Autumn Budget 2024

Lord Empey Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, I wish to identify with some of the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Monks, who is not in his place, that we were searching for the holy grail in economics—we have been at this for a long time. The noble Lord mentioned the Union Learning Fund. As a former Skills Minister in Northern Ireland, I worked with it and thought it was excellent. It gave confidence to workers and mentored people who would never have dreamed of improving their skills. It was an excellent organisation, and I hope we can get back to a sensible policy for skills, because we are very bad in this country at doing that.

Innovation can propel small business, growth and employment, but I am sorry to say that the Government have missed an opportunity here in going after large companies that have used the purchase of land and other assets to avoid tax, which we all understand. A number of Members—the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington—pointed out that farms are small family businesses. To give a local example, the average farm in Northern Ireland is below 100 acres, but the land price can be anything from £10,000 to an average of about £14,000, while good land can even get more, so a very small family-owned farm that is virtually economically unviable comes into this bracket at significant amounts. The average farm income is about £24,000 to £25,000. Even if you get 10 years to pay, how will you find any money to reinvest in the business? It is impossible. Although I understand the targeting of what the Government are attempting to do, the threshold is dangerously low and will have a very negative effect, damaging local businesses, schools, shops and all the rest.

The winter fuel payment decision is the most un-Labour decision I can imagine—it was the Labour Party that established it. We know there are people who do not need it, but we can find other ways of dealing with that. It could be taxed, but the threshold has to be raised, because, as the noble Lords, Lord Fox and Lord Oates, pointed out, we allow the gambling industry seemingly to have a free pass, yet we are taking a couple of hundred quid off a pensioner. I just cannot get my head around that—I do not understand it. We know from committee work that those companies have algorithms—they know who is watching the television at three in the morning and they know whom they can exploit, but we give them a bye ball. I do not understand that. So, although I understand the need to raise money, that is exactly the wrong place to look for it.

Social care is an issue that we as a country have dodged for years. Several attempts have been made to deal with it; Boris Johnson made an attempt, but that stalled. We need a political consensus across the country and across the political parties to deal with it. Some 10% to 14% of hospital beds are blocked because the social care is not there. We need to have a conversation about that.

The other thing the Minister did not mention was the costs of our failed immigration policy. We are paying probably £200 a day to put somebody up in a hotel, yet somebody can have £200 a year taken off them in winter fuel allowance. It does not make sense. I hope the Government will tell us the real costs we are facing with the immigration system—whether it is asylum seekers who come here legally or people who come here in boats as victims of criminal gangs. The Government must have at least an average figure of what this is costing per head. It has not been disclosed or taken into account.

I understand that the Government are in a tough position. The previous Government were faced with Covid and decided to borrow large amounts of money to keep the economy going; I think we all accept that that was the right thing to do. It has left us with a huge task. But to raise money, we are focusing on some of the wrong things while some of the people who can afford it, whether the gambling industry or others, are getting away in the smoke. That is not the right thing to face people with as they go into the very difficult winter ahead.