Economy: Growth

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Thursday 31st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bilimoria]

My Lords, what a privilege it is to follow the absolutely superb maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Kestenbaum. This is a debate tailor-made for his Lordship. He has hit the ground running, showing the invaluable input that he will bring to this House, particularly in the field of innovation and enterprise where he has had huge experience. He made his mark in this country as the former CEO of NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, the largest endowment in the UK, fostering innovation, and the country's biggest source of seed finance for technology start-ups.

Our House is renowned for its wisdom, and, of course, it follows that there is a certain maturity of age among our distinguished Members. With Jonathan, we have someone so young and yet with so much varied global experience which he will bring to bear here, having worked as a venture capitalist, having been the chief executive of my noble friend Lord Sachs’ Office of the Chief Rabbi and with his involvement in the arts and in higher education. He may very well have walked into one of our broom cupboards, but he has certainly made a grand entrance today and we look forward to many future contributions.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, for securing this crucial debate. Last week's Budget had so much that was music to the ears of the entrepreneurial community: encouraging start-ups; increasing the entrepreneurs’ relief limit; and the setting-up of enterprise zones—and, let us not forget, had it not been for enterprise zones, we would not have Canary Wharf today. The support for apprenticeships is tremendous, although I am yet to be convinced about the university technical colleges concept. StartUp Britain is terrific; however, we must remember that, as the noble Lord, Lord Kestenbaum, referred to, and as Professor Colin Mason has pointed out, 6 per cent of UK businesses with the highest growth rates generated half the new jobs created by existing businesses. Professor Mason tells us:

“The UK’s problem is the lack of high-growth firms”—

the gazelles—

“which go on to be ‘companies of scale’, rather than not enough start-ups. We need quality, not quantity”.

The reduction in corporation taxes is great news, but as the Chancellor said:

“high tax rates can do real damage … They crush enterprise, undermine aspiration and often undermine tax revenues”.—[Official Report, 23/3/11; Commons, col. 957.]

Those were the Chancellor’s words. The sooner the 50p tax rate is abolished, the more attractive Britain will be and, in fact, the tax take will go up. As for a property tax, this will take us back to the dark ages. I hope that this idea will be quashed before it can even get off the ground.

I am president of the UK India Business Council, supported by UKTI. At our annual summit in Manchester this month, the Indian High Commissioner, His Excellency Nalin Surie, said of India: “Our growth is your opportunity”. Yet British business is scratching the surface. We need to do much more to encourage British business to go global, particularly to countries such as India.

I have voiced my concern about the drastic cuts that the Government are making. Of course, we need to make savings, but it is what you cut that matters, and you do not have to cut everything. For example, cutting so severely investment in higher education will really harm this country. This, combined with a crude immigration cap, is seriously hampering higher education and business. We need to encourage growth and to keep investing in our infrastructure.

I have just returned from a business delegation hosted by the Emirate of Dubai, and in spite of all the problems that that country has experienced recently in terms of debt and a huge property crash, it is continuing to benefit from the phenomenal investment in world-class infrastructure and becoming a world-class hub in the region as a result of that investment, attracting 10 million tourists a year as well as trillions of dollars investment into Dubai.

This year I graduated from my nine-year president's leadership programme at Harvard Business School— I suppose that I am a slow learner. My study group presented me with a wonderful book, The Rational Optimist. Of course, I hope that they were referring to me. With all Britain's problems today—high inflation, low growth, high unemployment, a giant deficit, huge debt and far too high public spending—we are still one of the most open economies in the world. We still have so much of the best of the best in the world, be it advanced engineering, higher education or science. Only this week it was announced that Britain is in the top three in the world in the publishing of science papers—ahead of France and Germany. I bet that by 2050, the giants of India and China will be the two largest economies in the world, but I also bet that this tiny country will still be in the top 10.

National Insurance Contributions Bill

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bilimoria]

My Lords, not only is 2011 the centenary of the Parliament Act, it is also the centenary of national insurance being introduced by the great Liberal leader Lloyd George. Is it not ironic that we now have a coalition Government taking us back 100 years? With all the problems we face in this country today—the war in Afghanistan, a gargantuan deficit, and a fall in GDP in the last quarter to name just three—we have a Deputy Prime Minister wanting to push through House of Lords reform and a Government wanting to celebrate the introduction of national insurance 100 years ago by putting it up.

