Autumn Statement 2023
Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts(1 year ago)
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Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab) [V]
My Lords, reducing national insurance contributions does nothing for people on the lowest incomes. Full expensing, at a cost to the Exchequer of £11 billion a year, seems an expensive way of securing an increase in annual business investment of £3 billion.
Before the Autumn Statement, the OBR projected a fall of £27 billion in borrowing in 2027-28 compared with its forecast in March. The Chancellor had a choice as to how to use this windfall between consolidating the public finances, improving public services or making tax cuts. Bullied by his party, and with an election coming up, he chose tax cuts. He has gambled that the wafer-thin margin forecast by the OBR will enable him to adhere to his fiscal rule that the debt to GDP ratio will be falling by the end of the period.
Of course, the OBR’s projection is no more than optimistic guesswork. The Chancellor has left himself with nothing in the bank for contingency, yet contingencies always occur. If the market should take the view that the fiscal framework is fanciful, the effects could be devastating. A rise in interest rates, coming on top of the vast debt service costs that the Government’s policies have already incurred—£116 billion annually—would wreck his flimsy plan. International confidence in the UK has already been weakened, not only by the Truss-Kwarteng episode but by this Government’s cavalier attitude to international law.
A different kind of unrealism and irresponsibility is apparent in the Chancellor’s decision to withhold resources for public services. Inflation that is boosting his tax revenues is also increasing the cost of public services. He claims that his tax cuts will enable public services to be better funded; the reality is that he has funded tax cuts at the expense of public services already shredded by austerity. In his plans, public spending on government departments is due to fall by £19 billion in 2028; if this were actually to happen, it would be appalling.
The Chancellor made the bizarre claim that we deliver world-class education. That is not so for those who are threading their way through our chaotic and underfunded FE system, nor for the generality of children who have seen the discrepancy in funding per pupil widen vastly between state schools and private schools. Faced with the crisis in the justice system, bound up with inadequate education—cut by 20% after 2010—the Chancellor offered nothing.
With the Home Office budget also unprotected, how are the Government going to control immigration? The Autumn Statement showed a wilful evasiveness about the challenges to the British state. To court popularity with the pensioner vote, there is an 8.5% increase in the state pension—way above the 6.7% indexation of social security benefits—yet the Chancellor knows that the triple lock is fiscally unsustainable. He ought to recognise that it is socially damaging as well, widening the gulf between generations. The defunding of universal credit over the years has widened the gulf between the affluent and the destitute. On average, the Chancellor’s measures will give £1,000 a year to the top 20% of earners but only £200 to the bottom 20%.
Who are the employers who will provide all this work at home for people with mental health and mobility problems? Although the Nuffield Trust calculates that the NHS faces a £1.7 billion deficit, the Chancellor made no significant health funding announcements. Moreover, he provided nothing to support local government to pay for better social care and public health to ease pressure on the NHS. Demographic developments mean that, with an ageing population and a deteriorating dependency ratio, the Government will be faced with reduced tax revenues from people of working age and higher outlays on health and social care. The demands of the NHS, year after year, exceed the rate of growth of the economy. The days are gone when, to pay for the welfare state, the Government could raid the defence budget, which they have now said they want to increase.
Aside from his douceur to people who live near new energy infrastructure, the Chancellor showed no recognition of the scale of public expenditure that will be required to meet our commitment to a green transition. The Climate Change Committee and the OBR estimate that the Government must spend £25 billion per year between now and 2050 to achieve net zero. Where is the provision for that? His arithmetic assumes that he will index fuel duties next spring. We shall see. What is sure, though ignored by him, is that with the phasing out of petrol and diesel-powered vehicles, fuel duty—currently raising about £25 billion—will evaporate. VAT at 5% on domestic gas and electricity use, like the freezing of fuel duty and the tax treatment of air travel, subsidises fossil fuel consumption while we struggle towards net zero.
This Chancellor shows no interest in tax reforms such as introducing a progressive carbon tax and road pricing. There is a whole agenda of tax reforms that would be beneficial to the economy. The Government should at least extract the best value they can from the existing tax system, whether by merging national insurance and income tax into a properly progressive system, tackling the chaotic complexity of VAT, addressing the damaging effects of the stamp duty regime or removing the anomalies and injustices of council tax, but the Chancellor shies away from all this. Following the Statement, he said:
“I hope we are able to reduce the tax burden still further in the future”.
