social enterprises, and I have listened. We will introduce a new tax relief to encourage private investment in these social enterprises.
Research and development is absolutely central to Britain’s economic future, so today I am increasing the rate of the above-the-line R and D credit to 10%. Along with our new 10% corporation tax rate on profits from patents coming in next month, that will help make us one of the most internationally attractive places to innovate.
I also want Britain to be the place where people raise money and invest. Financial services are about much more than banking. In places such as Edinburgh and London we have a world-beating asset management industry, but they are losing business to other places in Europe. We act now with a package of measures to reverse that decline, and we will abolish the schedule 19 tax, which is payable only by UK-domiciled funds.
Many medium-sized firms and start-ups use the alternative investment market to raise funds to help them grow. Many observers of the British tax system complain that it has long been biased towards debt financing over equity investment, so today I am abolishing altogether stamp duty on shares traded on growth markets such as AIM. In parts of Europe they are introducing a financial transaction tax; here in Britain we are getting rid of one. From April next year, that will directly benefit hundreds of medium-sized UK firms, lowering their cost of capital and supporting jobs and growth across the UK.
We also set out to compete with the world in our headline rate of corporation tax. In Germany, the corporate tax rate is 29%; in France it is 33%; in the United States it is 40%. Here in Britain we have cut corporation tax from the 28% we inherited to 21% next year. But I want to go further. Today I want us to send a message to anyone who wants to invest and create jobs here that Britain is open for business, so in April 2015 we will reduce the main rate of corporation tax by another 1%. Britain will have a 20% rate of corporation tax, the lowest business tax of any major economy in the world. That is a tax cut for jobs and growth. We will have achieved in one Parliament, and in these difficult times, the largest reduction in the burden of corporation tax in our nation’s history, and with it we will achieve major simplification of our business tax system. By merging the small company and main rates at 20p, we will abolish the complex marginal relief calculations between them and give Britain a single rate of corporation tax for the first time since 1973. As with previous reductions in the corporate tax rate, I do not intend to pass the benefit on to the banking sector, so I will offset the reduction by increasing the bank levy rate next year to 0.142%.
Britain is moving to low and competitive taxes, but we should insist that people and business pay those taxes, rather than aggressively avoiding or evading them. That is the right way to succeed in the global race. Under Labour, we had the worst of both worlds: uncompetitive tax rates that were not paid. When the 50p rate was introduced, tax revenues fell by billions of pounds as the wealthy paid less. That is the wrong way round. Under this Government, the tax rates are more competitive and the wealthy pay more tax. That is the right way round. Here is an inconvenient truth for the Opposition: in every year of this Parliament the rich will pay a greater proportion of income tax revenues than in any one of the 13 years of the previous Labour Government. During those 13 years, too many people were allowed to get away with aggressive tax avoidance and abuse. They boasted that they were paying less tax then their cleaners, and Labour Members lauded them for it. We have stopped that, and that is what I call fair.
Today I am unveiling one of the largest ever packages of tax avoidance and evasion measures presented at a Budget. The details are set out in the Red Book. They include agreements with the Isle of Man, Guernsey and Jersey to bring in over £1 billion in unpaid taxes and new rules to stop the abuse of partnership rules, corporate tax losses and offshore employment intermediaries. That is another £2 billion. This year we are giving Britain its first ever general anti-abuse rule, and we will name and shame the promoters of tax avoidance schemes. My message to those who make a living advising other people how to aggressively avoid their taxes is this: this Government will not let you get away with it. This year we are leading international action on tax avoidance through our presidency of the G8 and with the OECD and the G20. We want the global rules governing the taxation of multinational firms to be updated from the 1920s, when they were first written, and made relevant to the global internet economy of the 21st century. This is the right and fair thing to do.
A tax system where people and businesses pay what is expected of them is part of the glue that holds our society together. So too is the expectation that those who work hard, who play by the rules, who save for their future and try to be independent of the state are not undermined but supported. So to the working parents struggling with the costs of child care, and the mother wondering whether it makes financial sense to get a job, we offer this: tax-free child care. The plans were set out yesterday: new tax-free child care vouchers for working families, with 20% off the first £6,000 of your child care costs for each child, and increased child care support for those low-income working families on universal credit.
For those who aspire to put aside money for their retirement, we offer this: a simple, flat-rate pension accessible to everyone and worth £144 a week. Any one pound you save will be a pound you can keep. We are bringing forward the introduction of the new single-tier pension to 2016. It will help the low-paid, the self-employed, and millions of women most of all. Of course, if there is no longer the old state second pension, there is no longer anything to contract out of. For employers, that means paying the same employer national insurance as those without defined-benefit schemes. Private sector employers can adjust their pension benefits to accommodate the extra cost; public sector employers will have to absorb the burden, as is always the case with tax changes. Any spending review in the next Parliament will of course take the £3.3 billion cost into account.
As we have already made clear, public sector employees, and the relatively small number of private sector employees in defined benefit schemes, will from 2016 pay more national insurance then they do today. They will pay the same rate of national insurance as the rest of the working population, and in return they will get a larger state pension than before. For example, someone who is 40 years old when the single-tier pension is introduced, and who has always been contracted out, will pay an extra £6,000 in national insurance over the rest of their working life—and in return get an extra £24,000 in state pension over the course of their retirement. That is a fair deal, and it is a progressive pension reform. We have also made it clear before that the extra £1.6 billion raised in employee national insurance will not be kept by the Treasury.
There is another group of savers I want to talk about today. I am proud to have been part of a Government who have helped to compensate the policyholders of Equitable Life, who have suffered a great injustice. But we have not extended help to those who bought their with-profits annuity before 1992. Now we can. I would like to acknowledge the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) on behalf of these people. We will make ex gratia payments of £5,000 to those elderly policyholders, and we will make an extra £5,000 available to those on the lowest incomes who are on pension credit. We are not doing this because we are legally obliged to; we are doing it because, quite simply, it is the right thing to do.