In his acceptance speech as the Republican presidential candidate in 1988, we all remember George Bush Senior's infamous words:

“Read my lips: no new taxes”.

We all know how that turned out. In the lead-up to the 1997 general election, Labour pledged to raise neither the base rate of tax nor the top rate in the lifetime of the Parliament, a pledge repeated by the then Chancellor Gordon Brown before the 2001 and 2005 elections. That pledge, however, omitted the glaring point that almost £8 billion was raised through national insurance hikes in 2003. And that is the point about national insurance—rising rates are generally not met by the public with the same alarm as increases in income tax, for which the noble Lord, Lord Newby, wishes. I quote from a note on national insurance contributions from the Commons Library:

“Many commentators have argued that NICs are poorly understood by the general public, despite the very large amount of money that they raise:

John Whiting is a tax partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers … He has a question that he tries out on people … when they talk to him about the tax system. ‘I ask them what the second biggest tax is, after income tax,’ he says. ‘People flounder. They suggest value-added tax and you shake your head. They suggest corporation tax. Wrong again. Then they start the wilder guesses and suggest petrol duties. They rarely come up with the correct answer, which is national insurance contributions.’

NICs are, in the words of Peter Bickley, technical manager of the Tax Faculty of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales”—

of which I am proud to be a fellow—

“‘the Cinderella of taxes’. They are the unseen tax. They are a dream come true for chancellors of the exchequer. They are a tax that ordinary people, by and large, have not noticed”.

It is estimated that in 2009-10, income tax, as the noble Lord, Lord Newby, said, brought in £134 billion to the Exchequer—nearly one-quarter of all government takings. National insurance contributions brought in almost £100 billion—almost as much as VAT and corporation tax combined.

People have the impression that national insurance is a contributory system, going only into social security, benefits, pensions and even the NHS. However, Andrew Dilnot, former director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said in 1995 that,

“it would be hard to find much evidence of any persisting actuarial link between contributions paid and benefits received”.

In a study of perceptions of the national insurance system published by the then Department of Social Security, it was found that respondents saw no real distinction between paying national insurance and tax. Whether it be income tax or national insurance, the money is in effect going into the same pot, and the game is up. As Abraham Lincoln famously said, you can fool some of the people all the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

This Government’s and the previous Government’s plans to increase primary and secondary national insurance contributions by one per cent to 12 per cent and 13.8 per cent respectively is made even more astonishing in the context of the rest of our cut-throat tax system. We have a top rate of tax of 50 per cent, which dwarfs America's reasonable top rate of 35 per cent. Research conducted by KPMG and released in October 2010 revealed that only three countries in Europe are above the UK in terms of personal income tax rates—the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark—and that we lag behind our two big competitors, Germany and France.

How are we to compete in the international market if we do not have internationally competitive tax rates? How do we expect to attract foreign investment to our country, and attract top talent to the City, if it makes more financial sense for talented people to go elsewhere with their businesses? The Chancellor must know this. That is why he reduced corporation tax from 28 to 24 per cent—a move of which I am wholeheartedly in favour. He said:

“Corporation tax rates are compared around the world, and low rates act as adverts for the countries that introduce them. Our current rate of 28p is looking less and less competitive”.—[Official Report, Commons, 22/6/10; col. 174.]

This is the right attitude applied by the Chancellor to a much smaller area of tax. Corporation tax makes up 10 per cent of the Exchequer's tax receipts: much less than national insurance contributions.

On top of this, we have the madcap immigration cap, turning away international talent. With this national insurance hike, we are merely adding to the ever-growing list of problems that the country faces. Savage and unnecessary cuts—for example, the privatisation of forests—are raising relatively small amounts of money while hurting and upsetting so many people so much. We have a defence review during a period of wartime and turmoil and uncertainty in the Middle East; an SDSR that was rushed through in three months and has made us the subject of international mockery, with aircraft carriers without aircraft, nuclear submarines without AWAC cover and army numbers continually being cut; and the brutish and ham-handed threefold increase in tuition fees that will hurt the higher education sector—both universities and students. VAT has been put up to 20 per cent. There is uncertainty in Europe, with the PIGS countries nowhere near out of the woods and the future of the euro nowhere near certain. There is also global uncertainty and the ominous fact that the economy shrank by 5 per cent in the last quarter—weather or no weather, and whether you like it or not. We have an onslaught of more and more EU regulations and red tape; our housing market has been in the doldrums for years; we have had a prolonged period of dangerously high levels of inflation, with the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England and the Governor of the Bank of England writing letter after letter, month after month, to the Chancellor, after breaching the 2 per cent target. On top of this, the Governor of the Bank of England tells us that real wages have fallen over the past six years—something that has not occurred since the 1920s. All this shows us how badly the British consumer is being squeezed. In an economy where 60 per cent of GDP is accounted for by consumer spending, the confidence of the consumer is paramount, as the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, said.