Instead, he should have told the truth—that low taxes are a fantasy. We are heading towards a tax take of 38% of GDP. That will still leave public services threadbare and the great challenges I have mentioned unaddressed. He said it was
“an autumn statement for a country that has turned a corner”,—[Official Report, Commons, 22/11/23; col. 337.]
but we have not. To transform productivity so as to achieve the growth that will improve living standards and fund decent public services, far more needs to be done on education and skills, NHS waiting lists, infrastructure, availability of capital, tax reform and rejecting the lobbying of vested interests.
The legacy that this Chancellor and his Conservative predecessors will leave is dire. We need a Labour Government to grapple with it. For the next Government and for our country, the road ahead will be arduous.
Budget Statement
Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts(1 year, 9 months ago)
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Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I think we can all agree that the Chancellor had to maintain a—[Inaudible]—stance and drive towards a—[Inaudible]—configuration of the public finances, while improving—[Inaudible]—and encouraging productivity and investment in a green economy, though we can argue about how—[Inaudible]—his measures may be in achieving those ends.
I suggest that the Chancellor’s analysis of the malaise of our economy fails to identify some crucial features. He is emphatic about the need to improve growth—an objective of my party as well. We should start by asking what sort of growth we want. The noble Lord, Lord Bridges of Headley, just now reflected on various forms of growth, not all of them welcome. The Chancellor said—[Inaudible]—sustainable and healthy growth, but what does that mean? He seems, in the conventional view of the Treasury, to envisage economic success in terms of increases in GDP. Should not the primary objective of economic policy be rather to grow the well-being of every member of our society, especially those who are worst off?
GDP, as a measure of the economy, takes no account of inequality and ignores the basic human needs of security, dignity and respect. The Chancellor alluded vaguely to the need to fund good public services. I am glad that he wants to help children in care and households with pre-payment meters, but he offered nothing in the Budget to give confidence to the great majority that they and their families will be cared for, that they will be helped to adapt their skills and make a good life, that their elderly parents will be supported in their frailty, and that their children will be well educated and in due course decently housed at an affordable cost. The Budget was not devised within a vision of a society that is equitable, humane and in harmony with nature.
The Chancellor preened himself, a little desperately, on achieving a
“slightly lower overall tax burden”
than previously forecast
“for the rest of the Parliament”,—[Official Report, Commons, 15/3/23; col. 836.]
although that will not have gratified his party, frantic for him to lower personal taxation before the election. They might reflect—and this is a consideration also from the noble Lord, Lord Bridges—that economic growth was stronger in the post-war decades, when top rates of personal tax were high and a mixed economy was the orthodoxy, than in the following decades, when policymakers put their faith in the market and sought to roll back the state with privatisation, deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy.
There is no evidence that low personal taxes inspire people who have advantages to work harder or lead to improvements in efficiency. Low rates of tax on high incomes make it rational to provide grotesquely large remuneration and prioritise shareholder value over investment. They have caused talent to gravitate excessively to finance, narrowing the capacity of the economy and contributing to the dereliction of post-industrial areas. Natural justice requires that the winners from globalisation are taxed so as to compensate its losers. Instead, the proceeds of growth have been almost entirely extracted by the rich.
Mr Hunt’s claim that since 2010 the Government have cut inequality can be based only on the most selective statistics. The Chancellor’s policy on personal taxes is for the rich to be able to accumulate bigger pensions and thereby pay less inheritance tax while many more people on lower incomes are to be dragged into the income tax net and see their disposable income fall. He could at least have introduced tax relief on pension contributions at a flat rate, but he chose not to do so. The Budget will exacerbate inequality and national demoralisation.
Communities blighted by the forces of economic change—new technology and globalisation—need not only generous social security for individuals and their families but substantial resources for place-based regeneration, funded by taxpayers who have benefited from globalisation and administered as far as possible by local communities themselves. I am pleased, therefore, that the Chancellor has seen the need to empower elected local leaders to
“fund and deliver solutions to their own challenges.”—[Official Report, Commons, 15/3/23; col. 838.]