Helping with aspiration also means helping those who want to keep their home instead of having to sell it to pay for the costs of social care. That is what our new cap will deliver, as Andrew Dilnot recommended. It will also come in in 2016. It will be set to protect savings above £72,000, and we will raise the threshold for the means test on residential care from just over £23,000 to £118,000 that year too. For decades, politicians have talked of doing something for savers and those who have to sell their homes to pay for care, and yet nothing has been done—until this week.
I want to do much more, for unless we fire up the aspirations of the British people—light the fires of ambition within our nation—we are going to be out-smarted, out-competed and out-performed by others in the world who are prepared to work harder for success than we are. So this Budget makes a new offer to our aspiration nation—and what symbolises that more than the desire to own your own home? Today I can announce Help to Buy. The deposits demanded for a mortgage these days have put home ownership beyond the great majority who cannot turn to their parents for a contribution. That is not just a blow to the most human of aspirations: it is a setback for social mobility, and it has been hard on the construction industry too. This Budget proposes to put that right—and put it right in a dramatic way.
Help to Buy has two components. First, we are going to commit £3.5 billion of capital spending over the next three years to shared equity loans. From the beginning of next month, we will offer an equity loan worth up to 20% of the value of a new build home to anyone looking to move up the housing ladder. You put down a 5% deposit from your savings, and the Government will loan you a further 20%. The loan is interest free for the first five years. It is repaid when the home is sold. Previous help was available only to those who were first-time buyers and who had family incomes below £60,000. Now help is available to all buyers of newly built homes on all incomes: available to anyone looking to get on or move up the housing ladder. The only constraint will be that the home cannot be worth more than £600,000—but this covers well over 90% of all homes. It is a great deal for homebuyers; it is a great support to home builders; and because it is a financial transaction, with the taxpayer making an investment and getting a return, it will not hit our deficit.
The second part of Help to Buy is even bolder and has not been seen before in this country. We are going to help families who want a mortgage for any home they are buying, old or new, but who cannot begin to afford the kind of deposits being demanded today. We will offer a new mortgage guarantee. This will be available to lenders to help them to provide more mortgages to people who cannot afford a big deposit. These guaranteed mortgages will be available to all homeowners, subject to the usual checks on responsible lending. Using the Government’s balance sheet to back these higher loan-to-value mortgages will dramatically increase their availability. We have worked with some of the biggest mortgage lenders to get this right; and we are offering guarantees sufficient to support £130 billion of mortgages. It will be available from the start of 2014 and run for three years. A future Government would need the agreement of the Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee if they wanted to extend it.
Help to Buy is a dramatic intervention to get our housing market moving. For newly built housing, Government will put up a fifth of the cost; and for anyone who can afford a mortgage but cannot afford a big deposit, our mortgage guarantee will help them to buy their own home. That is a good use of this Government’s fiscal credibility.
In the Budget Book we also set out more plans for housing—plans to build 15,000 more affordable homes; plans to increase fivefold the funds available for building for rent; and plans to extend the right to buy so that more tenants can buy their own home.
People also have the aspiration to keep more of what they earn. That is a difficult aspiration for any Chancellor to help with when economic times are tough and money is short, but we are doing the hard work to reduce current spending. We have set out a tough package to raise money from tax avoiders. That means that with this Budget we can stick to the path of deficit reduction, increase capital spending, and still find ways to help families.
Let me turn to duties. We inherited a fuel duty escalator from the previous Government that would have seen above-inflation increases in every year of this Parliament. We abolished the escalator and we have now frozen fuel duty for two years. This has not been easy. The Government have forgone £6 billion in revenues to date, but oil prices have risen again, family budgets are squeezed, and I hear those who want me to do more to help them get by. My hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) has again spoken up for his hard-working constituents. He has been joined by many other hon. Friends, like the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Mr Reid). We have all listened to the people we represent. Today I am cancelling this September’s fuel duty increase altogether. Petrol will now be 13p per litre cheaper than if we had not acted over these last two years to freeze fuel duty. For a Vauxhall Astra or a Ford Focus, that is £7 less every time you fill up.
There is another duty escalator that we also inherited from the previous Government—the annual 2% above inflation increase in alcohol. We are looking at plans to stop the biggest discounts of cheap alcohol at retailers, but responsible drinkers in our pubs should not pay the price for the problems caused by others. The sad fact is that we have lost 10,000 pubs in the UK over the past decade. Many hon. Members, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Charlotte Leslie), have raised their concerns with me, and my hon. Friend the Member for Burton (Andrew Griffiths) in particular has been a committed champion of the famous brewing industry that employs many of his constituents.
I intend to maintain the planned rise for all alcohol duties, with the exception of beer. We will now scrap the beer duty escalator altogether, and instead of the 3p rise in beer duty tax planned for this year by the previous Government I am cancelling it altogether.
That is the freeze people have been campaigning for, but I am going to go one step further and cut beer duty by 1p. We are taking a penny off the pint. The cut will take effect this Sunday night and I expect it to be passed on in full to customers. All other duties will remain as previously announced.
Of course, freezing petrol duty and cutting beer duty will not transform the finances of any family, but it helps a little to have some bills that are not going up. [Interruption.]
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. May I say to Back Benchers and to a couple of Members in particular that the panto season is not for another nine months, and if there are auditions could they take place outside the Chamber?
Mr Osborne
It helps a lot to be able to keep more of the money you earn before you pay tax on it. The Government support people who work hard and want to get on.
When we came to office the personal income tax allowance stood at under £6,500. In two weeks’ time, the allowance will reach £9,440, with the largest cash increase in its history. Twenty-four million taxpayers will see their income tax bill cut by an extra £200. More than 2 million of the lowest paid will be taken out of tax altogether.