Another concern lies in the Government’s tax plans in the lower-income and middle-income thresholds. The Minister spoke of this. However, the IFS tells us that 750,000 people are to be moved into the 40 per cent rate of income tax this year, and a further 850,000 people in 2014-15. This is due to the fact that while the Government are raising the threshold at which people are liable to pay tax, rightly by £1,000 to £7,475, they are reducing the threshold for higher-rate tax from £43,000 to £42,000.

We can all agree that the massive deficit that weighs over us needs to be reduced. No one argues with the Government about this. We, like the United States, have rightly used massive quantitative easing and reduced interest rates for a prolonged period. All this needed to be done and needs to be done. This is where the similarities with the United States end. Whereas we are increasing taxes, including national insurance contributions, the United States has been cutting taxes.

I remember that in the 1980s, after Ronald Reagan’s tax reductions, total tax revenues actually climbed by 100 per cent. After last December’s extension and expansion of tax cuts in the United States—a package of £542 billion—the IMF revised its growth predictions for the US economy this year from 2.3 per cent to 3 per cent, and for the global economy from 4.2 per cent to 4.4 per cent. In the face of all this, we in Britain raise our taxes and national insurance rates and stand by as our growth rate falters. We need to do everything we can to help the economy grow. If we made tax cuts in the UK proportionate to those in the United States, the impact would be huge, by enabling businesses, especially SMEs, to surge forward. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, spoke of SMEs. Consumers would start spending and, most importantly, consumers and businesses would have confidence, as the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, said. The momentum would build, the economy would grow, tax takes would go up and the deficit would go down. This is the magic bullet, not the tax and NIC increases that are stifling business, stifling the consumer and stifling confidence all round.

There are elements of this Bill that I welcome; for example, the increase in the threshold. I also welcome the NIC holiday for new business start-ups to encourage the creation of private sector jobs in regions reliant on public sector employment. This is a fantastic idea. To see the Government support small and medium-sized enterprise in this way is hugely encouraging. Such businesses are the engine of our economy and deserve support. They are vital if we are to get out of these dark times. However, why not take this good idea and run with it? Why exclude Greater London and the south-east? Let us make this a national, as opposed to a regional, holiday. This gesture in the grand scheme is welcome. I hope that what the Minister said is right and that it will save about £1 billion for SMEs in times to come. If we are serious about growth, we need to decrease taxes. What happened to Chancellor George Osborne’s opinion of a national insurance increase which he said in opposition was an unwelcome tax on jobs?

In conclusion, it is appropriate now, more than ever, to quote Churchill’s opinion of taxation. He said that,

“for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle”.

I urge the Government to re-examine their approach to deficit reduction. The economy should be encouraged to grow, not be stifled by taxation. There are huge areas of public expenditure and inefficiency which can be addressed before we put our businesses and consumers at risk. Public expenditure as a percentage of GDP needs to return to the 40 per cent level. Inefficiencies in the health and welfare sectors need to be addressed. We have an overgenerous welfare system which is being abused and taken advantage of. Cuts must be made there. Instead we are cutting where it hurts the most, forcing our economy back into its shell and hurting our competitiveness.

The Government have had their chance to do the right thing. Instead, at the risk of sounding gruesome, I believe that what the Government are doing to the economy and to the British consumer could be equated to medieval torture—the ruination of this country’s economy through death by a thousand cuts and strangulation by taxation.

IMF and World Bank: Appointment Procedures

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Wednesday 1st December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord for the distinguished part that he played as chief economist at the World Bank and I therefore listen very carefully to what he has to say. I can confirm that this longstanding, informal agreement whereby the managing director of the IMF was always a European and the World Bank was always to be headed by a US citizen is well past its sell-by date. As I said, we support open and transparent appointments based on merit and in that context, while it is right and appropriate that good candidates from wherever should come forward, the UK’s position is emphatically that appointments should be made regardless of nationality or, indeed, of gender.