I hope he will move faster than he seems minded to do to extend this freedom beyond the West Midlands and Greater Manchester mayoralties. However, I suspect that his vision of 12 investment zones as “potential Canary Wharfs” will be depressing rather than inspiring for the people who live in those places. Are they to be subjected to the abandonment of properly considered urban planning and the destruction of biodiversity? Growth should not be at the expense of quality of life and life itself.
It is good that the Chancellor will bring forward measures to tackle the promoters of tax avoidance schemes, but his concern seems only to stanch the haemorrhage of tax revenue. He gave no hint that he understands the importance of cleaning up the nexus between the very wealthy and government. When people read reports of the elaborate arrangements, devised by accountants and lawyers, for rich people to avoid even such taxes as they are expected to pay, and when they read about the lobbying of government by big business and the funding of politics by the rich, they conclude that government and politics are corrupt and, to coin a phrase, a conspiracy against the public.
Resentment is intensified when political rhetoric stigmatises the poor as failures and morally defective. This Chancellor is more delicate in his language than his predecessor, George Osborne, but in the Budget yesterday he said the sanctions regime for social security claimants will be applied “more rigorously”. A society in which feelings of injustice are thus incubated will, to say the least, not be optimally productive. This is dangerous for our democracy as well as our economy. Anger, unhappily, will issue in scapegoating of politicians certainly but also of immigrants, who are perceived wrongly to depress wages, steal jobs and have a free ride on public services. If the Chancellor wants more construction workers and childminders to come here from abroad, he had better educate the Home Secretary as to why this is in the interests of our economy and try to persuade her to tone down her language about migrants.
We have no option but to embrace technological change, but we should be aware that it is not certain that we will grow faster or be happier if we become a science superpower—the Prime Minister’s dream. Historically, the technological innovations of electricity and the internal combustion engine indeed engendered high growth in an era when the size of the state and its commitment to public services was also growing hugely. The technological innovations of the digital era, also the era of the cult of the small state and globalisation, have been accompanied by weak growth of productivity, stagnation of wages and widening inequality, as well as the pathologies associated with social media. If to be a science and technology superpower means to accelerate the application of artificial intelligence, as the Chancellor proposes, then we shall need more than ever a protective state. We have to see past the circumstances of today’s tight labour market to recognise that very many livelihoods are at risk from artificial intelligence.
Following technological innovations in the 18th century that heralded the Industrial Revolution in Britain, real wages halved and then stagnated for 50 years. Great technological disruptions may benefit capital but they immiserate labour that is displaced and rejected. In this context, it is perverse for the Chancellor to continue to tax labour at a high rate through national insurance while favouring capital through generous investment allowances. Destruction takes a very long time to become creative and there is no certainty that it will do so. In such an era we need government that willingly embraces responsibility for the well-being of the vulnerable.
I now look forward very much indeed to hearing the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Moyo.
Autumn Statement 2022
Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts(2 years ago)
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Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab) [V]
My Lords, the Chancellor who warned of a black hole has indeed consigned us to a dungeon. If the main drivers of inflation—the energy crisis, the pandemic and its effect on supply chains—are global, and we face recession, it is the wrong response to weaken our economy with a planned fiscal tightening of 2% of GDP. Falling real incomes and interest rate increases will amply reduce domestic inflationary pressures. There are pay demands, of course, but no wage-price spiral. We are now on track to 19 years of no real growth in average wages and household income. We know the enormous damage that excessive austerity in Britain did to investment and productivity, public services and living standards following the global financial crisis. Once we have brought inflation down, do we then need austerity 2.0 to satisfy newly contrived fiscal rules on the ratio of debt to GDP? While markets will not tolerate unfunded tax cuts, they might well take a benign view of investment in public services that will strengthen our economy.
If there is a black hole in the British economic cosmos, it is that which sucks resources away from low-income families and public services and piles them up in the bank accounts of the wealthy. The Chancellor’s reductions in capital gains tax and dividend allowances twinkle only faintly in that murk. With his decision to allow the average energy bills faced by households to rise in the spring, we shall see how far his measures to support people on low incomes will go. The prognostications are worrying. An indexing of benefits that have previously been severely cut and capped, with disregards and capital limits frozen, hardly justifies his claims that this is a compassionate Government. His reliance on dragging low earners into the tax net through freezing the income tax and national insurance thresholds equally belies that claim.