In this Budget, the Government reconfirm their commitment to raising the personal allowance to £10,000, In fact, we go one better. We said we would raise the personal allowance to £10,000 by the end of the Parliament. Today I can confirm that we will get there next year. From 2014, there will be no income tax at all on the first £10,000 of your salary—£10,000 of tax-free earning. That is £700 less in tax for working families than when this Government came to office. Almost 3 million of the lowest paid will pay no income tax at all. It is a historic achievement for this Government and for hard-working families across the country.
I am aware that the concept of a 10p tax rate has caused problems for Labour Members. First, they introduced it before deciding that introducing it was a mistake and that it ought to be abolished. Then they decided that abolishing it was a mistake and that they ought to introduce it again. To put them out of their misery, we are going to turn their 10p band into a 0p band, so they do not have to worry about it any more. Every person who is paying at the 10p rate that Labour doubled will now pay no income tax at all.
There is one final tax change that I want to tell the House about. It is about jobs. In the end, aspiration is about living in a country where people can get jobs and fulfil their dreams. The ending of contracting out that I talked about generates extra employee national insurance revenues for the Exchequer. I want to put those revenues to good use. I want to support jobs and the small businesses that create them, and I want to do it with a reforming tax cut. In fact, it is the largest tax cut in this Budget.
The cost of employing people is a burden on small firms. It is a real barrier to taking an extra person on. To help create jobs and back small businesses in this country, I am today creating the employment allowance. The employment allowance will work by taking the first £2,000 off the employer national insurance bill of every company. It is a tax off jobs. It is worth up to £2,000 to every business in the country. It will mean that 450,000 small businesses—one third of all employers in the country—will pay no jobs tax at all.
For the person who has set up their own business and is thinking about taking on their first employee, a huge barrier will be removed. They can hire someone on £22,000, or four people on the minimum wage, and pay no jobs tax. Ninety-eight per cent. of the benefit of this employment allowance will go to small and medium-sized enterprises. It will become available in April next year, once the legislation has passed. We will also make it available to charities and community sports clubs. The previous Government’s answer to Britain’s economic problems was to propose a tax on jobs. We stopped that and today this Government are taking tax off jobs.
A new employment allowance that helps small firms, a 20% rate of corporation tax and a £10,000 personal allowance are major achievements delivered by this Government in difficult times.
We understand that the way to restore our economic prosperity is to energise the aspirations of the British people. If you want to own your own home, if you want help with your child care bills, if you want to start your own business or give someone a job, if you want to save for your retirement and leave your home to your children, and if you want to work hard and get on, we are on your side. This is a Budget that does not duck our nation’s problems; it confronts them head on. It is a Budget for an aspiration nation. It is a Budget that wants to be prosperous, solvent and free, and I commend it to the House. [Interruption.]
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. If Members want to debate the Budget, we had better make some progress.
Tax Fairness
Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts(11 years, 8 months ago)
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Kelvin Hopkins
No, no. I live in the real world, and I suspect that even my hon. Friends on the Front Bench will not start considering 98% marginal tax rates.
George Bernard Shaw, a witty man but a socialist, who was paying 98%, said, “I consider myself to be a tax collector for the Government, in return for which I receive a 2% premium.” I thought that that was one way of putting it. Shaw was, as I said, a socialist, who no doubt accepted that wealthy people such as himself should pay substantially more than the poor.
I realise that we will not return to that rate, but I will say that during a Budget debate in the last Parliament, on a cold Thursday afternoon when it was raining and there were about six people in the Chamber, I suggested that we could consider a 50% rate for those on £60,000 a year—this was then!—a 60% rate for those on £100,000, and a 70% rate for those on £200,000. That would have taken us nowhere near where we had been in the 1970s, but it would have been a substantial change from where we were then.
I did not get much of a reaction in the Chamber, but the Deputy Speaker spoke to me privately afterwards. I am giving away no secrets, because she is no longer a Member of Parliament. She said, “I do so agree with you. Why do the Government not just do as you say?” Well, if only; but I had said what I thought, and I thought that would be a reasonable move. I suggested the 50% rate for those on £60,000 because at least it would mean Members of Parliament paying a tiny bit extra on the top part of their income. I thought that was right then, and I still think it is right.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. I fear that the hon. Gentleman has run out of time. Much as I was enjoying his speech, I must now call Catherine McKinnell.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. Mr Davies, you have spoken. It is up to the Minister when he gives way. It is not for you to keep reminding him, saying that he should give way.
Mr Foster
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker.
It is worth repeating yet again that the Opposition put the 50p tax rate in place for a whopping 36 out of their 4,758 days in power. As my hon. Friend the Exchequer Secretary made clear, a recent review showed that the additional rate is a distortive and economically inefficient way of raising revenue. So we have decided—sensibly, in my view—that it is neither efficient nor fair to maintain a tax rate that is not effective at raising revenue from high earners and risks damaging growth. That is why we have introduced a top rate of 45p, which will be higher than the top rate that existed under Labour for all but 36 days of their 13 years in office.
It is not true to suggest, as some have done, that the Government are not requiring the wealthiest to pay more. We have continually increased the tax contribution of the richest since the election. The 2010 Budget introduced a higher rate of capital gains tax; the 2011 Budget tackled avoidance through disguised remuneration; and the 2012 Budget increased stamp duty land tax to 7% on residential properties costing £2 million or more. We are also the Government who took action in the autumn statement to reduce the cost of pensions tax relief, and we introduced a 15% rate of stamp duty for properties owned through a corporate vehicle. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) for a number of suggestions of further measures that we can take in this area, which we will certainly consider, but I can confirm that if a property is taken out of a corporate envelope, SDLT will be paid in full.
As a result of the Government’s actions, the richest pay more tax on capital gains, more stamp duty on their homes, more tax on their pension contributions, and more on income tax. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies has confirmed, the rich are now paying a higher percentage of income tax than at any time under the previous Administration. Given our measures to boost compliance, more of the tax owed will be collected. I thank the hon. Member for Scunthorpe for his praise for our work in this area.