[Lord Bilimoria]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that waiting for the appointment of the head of the World Bank is like waiting for white smoke to emerge from the building? We know that the Americans fund the World Bank more than anyone else, but, in spite of that, is it right that the President of the United States, behind closed doors, should have the right to appoint the head of the World Bank in today’s world? With the IMF, why should it be a European? Why can it not be, as the noble Lord, Lord Stern, said, someone such as our mutual friend, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the deputy head of the Planning Commission in India?

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, I will not repeat my previous answers but I draw attention to part of my first Answer. Processes for search, selection and appointment are being worked up by the IMF and the World Bank. I suggest that any candidates that noble Lords think are appropriate for the appointment should apply in due course.

Comprehensive Spending Review

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bilimoria]

My Lords, I have always believed that a wise person learns from other people’s mistakes, a sensible person learns from his previous mistakes, and a fool makes the same mistake over again. The question before us is: is the Government’s spending review wise, sensible or foolish?

As regards past mistakes, it is widely held that it was Franklin D Roosevelt’s failure to provide prolonged stimulus during the great depression, combined with fiscal tightening, that prolonged the slump and was responsible for the double dip during that period. On the other hand, the Canadian and Swedish examples of making severe cuts in the 1990s that led to their economic recovery are cited as examples of why a country in our position should take similar measures by having our own “bloodbath budget”. Well, we have had our “Axe Wednesday”.

However, the world was very different in the 1990s. Canada was able to make those cuts, first, because the rest of the world was emerging into a prolonged boom time—a sharp contrast to today—and, secondly, because Canada is a country with enormous natural resources whose exports have accounted for 45 per cent of GDP. Sweden had, 50 years ago, the same level of public sector expenditure as a percentage of GDP as the United States—at 30 per cent of GDP—but, by the 1990s, the figure was well over 60 per cent. However, when those countries began wielding their axe to public expenditure, they were surrounded by a benign and increasingly booming global economy. Furthermore, both countries had the flexibility to use fiscal and monetary measures to compensate for huge public spending cuts.

Just look at the world situation over the past four years. In 2006, the sub-prime crisis started to unfold. In 2007, there was the credit crunch. In 2008-09, there was the great recession. By 2010, we had the sovereign debt crisis. In the same year, we now have the potential global currency crisis, increasing economic protectionism and beggar-thy-neighbour policies around the world. That is a classic domino effect, with one thing leading to another. What is next?

Here in Britain, there is no question that the previous Government squandered away an economy in excellent shape that was handed to them on a silver platter in 1997. They used that period of prolonged growth and low interest rates to take public expenditure to well over 50 per cent of GDP, from the 40 per cent level that it had historically been. I am delighted to see that the comprehensive spending review plans to bring public expenditure as a percentage of GDP back to 40 per cent by 2014. I would appreciate hearing the Minister confirm that that is the Government’s target.

Today, we have the non-dom levy and the 50p high rate of tax, both of which are driving people away and deterring the best talent from coming into this country. On top of that, the current Government have introduced a madcap immigration cap. In addition, the forthcoming VAT increase will hit every man, woman and child in this country. Those things combined with interest rates of 0.5 per cent—how low can we go?—mean that as a country we have boxed ourselves into a corner, with no room for manoeuvre. We have high levels of unemployment, especially youth unemployment; our housing market has come to a standstill; the spectre of inflation looms; our people have low levels of confidence and high levels of uncertainty; and our banks are not lending. We have to prevent not just the danger that we bump along the bottom for the next few years but the risk that we become another Japan—in the doldrums for two decades.

Our only hope is to play to our strengths and to address our weaknesses. Our weaknesses include nearly £200 billion of welfare and pensions expenditure. I am delighted to see the measures in the CSR to deal with this head on. As much as we all appreciate and love the NHS, there are still tens of billions of pounds of efficiency savings to be made.