Important for people struggling in poverty is the maintenance of law and order and the good functioning of the justice system—but once again, and scandalously, these have been neglected. The plight of renters in the private sector was unaddressed. If he sincerely wants to help more disadvantaged communities, why has he made a real-terms cut in the Budget for levelling up? How much control of resources will the Treasury really allow for mayors and local authorities?
The Chancellor offered no vision of how we are to meet certain great economic challenges. On climate change, infinitely the most important, he reaffirmed the 2030 target for emissions reduction, but gave no indication of what the Government will invest overall, with numbers and waymarks, along the journey to net zero. What are the Government’s projections for overall spending on averting climate change, adapting to climate change and repairing the damage of climate change? Confirmation that Sizewell C is to go ahead, plans to build some small modular nuclear reactors, and the investment announced in energy efficiency, welcome and significant as they are, do not amount to a full strategy. The Prime Minister is being blown hither and thither by onshore wind and his own MPs.
The Chancellor said nothing about the Treasury’s view on biodiversity loss. Nor did he tell us how our country will be enabled to support an ageing population or to develop the resilience to protect itself against another pandemic. The additional money that he announced for the NHS will not be sufficient to fund the pay increases needed to prevent the system buckling, tackle the backlog, and meet rising demand for healthcare in the recession. He offered no vision for a model of health- care that will be economically sustainable for the future. The Autumn Statement had nothing to say about resources for preventive strategies to lessen demands on the NHS and enable us to become a healthier society. A long-term workforce plan, rightly, is being commissioned, but he said nothing about its funding.
Equally, the additional funds for social care will not stabilise the system, enable the release of enough hospital beds, and provide decently for the vulnerable and frail in the community. By putting the onus on local authorities to fund much of the increase in care funding through council tax—a regressive tax—the Chancellor ensured that the cost and benefit will not fall equitably. He did not foreshadow any plan to integrate the health and social care systems in order to get rid of the vast inefficiencies of their separation.
The root cause of the threadbare state of our public services is our poor productivity. The Chancellor announced constructive policies on regulation, competition, tariffs, clusters, and R&D spend. I hope that his policy on Solvency II is prudent. More is needed to forge a comprehensive strategy covering availability of labour and capital, childcare, skills, taxation, regulation, planning, infrastructure, housing, personal and business mobility, and obstacles to trade. Plans for infrastructure investment were cut back. He said not a word about immigration. Why did he not have the candour to say that immigration is good for the economy? Will he make sure that the Home Secretary does not wreck our universities? The additional funding for schools will do no more than restore the level in 2010. The Barber review is still to come, but there was no indication of an uplift in funding for post-16 education and apprenticeships. The Chancellor should challenge convention and classify spending on education and training, which is investment in human capital, as capital expenditure.
By reducing R&D reliefs for small and medium enterprises, which the noble Lord, Lord Fox, spoke about, instead of improving the policing of abuse, the Chancellor removed incentives for enterprise and innovation in science-based industries. The tax changes that he announced, on stamp duty and business rates, were not part of a programme of tax reform to drive improved productivity. Corporation tax will rise from April, and the super-deduction capital allowance will expire. We are going to live with higher taxes under any Government. That need not impair economic performance, but it makes it all the more urgent that we have a rational tax system. The Chancellor has shown no interest in this crucial part of his responsibilities.
The Chancellor has appeased the markets for now. On the tests of strategic vision, investment, growth, the future of our public services, and fairness, his Autumn Statement is wanting.
Budget Statement
Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts(7 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, our economy is in deep trouble. Pace the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, this is not on account of Brexit, which the Chancellor barely mentioned. Though he touched on some of the problems—lack of technical skills, poor productivity and erosion of the tax base—his chirpy report on the performance of the UK economy in 2016 betrays a failure to recognise the systemic nature and scale of our predicament. Just as the dispensation of Bretton Woods, neo-Keynesianism and the corporate state hit the buffers in the 1970s, so the dispensation that followed, of neoliberalism, free markets and the small state, crashed in 2007-08.