As well as making the wealthiest in society pay more, we are asking less of the poorest in this country. As the hon. Gentleman said, we are helping the hard-working families in this country. From April 2013, the income tax personal allowance will increase yet again by £1,335 in cash terms to £9,440. This change will benefit 24 million individuals, lift an additional 1.1 million out of income tax altogether, and provide a real-terms gain of £223 a year to basic rate taxpayers.
In total, the coalition’s actions since we came into office mean that 2.2 million people under the age of 65 will have moved out of paying income tax altogether, and there is a tax cut of £600 for more than 20 million people. We are proud of the way in which we are putting fairness firmly on the agenda. As the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills said earlier today, parties should be judged on what they deliver on fairer taxes, not on what they say about them. It is deeds not words.
The Labour party when in office failed to back our mansion tax proposals, and now we are not even clear whether it is willing to include a mansion tax in its 2015 manifesto. The Liberal Democrats have made it clear that we are in favour of such a scheme, but I urge my colleagues to support the Government’s amendment, which reiterates our party’s support for the mansion tax without putting the coalition Government at risk. It is the country’s economy and people that need a strong, co-operative and working Government, which this coalition Government are providing. The do not need a Labour party playing the exact kind of cynical political games that the public so revile. The hon. Member for Ashfield (Gloria De Piero) said that the public disliked infantile Punch and Judy politics. So do I, and that is why I urge the House to support the amendment.
Question put (Standing Order No. 31(2)), That the original words stand part of the Question.
Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I wonder whether you have had any indication from the Government on whether they plan to make an oral statement on the subject of the bedroom tax. Yesterday, in questions to the Department for Work and Pensions, Ministers assured us that the scheme was running smoothly, yet this afternoon we have another rushed U-turn that offers no money and no protection for disabled children. Right hon. and hon. Members would have welcomed the opportunity to put those points directly to the Secretary of State, and expose today’s announcement for the shallow nonsense that it is.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
I can tell the right hon. Gentleman that the Chair has received no notification that there will be a statement before the House. I am sure that those on the Treasury Bench and other Secretaries of State will have heard the comments that have been made, and the right hon. Gentleman is well aware that there are other avenues he may wish to pursue.
Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill
Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts(11 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. I remind Members that there is a 12-minute limit.
The Economy
Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts(11 years, 11 months ago)
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Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. I remind hon. Members that we will start with an eight-minute time limit on speeches.
Mr Michael Meacher (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab)
I think this is the most extraordinary rewriting of economic history I have ever heard in the Chamber. The hon. Gentleman has not once mentioned the banks and the financial crash. Does he not realise that the public sector deficit in 2007, just before the crash, was about 3%? It only rose—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. The hon. Gentleman will have no time to answer you, Mr Meacher, and I am sure that you want an answer.
Kwasi Kwarteng
The right hon. Gentleman has talked me out and I must end my speech, but I am happy to discuss the banks with him at any time. My point today is looking at—
Chris Kelly (Dudley South) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for calling me to speak in this important debate, not least because I was otherwise due to serve on a Public Bill Committee. I draw the House’s attention to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
I will restrict my remarks to how I see the autumn statement benefiting and assisting the economy in my own region. Many businesses across the west midlands are set to benefit from the plans laid out by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor last week. The 368,000 small businesses in the region, including many in my own black country constituency, will benefit from the business bank, which brings together existing Government finance plans and uses £1 billion to stimulate the market for long-term capital. The decision to increase the annual investment allowance limit from £25,000 to £250,000 for two years, in addition to an extra £25 million per year for UK Trade and Investment’s assistance and guidance on exports, will be of great help to an area such as mine, which is crammed with small and medium-sized engineering and manufacturing firms. In addition, the scrapping of the 3p rise in fuel duty, which means that fuel prices will be 10p lower than they would have been under the plans of the Labour party, will help ease the strain of transport costs for small and medium-sized enterprises.
My right hon. Friend the Chancellor has demonstrated once again that Britain is open for business. The reduction in corporation tax to 21% from April 2014 means that the UK will have the lowest corporation tax in the G7. It is worth noting that the total amount raised in corporation tax for the year 2011-12 was £43.4 billion—20% higher than it was for Labour’s last year in office. Lower corporation tax is working. It is resulting in the higher yields that the Treasury needs, while also contributing to increased private sector investment and employment.
Prior to the autumn statement, the black country chamber of commerce, which has many members in my constituency, called for my right hon. Friend the Chancellor to support a pro-business environment. In response to the measures announced by my right hon. Friend, the chamber’s president, Paul Bennett, welcomed his actions to get British business growing:
“The Chancellor’s Statement was encouraging for businesses and many of our members concerns seem to have been addressed”.
Meanwhile, Mark Hastings, the director general of the Institute for Family Business, described several of the measures as “encouraging”. This qualified support reflects the attitudes of many of the business people whom I have spoken to recently in my own constituency—they recognise that this Government are on their side—and of those in the family business sector, in which I am involved as the founder and chairman of the all-party group on family business.
It is pleasing to see the Chancellor building on this Government’s support for British businesses. Last year, we saw an increase of 250,000 in the number of private businesses, which included 226,000 new small businesses, a good proportion of which were in the west midlands. It is obvious, but still worth pointing out, that every successful large employer in the private sector started off as a small start-up. Even JCB, which was started by the inspirational J.C. Bamford and which I have had the privilege of visiting in Rocester, was once a small enterprise in a small shed. I refer the House to my declaration in the register relating to the last election.
This Government are cutting red tape and making it easier for budding entrepreneurs in this country to set up their own businesses, and that is clearly being borne out by the figures. All of that is in marked contrast to the previous Labour Administration, who introduced the equivalent of six new regulations for every single working day they were in power. It is estimated by the British Chambers of Commerce that those new regulations have cost British businesses almost £77 billion since 1998.
Last week, the Chancellor announced further support for local enterprise partnerships, which the Government created. That is the right approach because it promotes local growth by ensuring that Government spending is aligned with the priorities of local business communities. We have an excellent LEP in the black country, which is ably chaired by the no-nonsense Stewart Towe of Hadley Industries. I am confident that the Government’s approach will help to create the conditions that will enable the private sector to get on with creating more jobs in the black country.