With 500,000 public sector jobs predicted to be lost over the coming years, are the Government doing enough to encourage the private sector to provide those jobs? Are they doing enough to promote growth in the economy today? I welcome the £1.5 billion fund and the £200 million enterprise fund to help businesses in this country, but by comparison with the United States, which has created a $30 billion loan fund along with $12 billion in tax breaks specifically for small business, we seem to be falling very far short of the mark. The proposed measures are even more piffling when compared to the hundreds of billions of pounds spent on bailing out the banks, given that it is the small and medium-sized enterprises that will lead the charge to recovery in this country.

Our strengths include our higher education sector, but we are cutting that by 40 per cent over the next four years to try to save £3 billion. Our higher education is the cornerstone of our competitiveness and is one of our biggest export earners through the foreign students that we attract. Surely such a cut is foolishness.

We have had a hastily rushed-through defence review when our brave troops are making the ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan—a war that is almost 10 years old—and despite the uncertainties that the world throws our way all the time. We did not predict the Falklands war, but it happened. We did not predict 9/11, but it happened. We do not know what is going to happen next, so to skimp on our defence at this time is foolishness.

Our creative industries, our design capabilities and our tourism are strengths, yet we are planning cuts in those. That is foolishness indeed.

I am president of the UK India Business Council, which is funded by UK Trade & Investment, which in turn is funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Surely to cut funding that helps UK firms to go global is folly. The Indian economy is booming even in these times. The Goldman Sachs BRICs report predicts that China and India will become the world’s two largest economies by 2050, yet Gerard Lyons, who is the chief economist of Standard Chartered Bank, told us yesterday that Britain exported more to Ireland in 2009 than it did to Brazil, India, Russia, China and South Africa combined—countries that have a population of 3 billion. Instead of encouraging the spirit of global enterprise, we make cuts. “Penny wise and pound foolish” seems to be the mantra of the comprehensive spending review.

The amounts involved in those cuts to our areas of strength are tiny compared to the big-ticket items in our areas of weakness, but the effect of destroying our abilities and competitiveness is potentially catastrophic. We are shooting ourselves in the foot. Our Nobel Prize-winning economist Christopher Pissarides has said:

“Unemployment is high and job vacancies few. By taking the action that the chancellor outlined in his statement, this situation might well become worse”.

No one denies that cuts need to be made, but the timing, severity, pace and priorities of the cuts and their indiscriminate nature are a cause for worry not just here but in the United States and all over the world.

We are still in the eye of the storm and the global uncertainties continue to whirl around us. Our only chance of getting through depends on our strengths. I implore the Government not to hamper this country’s great and special strengths. Help us unleash our strengths and play to them. Then, and only then, will we get through this nightmare and come out stronger than ever.

Comprehensive Spending Review

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Wednesday 20th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords—

[Lord Bilimoria]

My Lords—

[Lord Higgins]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords—

[Lord Bilimoria]

My Lords, the Minister has confirmed that public expenditure will go up in actual terms. Historically, 40 per cent was deemed to be the sensible level of public spending expressed as a percentage of GDP and a sensible balance between the private sector and the public sector. Is the Government’s aim to get back to that 40 per cent figure on a regular basis? In this environment, one would need to do that anyway regardless of the budget deficit. In that sense, I welcome the reductions in the welfare budget, which were badly overdue. Although spending on the National Health Service has been ring-fenced, the efficiency savings there are also very welcome and I think that the whole public would agree with them. However, in the coalition Government’s spirit of the transparency, the Chief Secretary revealed to us yesterday that 500,000 jobs would be lost in the public sector, a figure that the Minister has confirmed today. How confident are the Government of those jobs being replaced in the private sector? How confident are they that they have done enough to stimulate growth in the private sector, particularly against a backdrop of increased capital gains tax and higher rates of tax in every area? How difficult will it be?

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, for drawing our attention to the important question of the balance between the public and the private sectors, which had got completely out of kilter under the previous Government. I repeat that this is not just an exercise in cutting back expenditure, necessary and unavoidable though that is; it also entails a critical rebalancing of the public and the private parts of the economy. What we have announced today will take the public sector part of the economy back towards that 40 per cent figure. In answer to the question about the absorption of the inevitable job losses in the public sector, I draw the noble Lord’s attention to the fact that, in the past quarter alone, the private sector generated 178,000 new jobs. That was in one quarter, so we should be confident, when the Office for Budget Responsibility believes that overall employment in the economy will rise year by year, that that indeed will be the case and that the inevitable reduction in public sector jobs will be more than absorbed.