Finance Bill

Debate between Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Lord Davies of Oldham

Tuesday 13th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Oldham (Lab)]

My Lords, it can sometimes seem a little lonely for a Minister addressing the House on issues such as the Finance Bill and the Budget. He sees before him a significant number of Members of the Opposition, some of whom have had experience in high office, including my noble friend Lord Darling as Chancellor, but he may not have too much support behind him. It was interesting today to see that the Minister had no support behind him: there has not been a single speaker from his Benches. Of course the House is reasonably full, reflecting the importance of this debate and the issues—

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

It is true that there have been no Conservative speakers, but that is because those in the Conservative Party are really enthusiastic about their leader, who addressed them at the start of this debate.

[Lord Davies of Oldham]

My Lords, that is a convenient excuse. I have no doubt that it is important to prioritise attending such meetings. However, the noble Lord will also recognise that a prime duty of Members of this House is to attend debates and actually engage in them, particularly in circumstances where the Opposition will have some trenchant things to say about the main subject of the debate. But there have been no speakers from the Minister’s Benches. That may also be a reflection of the fact that the Government Benches have largely decided that the last Budget is wholly irrelevant to our present situation.

Several noble Lords have made that point quite explicitly. Even the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, indicated that she had difficulty seeing the significance of the Finance Bill, which now belongs to the past and which was introduced by a previous Chancellor—a Chancellor who conspicuously failed in the significant tests that, had he been providing any supervision of the economy, he ought to have met. The deficit was postponed from 2015 to a putative surplus in 2019 and 2020. Growth, which he put forward in 2010, fell considerably below his optimistic forecasts. He even failed to match the growth levels that my noble friend Lord Darling presided over when he was Chancellor. Living standards for a very substantial section of our population have fallen. There have been no pay increases since 2010 and inflation has taken its toll. I imagine that, at this stage, members of the governing party are happy to see the back of the Finance Bill and its objectives.

Nevertheless, we have to recognise one absolutely critical aspect of the Finance Bill and I want to itemise that. The Government emphasised that cuts in corporation tax and capital gains tax would help investment in the economy and help to boost British industry and enterprise, but there was never a reference to any deleterious effects. This is a manifestly unfair Finance Bill. It is asking ordinary people to sustain the cost of cutbacks in crucial areas of government expenditure while tax breaks are given to those among the wealthiest in our society.

We are critical of the Bill. We were critical of it in the other place and we are critical of its general propositions here. But of course the debate has moved on in several respects. This House had the benefit of a report introduced today by the chair of the Economic Affairs Committee, my noble friend Lord Hollick, who emphasised the fact that the Government had discreet weaknesses in their position over the subject of that report. We can all see the advantages to the taxation system of modernising the receipt of taxes, but the digital economy clearly presents enormous challenges for ordinary people. It is not the case that everyone in this country is completely au fait with how the digital economy is meant to work and who have the confidence to respond in those terms. But there is no indication that the Government have any real awareness of that. In the report that my noble friend commented on, that point was emphasised.

The report also emphasised that the Government pay lip service to the concept of tax simplification. It says positive things about the Office of Tax Simplification, but not what the committee emphasised, which was any suggestion of adequate resources for that office to be able to carry out its role. We recognise that the Government have some regard for the Office of Tax Simplification. They certainly accepted amendments to place greater emphasis on the role of the Treasury Select Committee in the other place with regard to personnel. But the fundamental point remains that the report sought greater resources for the Office of Tax Simplification. It wanted much more consideration of the way in which the ordinary taxpayer will respond to the digital revolution and it wanted greater consultation about the development of tax law so that matters should be simpler for the ordinary taxpayer. I hope that the Minister will address those points because they are an important part of this debate so ably introduced by my noble friend Lord Hollick.

The Minister also needs to respond to points made by my noble friends Lord Darling and Lord Hain. They emphasised the extent to which it is essential for the Government to change their order of priorities and develop a strategy for growth that enables us to improve what I know the Minister is concerned about—levels of productivity. They will not increase while we are trailing at low levels of growth. It is important for the Minister to respond to the fundamental issue that for the last six years we have had a great weakness in the British economy that no amount of concentration on reduction of debt has done anything greatly to assuage. That is why the Minister needs to respond to these crucial issues raised in the debate.

Noble Lords who subsequently followed my noble friends largely regarded the issues of the Finance Bill as passé and not part of the crucial issues of the debate about our economy at the present time.

Of course, we have moved into the fog of Brexit. We are grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, who sought clarification on some of the issues, the first of which is an indication of the timescale for when certain aspects will need to be negotiated. I have seen nothing from the Government that remotely approaches anything as definitive as that. Nor have I seen any recognition on the part of the Government of the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, when he said that it is important that those who are involved in determining our negotiations with the European community should acknowledge that this is an entirely capitalist economy. It is an exercise in which they will expect to get the best deals they can for themselves as much as we will strive to do on behalf of our people. That is a tough agenda, but I have seen nothing yet to show that the Government are facing up to it, particularly when one of the key figures of Brexit, the Secretary of State Liam Fox, attacks British industry for being more interested in playing golf than improving its business record.

These are serious issues which the Government need to take hold of very rapidly indeed, yet thus far we have had nothing but evasion when challenges are presented, and indeed they have been presented today with great force in this House. We all recognise the primacy of the other place when it comes to financial issues, but occasionally we are given the chance to debate the nature of the challenges in our economy. Consideration of the Finance Bill gives us no chance to amend or challenge it because that is the responsibility of the elected House, but as I say, we have a chance to comment on the economy and to point the way forward to a more constructive position than what obtains at the moment.

What we have now is obvious. We have economic failure on the part of the Government in previous years now allied to a decision by the British people to throw a great deal of our trading position into hazard. It is important that the Government should take every opportunity to clarify how they are going to go about the Brexit process. That does not mean that they should give away their negotiating position, but they should reassure people that they understand what the approach will be and how long it will take. Thus far, we have had nothing.