The Government are continuing to demonstrate that they are not afraid to take tough decisions in the face of tough economic times. A clear message is being sent out that Britain is open for business and that Britain has a pro-business Government.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Before I call the new Member for Rotherham, I remind everybody that this is a maiden speech.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. Before I call the hon. Member for Croydon North (Steve Reed), I remind hon. Members that this is his maiden speech.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. Before I call the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald), I remind hon. Members that this is his maiden speech.
Gordon Birtwistle
Once again, I agree with the right hon. Gentleman. It is always a great moment when the right hon. Gentleman rises and speaks in this Chamber—even though he has only just turned up.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
On a point of clarification, Mr Binley is not a right hon. Member. He has been in the Chamber a little longer than suggested, too.
Gordon Birtwistle
I apologise. The hon. Member for Northampton South (Mr Binley) must have been so quiet that I had not seen him in his place.
I agree that the schools and colleges in this country must no longer downgrade apprenticeships, and must no longer say to students, “If you don’t pass, you’ll be an apprentice.” That is an outrageous statement for schools to make. It is time they woke up. I must say that it is also time that this Government’s Department for Education woke up to the fact that going to university is no longer the be-all and end-all, because there is far more to life than going to university.
I am a little upset that the Secretary of State for Education does not think a right lot about careers advice, because I believe that careers advice in schools is crucial. Young people need to be told about, and shown, what is available these days outside the school gates. The Secretary of State and his Department must realise that and advise schools that careers advice is crucial to young people’s futures. Perhaps even more importantly, it is crucial to the economy of this country, because if we do not train people for the jobs of the future, we will all go down the pan.
Emily Thornberry
The fact is that 7,000 jobs have gone under this Government’s plans, and the gap between what we collect and what we are owed is estimated to be £35 billion, which is twice the housing benefit bill. Independent research commissioned by the Public and Commercial Services Union reckoned that the real figure was more like £120 billion, which is six and a half times the housing benefit bill. Whatever the true sum, the fact is that without a sufficient number of tax inspectors we cannot ensure that the rules apply to everyone. Everyone should pay tax; it should not just be for the little people. Paying one’s taxes should not be some sort of charitable gesture, and I have little understanding as to why it was seen as appropriate for this Government to continue to cut back on tax inspectors. If we are to have rules, they need to be applied. The Exchequer Secretary says that there were many processing jobs, but presumably people in that job need to make sure that the sums add up, that everything has been claimed that should have been claimed and that everything has been paid that should have been paid. Without that essential processing we will never know whether or not tax avoidance has been taking place—this is not just about major companies; it happens throughout the system. At a time like this, we need to make sure that everyone plays by the rules. If everyone does that and if the rules apply to us all and we have a fair society, we have the very one nation that Labour Members have been talking about.
Of course, the rules also apply to those who claim benefits and of course if someone can work, they must work. That is what unites this whole House. What does not unite this House is the language used by Government Front Benchers—the language of “scroungers”. Such language is simply offensive, as the highly eloquent maiden speech by my new hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) so well set out. Such language is a smokescreen that covers up a great deal of what this Government are actually doing. Although they talk about scroungers and those who stay in bed, keep the curtains closed and do not go out to work—the remarks are highly offensive—they do not address the issue, which is that many, many people who are out of work want to work, but the fact of the matter is that people cannot go from welfare into work if the work is not there.
Furthermore, many of the changes that this Government are making and announced in the autumn statement will affect those very people who work. I want to go on to address the issue of not just those who are poor and not working, but that of those who are working in my constituency and are dependent on benefits. Sometimes I feel as though I live in a different world where Government Members believe that only those who are out of work claim benefits. In fact, many people who work depend on benefits. Surely that is a conundrum. Many people meet me on the street and say, “How can the welfare benefit bill be going up if a million additional people have got work?” The truth is self-evident. Many people who are now working work part-time or are self-employed rely on housing benefit and tax credits, the very things that the Minister will be cutting as a result of the autumn statement. Let us use the terms that he uses, such as the strivers. Those very strivers are having their support system cut away by this Government. Even in the hon. Gentleman’s offensive terms, that cannot be justified.
I want to talk specifically about housing benefit because the issue affects my constituents particularly. I hear Government Members say, “Why should it be that people on average earnings receive less than people on benefits?” That has a certain ring to it and I know that the Conservatives are out of touch, but surely some of them must know someone who rents a flat and who understands that housing benefit goes not to the tenant, but to the landlord. It is because rents have gone up so much in London and the south-east that the housing benefit bill continues to rise. In the past two years, private rents in London have gone up by 25%, according to London Councils. In those circumstances, how can it be justified to attack housing benefit, to put an arbitrary cap on housing benefit, or to believe that housing benefit should be the same level in London as it is anywhere else in the country? How can that be fair?
It is not the fault of my poor constituents that their rent is high. It is the fault of my Government and of Conservative Governments who did not build enough housing. There was a time when Conservative and Labour Governments used to compete with each other as to how much affordable housing they could build. In the 1970s, four fifths of the housing budget was spent on building new homes and one fifth on housing benefit. Now it is completely turned on its head and we continue to pay the price of failure. We must build more housing and we must not simply dance on a pin, analysing what affordable housing means.
The Minister represents a party that defines affordable housing as costing 80% of market rent. He and his party should get some sort of George Orwellian prize for double-speak. Eighty per cent. of market rent in my constituency could not be afforded by ordinary people in my constituency. I went on to the Rightmove website this morning and looked at the prices of three-bedroom flats in my constituency. Does the hon. Gentleman know how much the rent for a bog-standard three-bedroom flat in my constituency would be? Four hundred pounds a week. How much is the housing benefit cap? Three hundred and forty pounds a week. There was only one flat on Rightmove that was under the amount of the cap so how can people in my constituency, who will be subjected to the housing benefit cap, afford to continue to live in Islington?