In the 1950s we saw large improvements in living standards across society, the creation of great new public services and, for all the class consciousness of those days, a sense that we were one nation. What has neoliberalism brought us to? As corporate profits have risen, the share of income going to investment and labour has fallen. Higher productivity has not gone through to higher median pay, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, noted. Although the OBR reckons that our economy was growing at its maximum capacity in 2016, average earnings are forecast to be no higher in 2022 than they were in 2007, public borrowing is forecast for 2020 to be £30 billion more than was planned a year ago, and we face the prospect of austerity stretching to 2025. Our chronic current account deficit is now 5.2% of GDP. Spending per pupil on education, which is crucial to future productivity, is planned to fall by 7% in this Parliament. We have a growing precariat who know nothing of the Chancellor’s imagined “security and dignity of work”. The poor will get poorer with cuts to employment and support allowance and tax credits next month. We have huge regional disparities in prosperity and a fracturing United Kingdom. We need a new economic model, but not the ultra-neoliberal model envisaged by the Chancellor and the Prime Minister in their threat to turn Britain into an offshore haven of deregulation and low taxes.
The economic model of the last 40 years has been very nice for those with financial and property assets and high levels of skills. It has failed huge numbers of our people. Trickle down has not happened and very many of the “hard-working families” whom Ministers profess to support feel abandoned.
Governments have grovelled to attract footloose international capital. Corporation tax is due to fall again to 17% in 2020, while multinational businesses scandalously avoid paying tax. Policy has especially privileged finance, with tax rates lower on assets than on earnings. Top-rate tax relief on pension contributions, big reductions in inheritance tax and reduced capital gains tax for people selling their businesses have all benefited the wealthy while reducing resources for the public services on which most people depend. We have created a rentier economy and vast inequalities of income and wealth. Incentivising and deregulating finance has channelled savings not to productive investment, as free-market theory promised, but to an unstable, bubble economy.
The global financial crisis, under the shadow of which we continue to live, was caused not by excessive government deficits but by the recklessness of bankers let loose by the state. Bank bailouts in Britain rose to £133 billion in cash and £l trillion in guarantees and indemnities. Extreme fiscal austerity to pay down debt, easing only slightly now, has been accompanied by ultra-loose monetary policy. Low interest rates and quantitative easing have distorted the allocation of capital, apparent in the inflation of asset prices. The effect has been taken to an extreme in the housing market, exacerbated by policies of inflating demand while restricting supply. This has damaged the labour market and created misery.
It has been an illusion that the marketised state works better and costs less. Instead, we have seen administrative costs, professional demoralisation and public dissatisfaction all increase. Public functions have been handed over to commercial entities on long-term contracts, with information concealed from Parliament and the public under the spurious rubric of “commercial in confidence”, and poorly supervised by a stripped-down Civil Service. Government has become haplessly dependent on outsourcing contractors, some of which are a byword for accounting scandals and delivery failures.
Social care, the NHS and prisons alike are in crisis. The social security system is routinely operated by contractors both cruelly and inefficiently. The Chancellor intoned on Budget Day that “choice is the key to excellence in education”, defying the experience of the last 30 years that the values and dynamics of the market are no guarantee of quality in public services. What is certain is that more selective schools will mean more social division and more children left behind.
The failure of neoliberalism to create inclusive prosperity and economic justice, and the fear of parents that their children will be worse off than they are, are now generating a public revolt. Since the 1980s, citizens have abstained from voting in increasing numbers. When the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats espoused neoliberalism, electors could see no essential difference between them and the Conservatives. Now, not just in the Brexit vote here but in the US presidential election, as in the last elections in Hungary and Poland, they have rejected the political establishment in favour of authoritarian populists. At least the referendum did not put Nigel Farage into Downing Street. Instead, as she entered Downing Street, Theresa May spoke rightly of burning injustice and her mission to make Britain a country that works for everyone. The recognition of that necessity could be the beginning of wisdom. We need radical thinking, however. Without it, both our economy and our democracy are in peril.
Barnett Formula
Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)
Does the Minister recognise that whatever new constitutional arrangements may be made, there will be no stable union of the nations of the United Kingdom as long as the distribution of public funding between them is fundamentally inequitable?
Lord Newby
My Lords, there are many different views about where equity lies in this respect. The effect of the transfer of fiscal responsibility means that, going forward, the extent to which Scotland has money to spend will depend increasingly on the success of the Scottish economy and therefore very much upon the effectiveness of the Scottish Administration.
Taxation: Avoidance
Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Newby
My Lords, the noble Lord asked about civil as opposed to criminal penalties, and whether an exemplary hanging might not be a good idea. I explained the difficulties about prosecutions in this case, but we have successfully prosecuted people for LIBOR manipulation and we have extended the scope of the criminal law in respect of people in senior positions in banks. The noble Lord will probably have seen that the very threat of criminal action against directors of banks, even though pretty remote, has made a number of non-executive directors of banks extremely nervous.
Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, anybody who knows the noble Lord, Lord Green of Hurstpierpoint, as many of us in this House do, knows that he is a person of the utmost integrity and great ability. Do not these revelations about HSBC, profoundly shocking as they are, demonstrate two things, among others? The first is that enormous international conglomerates such as HSBC are impossible to manage as they need to be managed. Secondly, does not this revelation demonstrate the cultural change wrought by the neo-liberal orthodoxy which has been dominant during recent decades and under which personal material self-seeking has been elevated far too far above other values?
Lord Newby
My Lords, if noble Lords have read the statement by HSBC in today’s Guardian—it may be in other newspapers, but that is where I read it—they will have seen that it is clear that, in 2005, HSBC was run as a very loose confederation and that the centre sought not to exercise very great control. That has changed very dramatically, and the new regulatory authorities are much more intrusive in ensuring that management at the centre has effective control throughout the organisation. It is clear that there was a wholly unacceptable culture in many of the banks. Both regulatory and legal change and activities by the banks in setting up their own body to monitor standards—as well as statements by senior management at the top of banks—are trying to reverse that culture towards the kind of culture that I suspect most people would expect their bankers to follow.
Assisted Dying Bill [HL]
Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts(10 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Newby
My Lords, noble Lords will have seen an unusual amount of toing and froing, as there has been a certain amount of confusion about the consequences of the pre-emption of several amendments as a result of the amendment passed earlier. Having spoken to noble Lords who have amendments affected by that pre-emption, or who have amendments that are due to be debated, I propose that for the rest of the afternoon we proceed as follows. First, the noble Lord, Lord Alton, should speak to his Amendment 11 as part of the debate on whether Clause 1 should stand part. If any noble Lord wants to speak to any of the amendments that were dropped, as it were, as a result of pre-emption, I suggest that they do so at the conclusion of that debate.
The amendments covered by pre-emption were the initial amendments in those three groups, Amendments 8, 10 and 11. The later amendments in those groups, Amendment 69 and onwards, Amendment 25 and onwards and Amendment 90 and onwards could be debated later, when we get to them. I propose that when we have finished the debate on whether Clause 1 should stand part, in the light of the fact that, by common consent, the debate on the following group will be very long, I adjourn the House.
Lord Harries of Pentregarth
I shall speak briefly to my Amendment 8 which would ensure that any request for assistance is voluntary. The House is agreed on the need for a voluntary decision, but the question is how you ascertain that the request really is voluntary.
I refer to a later amendment in my name, Amendment 69, which says that the person must not be under pressure or duress from others or from a sense of obligation or duty to others. Noble Lords have touched on this once or twice because it is a matter of huge concern, but we have not yet had a thorough debate on this issue. The noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, wondered why it was such a bad thing to have a sense of obligation or duty to others. That is a good question. The trouble is that the remarks we make are never made in isolation; they are always made to other people. If a person says out loud, “I am beginning to feel a bit of a burden”, somebody may hear that remark. As the noble Lord and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, and the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said so movingly, you want to give such a response that the person will know that, despite everything, they really matter. Within all the subtleties of a relationship, you might say something like, “You are certainly worth that and a great deal more”. In order to ensure that the request really is voluntary and there is not that kind of subtle coercion, Amendment 69 also says that the doctor must have in-depth discussions not just with the person but with the family and people close to them.