There is an argument that the poor should not be living in Islington, but I respectfully disagree. My constituency should be a mixed constituency and should have rich and poor. Generations of poor people who live in my constituency should be allowed to continue to live there. Furthermore, the housing benefit cap is one atrocious measure that this Government have introduced, but we wait for the next, which is universal credit. There will be a cap of £500 a week for a four-bedroom flat in my constituency. There were 69 that were under the £400 current housing benefit—
Financial Services Bill
Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts(11 years, 11 months ago)
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Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
With this it will be convenient to consider the following:
Lords amendment 60, and amendments (a), (b) and (c) thereto.
Lords amendment 61, 62, 79, 115 to 121, 139, 140, 142, 146, 182, and 203 to 205.
Greg Clark
I come now to the Government’s implementation of the independent review of LIBOR conducted by Mr Martin Wheatley. I announced the Government’s response to the Wheatley review in mid-October and three sets of amendments to the Bill have been made to implement those recommendations that require legislation. The first is to enable activities in relation to benchmarks, such as LIBOR and potentially others, to be brought within the scope of regulation under FSMA. The second is to create criminal offences designed to tackle misconduct in the financial sector, including a new criminal offence for making false or misleading submissions in connection with the determination of a benchmark. The third is to provide the FCA with a rule-making power to require banks to submit to LIBOR and other benchmarks. Those amendments complement the market-led reforms to LIBOR as recommended by the Wheatley review. Martin Wheatley recommended that submission to, and the administration of, LIBOR become regulated activities, and amendments 59 to 62 create a framework to enable activities in relation to benchmarks to be specified as regulated activities under FSMA.
Amendment 60 defines “ benchmark” as an “index, rate or price”, defined from time to time by reference to the state of the market and used in relation to investments. A benchmark is capable of being regulated only if it meets that definition. The precise benchmarks that are subject to regulation will be specified by way of statutory instrument. The Government recently published a consultation paper on this legislation. Initially, the activities to become regulated will be LIBOR submission and administration, as recommended by the Wheatley review. However, further benchmarks can be added and the Government are considering and consulting on whether additional benchmarks should be brought within the regulatory perimeter. The types of benchmarks that could be eligible include equity or bond indices, derivatives and commodity or energy benchmarks. The definition of benchmark, as drafted, requires that it be used for one or more purposes that relate to section 22 of, and schedule 2 to, FSMA.
The hon. Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie) has tabled an amendment that would extend that definition to include commodities. Let me say first that I totally understand the requirement that we should be able to address some of the alleged abuses that have taken place and have the powers in statute to include those benchmarks that are relevant to some of the concerns that have been expressed recently. We do not believe that there is any requirement to extend the legislation on that. In fact, the Bill was drafted to anticipate the Wheatley review and the work going on in other benchmarks. Benchmarks can represent many things, including commodities or energies, provided that they are traded financially in the way we often see. Under the definition, regulation by the FCA extends to benchmarks that involve financial matters consistent with FSMA and the objectives of the FCA as the financial services regulator.
The Wheatley review also recommended that banks should be encouraged to participate in LIBOR—participation is currently voluntary. In the absence of such submissions, LIBOR would cease to be a representative benchmark and, in an extreme scenario, would not be published at all. Therefore, Lords amendment 79 allows the FCA to require firms to participate in particular benchmarks, while making reference to a “code or other document”. That allows the detail of the requirement to be determined by the benchmark administrator, not by the FCA. It might not be necessary for the FCA to use that power immediately, if at all, and it has recently opened a discussion on how and when the use of that power could be considered.
The Wheatley review also recommended the creation of a new criminal offence in relation to the manipulation of benchmarks such as LIBOR and the re-examination of the criminal sanctions for market manipulation under FSMA. Although such conduct could already be a criminal offence under legislation, this is a helpful clarification of some of the powers. There will be three criminal offences: first, we are re-creating the offence of making a false or misleading statement; secondly, we are widening the offence in section 397(3) to include creating a false or misleading impression as to the market in, or the price or value of, an investment for the purposes of making a profit or avoiding a loss; and thirdly, we are creating a new criminal offence related to misleading statements and impressions in respect of specified benchmarks.
The amendments also replicate the penalties for existing offences: a person found guilty might face a prison sentence of up to seven years and an unlimited fine. The detail of the investments, agreements and benchmarks for which those criminal offences apply will be set out in secondary legislation. That is included in the public consultation currently under way.
Under the current arrangements, where enforcement action results in a firm paying a financial penalty, that is applied as a discount to fees paid by other firms the following year. Without reform, unprecedented fines, such as those relating to the attempted manipulation of LIBOR, would have represented a significant windfall to regulated firms. In future, regulatory fines revenue in excess of enforcement case costs will go to the Consolidated Fund. The hon. Member for Nottingham East and I had an exchange about that earlier. The regulators will be able to net off enforcement case costs before handing over the penalties to the public purse. The new arrangements will apply to FSA fines received from 1 April 2012, so the measure will include the penalty imposed on Barclays in relation to the attempted manipulation of LIBOR.
The Government have announced that £35 million of fines imposed from attempted LIBOR manipulation and other unacceptable behaviour received this year will be used to support Britain’s armed forces community. In addition, £5 million will go to the creation of new, groundbreaking first world war galleries at the Imperial War museum. I hope that the House will agree to these amendments but, of course, I stand ready to respond to any points Members make.
Public Service Pensions Bill
Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts(11 years, 12 months ago)
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Chris Leslie
I beg to move amendment 10, page 2, line 16, at end insert—
‘(3A) Scheme regulations shall not make any provision which would have the effect of reducing the amount of any pension, allowance or gratuity, insofar as that amount is directly or indirectly referable to rights which have accrued (whether by virtue of service rendered, contributions paid or any other thing done) before the coming into operation of the scheme, unless the persons specified in subsection (3B) have agreed to the inclusion of that provision.