The reason why this matters so much was brought home to me a couple of days ago when I received a letter from somebody saying that a relative of theirs had gone into a hospice for temporary respite and one of the nurses said to them,
“Oh, don’t you think it would be better for you to stay here instead of going back”,
to your daughter-in-law’s place?
“She works ever so hard taking care of you; don’t you think you are a bit of a burden to her”?
That was a very unfortunate remark, but people do make unfortunate remarks and they weigh on them.
The reason why this is such a key issue can be seen from the figures and research in Oregon and Washington. Both states collect data on the end-of-life concerns behind people’s decision to seek assistance with suicide. Contrary to popular impression, the data reveal that inadequate pain control is one of the least common concerns behind a request. In 2013 only 28.2% of those who sought assistance with suicide indicated inadequate pain control as a concern. Alarmingly, and more commonly cited, is a concern about being a burden on family, friends or care givers. In 2012, 63% of those in Washington cited this as a concern. In the same year, only 33% cited poor pain relief. Responses from Oregon reveal the same pattern. Since legislation was passed there, concern about being a burden has increased as a motivator from 13% in 1998 to 49.3% in 2013. This is a matter of huge concern and I hope that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, will take the concerns of the whole House on board when he looks again at his Bill.
Lord Howarth of Newport
My Lords, I added my name to the amendments in the name of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth. I am glad that we have the opportunity to spend a few moments examining this question of the nature of voluntariness in the circumstances for which we are seeking to legislate.
There can be a multitude of pressures on people who are ailing or nearing death; people who find themselves in a situation in which they consider that they may wish to seek assistance in their suicide. I know that my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer, in the drafting of the Bill, has sought very clearly to preclude situations in which anyone is driven by coercion or duress to a decision of this nature. It is going to be very difficult to ensure that those conditions are satisfied, whether in the context of the original Bill or whether in the Bill as modified by the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. There are the most overt and obvious pressures coming, perhaps, from family members who are exhausted, angry and grudging, and who may not love the person they find themselves having to care for. There are, as my noble friend Lady Mallalieu mentioned this morning, circumstances in which family members are actually motivated by venal considerations. They want to stop spending all this money on the costs of care and hurry up their inheritance. Although it is most unpleasant to think of these possibilities in human nature, they do exist and we cannot ignore those possibilities.
There could also be pretty overt pressures from professional carers and doctors who are under pressure, working with inadequate resources, impatient, testy and frustrated themselves. We can see a range of possibilities, from inadequate but well intended care, going all the way through to the kind of institutionalised callousness that was reported at Mid-Staffordshire and Winterbourne View—situations of elder abuse. In a sense, it should be easier to preclude people coming to a decision to seek to end their own life with assistance in such obvious circumstances. However, there are then the subtler situations, in which someone has perhaps been pressurised unintendedly by a person whose gesture or facial expression was not meant to be seen by the relative or person for whom they are caring and was interpreted by that person to signify that they were a nuisance or were no longer wanted.
In her speech at Second Reading, the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell of Surbiton, talked of the pressures of pity and how pity can be experienced as contempt and as a signal that your life is not worth living. There are tacit pressures that could arise even from the availability of the remedy that this legislation would make legal—its tendency to normalise the practice of assisted suicide and, going with that, a tendency to diminish trust between patients, sufferers and those who have responsibility for their care. A number of noble Lords have spoken of the risks of an altered ethos in the medical profession. Of course, people who are old and ill and costing the NHS or their families a lot of money may simply felt that they ought to stop incurring such expenditure. If people internalise such pressures and arrive at a sense that their continued existence cannot be justified and they do not have the self-worth they once had, if they feel guilty and that they are a burden on their families and the system, are we to say that these are decisions freely taken? The noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, in her speech at Second Reading proposed to us that people could proudly and honourably—admirably—come to a decision that they should not be a burden on others. Is that a freely-made decision when such pressures have been psychologically and emotionally internalised? It is a difficult question to judge.
Lord Avebury
I wonder whether the noble Lord has ever looked at the Macmillan Cancer Support site, on which there is a forum for people with incurable cancer. If he looks on that site, he will find that no patient has ever expressed the view that they are a burden on the National Health Service. It has never come up at all.
Lord Howarth of Newport
I will certainly look at that site, but I wish I could be as confident as the noble Lord is on that point.