(3B) The persons referred to in subsection (3A) are the persons or representatives of the persons who appear to the responsible authority to be likely to be affected by the regulations if they were made.’.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment 3, page 6, line 27, in clause 10, at end insert—
‘to be agreed with employee representatives’.
Amendment 5, page 11, line 8, in clause 19, at end insert—
‘with a view to reaching agreement’.
Amendment 34, page 11, line 24, in clause 20, leave out from ‘—’ to ‘(b)’ in line 27 and insert—
‘reach an agreement through consultation with the persons specified in subsection (3), and’.
Chris Leslie
Clause 3 is an important part of the Bill, as it makes a series of arrangements for scheme regulations. Hon. Members will now be turning to page 2 in their copies; when they merrily flick through to it, they will discover that subsection (3)(c) states:
“Scheme regulations may…make retrospective provision.”
The theme of retrospectivity gives the Opposition great concern. Essentially, the Bill allows the reduction of accrued pension benefits.
The measure is not qualified in any way: it allows all retrospective provisions, including, essentially, the reduction of the savings that people have put aside, which many regard as sacrosanct—the contributions from their monthly salaries or income into a pensions pot that is supposed to safeguard their financial future in retirement. We now discover that the Bill contains a provision that allows the Government to dip their hand into what are normally regarded as safe amounts of money—the accrued benefits for which people have paid in over their years of service. The Opposition believe that that breaches a central tenet of pension provision. Benefits that have been accrued are deferred earnings and should not be reduced. Retrospectively reducing accrued rights is essentially akin to taking back a portion of an employees’ wage that has already been paid; there is very little difference.
Many hon. Members and many of my constituents find it difficult to resist the grey mist that descends and the heaviness of the eyelids that pensions law tends to bring about, but hon. Members should wake up and realise what is in the legislation. They should recognise that we are talking about the Government’s ability retrospectively to reduce the amounts that ordinary employees have saved for their retirement, which they believe are safe.
Public sector workers and their representatives are extremely concerned about the retrospective powers that the Bill gives to this and any future Government. Understandably, they believe that as long as the Bill contains those powers, the pensions of ordinary working people—public sector employees—are not safe. On 29 October, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury was asked about the retrospective provisions in subsection (3) by the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan). The right hon. Gentleman replied that there was no need to be concerned about the reduction of accrued benefits, because the Bill mirrored the Superannuation Act 1972 in that respect. It is important to read out his exact words:
“The hon. Gentleman will know that the provisions in the clause to which he refers mirror directly those in the Superannuation Act 1972, which this Bill in many cases replaces. It was passed in the year I was born,”—
in the year I was born too, but let me not digress—
“and it has been used by a number of Governments to make adjustments to public service pensions.”—[Official Report, 29 October 2012; Vol. 552, c. 60.]
The Chief Secretary went further than that when he gave one of those famous quotes—a bit like the George Bush “read my lips” quote—in a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research on 20 June 2011. He said:
“We will honour, in full, the benefits earned through years of service. No ifs, no buts.”
Well, it turns out that the Bill does not mirror the Superannuation Act 1972 in relation to accrued benefits. The 1972 Act provides that accrued benefits can be reduced only with the consent of scheme members—in other words, only if members of those schemes, employees, agree to such retrospective arrangements—whereas the Bill allows for retrospective reductions without the consent of scheme members.
Given that the Bill does not mirror the Superannuation Act protections in the way the Chief Secretary said it would, we can only assume that it must have been a drafting error by the Minister—perhaps some sort of oversight or typo. We are not sure why the Government did that. We tabled an identical amendment in Committee to ensure that the protections for accrued benefits in the 1972 Act were retained, but, surprisingly, our amendment was rejected. The Economic Secretary said that there was no need to mirror the protections in the 1972 Act, which prompts the question: why on earth did the Chief Secretary to the Treasury say that the Bill contained certain protections when it obviously does not? It may be, as we have said, because the Chief Secretary is from a different political party from the Economic Secretary. We are not quite sure why the Chief Secretary said that it mirrors the Superannuation Act provisions, but this Minister, the Economic Secretary, resisted that arrangement.
As we have said time and again, when employees in the public sector find themselves facing changes, without any consultation, to their contribution rates and radical changes to the valuation arrangements for their pensions, the question of trust comes up again and again. This Minister says, “Oh, don’t worry, we’re not going to use this provision on retrospectivity,” but when employees voice their doubts and say, “Hang on a minute. Why on earth are you putting it in the Bill?” we have to sympathise with them. They will be extremely sceptical of the Government’s motivations.
We tabled the amendment to give the Minister another chance to include the protections that the Government—or at least one Minister—said were already in the Bill. When accrued benefits and retrospective changes were raised in Committee, the Minister did not dispute that the Bill allowed the Government unilaterally to reduce members’ accrued benefits, but he said repeatedly that the Government had promised not to reduce those accrued benefits. He said that that promise—a verbal promise—offered adequate protection to public service workers and that legislative protection was therefore unnecessary. That is an extraordinary argument. Even if this Government intend to keep their promise—that is a big “if”—their words will have no effect on a future Government, particularly a Conservative Administration. Surely the Government appreciate that, among the public, the level of trust in politicians and Ministers is low and that our request that they enshrine this protection in statute is a basic one.
Small Charitable Donations Bill
Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts(12 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Cathy Jamieson
I beg to move amendment 4, page 1, line 17, leave out ‘maximum donations limit’ and insert ‘the specified amount.’.
This amendment is consequential on amendment 3.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment 3, page 1, line 19, leave out subsections (4) and (5).
This amendment removes the matching principle from the bill.
Government amendment 23.
Amendment 1, page 2, line 1, leave out ‘double’ and insert ‘triple’.
To increase the maximum claim to triple the amount of gift aid claimed each year. Cathy Jamieson
Amendment 5, in clause 4, page 3, line 13, leave out ‘for the purposes of section 1(4)’.
This amendment is consequential on amendment 3.
Amendment 6, in clause 6, page 4, line 27, leave out ‘for the purposes of section 1(4)’.
This amendment is consequential on amendment 3.
Amendment 17, page 4, line 38, leave out paragraph (a) and insert—
‘(a) the sum of the small donations that are made to the charity in the community building in the tax year, or’.
This amendment seeks to remove the requirement that donations under the community buildings amount can only be made by group members while the charity is running its charitable activities.
Amendment 18, page 5, line 3, leave out ‘by group members while it is running charitable activities in the buildings’.
This is consequential on amendment 17.
Amendment 19, page 5, line 5, leave out subsection (6).
This is consequential on amendment 17.
Amendment 20, in clause 7, page 5, leave out lines 20 and 21.
This is consequential on amendment 17.
Amendment 7, in clause 9, page 6, line 29, leave out ‘for the purposes of section 1(4)’.
This amendment is consequential on amendment 3.
Government amendment 30.
Cathy Jamieson
Again, I hope not to detain the House to any great extent. As the Minister will recall, we consistently pushed the Government to reconsider the matching principle in the Bill as we believed that it was too onerous for many small charities and would mean that many of them could not benefit from a scheme that was supposedly set up to help them.
The Government amendments show that the Minister has bowed to the pressure not just from members of the Committee but from people in the charitable sector who had serious concerns about the impact of the measures from the very start. I will not repeat all the comments made by the different organisations over the course of our discussions about the Bill.
We could of course continue to argue for the matching principle to be dropped completely and could make a case for that. However, given that the Government have seen fit to introduce changes that will take the ratio from 2:1 to 10:1, I think we should recognise that they have moved a significant amount, which has been welcomed by the sector. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say about his amendments and I want to make it clear that I do not think our amendments are required at this point as they have been superseded by his.
Fuel Duty
Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts(12 years ago)
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Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
I inform the House that the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister has been selected.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
On the day that the International Energy Agency has warned that two thirds of fossil fuels need to remain under the ground if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change, does the hon. Lady not see a contradiction in arguing for lower fuel prices, especially since the cost of motoring has fallen in the past 10 years while the cost of public transport has risen? Would a more consistent position not be to seek to support struggling households directly, using the money—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. The hon. Lady is testing the patience of the House. It is unfair. We are going to have to introduce a time limit already. If she wishes to speak, would she please put her name down? She cannot make a speech now. Short interventions are needed on both sides
Cathy Jamieson
I gave way because I respect what the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) has to say, but I hope she will understand the real pressures on families and the pressures that individuals are facing as they try to get to work and go about their business.
It is not just Labour that is calling for the increase to be postponed. FairFuelUK, backed by the RAC and the Road Haulage Association, among others, has consistently and determinedly campaigned for lower fuel duty.
Sajid Javid
If the hon. Lady is patient, I will give way in a moment—[Interruption.]
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. I do not need an answer back; I am just saying that the hon. Lady does not need to keep jumping to her feet. The Minister has promised to give way, but I do not know whether he is giving way now.
Sajid Javid
Not yet.
The hon. Lady does not want me to tell the House what the Labour Government did when they looked at this tax loophole. They declared:
“The Government has considered all the consultation responses and believes that on balance the negative effects of changing existing legislation outweigh the benefits"
To address just this issue, this Government have already strengthened HMRC's enforcement and compliance teams, and protected tens of millions of pounds of revenue. So the nub of today's debate is a call to clamp down on avoidance of a relief that the Opposition declared they could do nothing about, to pay for a cut in fuel duty that they supported. Mr Deputy Speaker, you couldn't make it up.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. I remind Members that the time limit on speeches is seven minutes.
Alison Seabeck (Plymouth, Moor View) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for acknowledging that the Opposition motion openly states that there is a fragile economic recovery. Will he do likewise and acknowledge that there was a fragile economic recovery in June 2010?
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Before the hon. Gentleman answers that question, I remind hon. Members that, if they intervene, and if they drop down the speaking list, they will understand why—they keep adding minutes to the debate.
Ben Gummer
I thank the hon. Lady for her comment, because it helps me to remind her that, when Britain was in recession at the back end of 2008, fuel duty went up by 2p. When it was in recession at the beginning of 2009, fuel duty went up by 2p. When it was in recession in September 2009, fuel duty went up by 2p. When there was a faltering recovery—which was probably credit fuelled—in March 2010, on the eve of an election, at the point when the figures showed that the economy was recovering, fuel duty went up by 1p. So much for the correlation between recession and fuel duty increases.
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. Those who think they are bottom of the list will also have minutes removed.
Bill Esterson
I am always happy to be guided by you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman is aware of the research—
Alison Seabeck
The hon. Gentleman speaks from the experience of his own constituency, and the Chancellor will need to consider that very serious point when he sets out his Budget later this year.
There has also been a huge increase in housing costs. Average house prices are now 11.5 times higher than the median income, and private rents are set to rise by an estimated 65% over the next 10 years. That will create huge cost of living issues for people in my constituency. Road fuel prices are higher by about 2.1p a litre in rural areas and, on average, people who live in rural areas travel 53% further than those who live in urban areas. They are also less able to access public transport alternatives. In my area, there are poor rail services down to Plymouth and we have no airport. All those factors push people into cars, and rises in the price of fuel make it extremely difficult for our economy and the economies of individual families to thrive.
I shall finish my speech early because you pulled me up for intervening, Mr Deputy Speaker. I hope that the Chancellor will have listened to his colleagues on the Government Benches, and that he will also take seriously those on the Opposition Benches as we go through the Lobby tonight to make it absolutely clear that we need a temporary halt to the increase.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
I should just like to point out to the hon. Lady that she has not given me back a minute, because she has taken an intervention. So we ended up with nothing!
Banking Union and Economic and Monetary Union
Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts(12 years ago)
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Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
I inform the House that Mr Speaker has selected the amendment in the name of Mr William Cash.