I will conclude by saying that I think it is going to be very difficult for doctors ever to be certain that a decision has been arrived at on a truly voluntary basis, freely. It will be equally difficult for the judge that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has brought in to the proceedings. As the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, put it to us earlier, there is a risk that pressures and duress will never be wholly eliminated.
Lord Falconer of Thoroton
My reason for not putting that in the Bill is that so many cases are much more complex than the simple case I gave, where I would not wish for there to be an assisted death—where one’s motive for wishing to have an assisted death will be a mixture of “I don’t want to be dependent on other people, I don’t want the lack of dignity, I don’t want to be a burden”, a whole mixture of motives that make clear “I do not want to go on living for the last week or month”. I am very unkeen to isolate just one factor in what is a much more complex issue than the example I gave. That is why I am against putting that in the Bill.
Lord Howarth of Newport
Will my noble and learned friend say a word or two about how he envisages that the judge or the doctors should know, ascertain and satisfy themselves that the decision has been taken voluntarily?
Lord Falconer of Thoroton
They must conduct in-depth discussions with the patient and the other doctors. The judge must call such evidence as he or she considers appropriate to be satisfied—the burden is to be “satisfied”—that the decision is voluntary. “Voluntary” means “this is what the patient wants”: he or she is not being forced into it either by coercion or by the sort of guilt that we referred to earlier. Although that will give rise to complex issues, it is not a job that is beyond judges or, indeed, some doctors.
The noble Baroness, Lady Howe of Idlicote, said that a person should have to be resident for a year immediately before the declaration is agreed. I think that is the Bill’s effect, because as it is drafted it says,
“on the day the declaration is made … has been ordinarily resident in England and Wales for not less than one year”.
The patient has to have been here for a year. However, she has a second point, which is that it should be two years rather than one. Until the noble Lord, Lord Howard, suggested it, it had not occurred to me that this was about immigration. I had thought it was about a desire to prevent tourism for this purpose, which is how the noble Baroness put it. I think it is quite difficult to judge between one year and two years. My inclination is to stick with one year, but I will take soundings to see whether two years seems right. People coming to be resident for a year before the declaration is made looks like considerable forward planning. I am not minded to accept her amendment.
The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, made a point about the 18 to 25 year-old age group. I completely agree with him that they need especial care, but this right is for anybody aged over 18. I do not think it should be taken away from them. We need to consider what should go into a code of practice to ensure that the particular needs of 18 to 25 year-olds are borne in mind.
I think that has dealt with all of the amendments that were suggested.
Taxation: Rental Income
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Lord Newby
My Lords, that is basically how this scheme operates. A letting agent has to take some 20% of the rent and pay it over to HMRC for the non-resident landlord.
Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, is the noble Lord able to confirm what I have been told—and I do not know whether this is correct—that in France, if you are a non-resident owner of residential property, you are taxed on the rentable value of that property whether or not you have let it? Does he know whether that is the case; and if it is, does he think that it is worth considering introducing it here?
Lord Newby
My Lords, I do not know whether that is the case. I think that I might take advice from the noble Lord, Lord Lawson of Blaby.
Taxation: VAT on Retrofitting Buildings
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Lord Newby
My Lords, I have a great deal of sympathy with the noble Lord because my first job as a new employee was working on VAT. It was very complicated when it was introduced; it has got more complicated since then and should not be allowed to get any more so.
Lord Howarth of Newport
My Lords, is it not irrational to have a VAT regime that incentivises demolition and new build and penalises alteration and refurbishment? Is that not just as perverse in relation to heritage conservation as it is to energy saving? Will the Government negotiate with real determination in Brussels to secure a sensible regime?
Lord Newby
As the noble Lord said, the VAT regime is an EU regime. Any attempt to change it will require unanimity as it is a tax measure. Opening up the regime would, in my view, open up a Pandora’s box, and I do not recommend that as a policy approach.
Future Investment
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Lord Newby
My Lords, I am happy to give that assurance but the noble Lord underlines what has been a leitmotif of the nuclear programme. On paper it has looked a lot better in a number of respects and easier to deliver than has been achieved in practice. What we are committed to trying to achieve when we set our face to get new nuclear capacity is that we are able to deliver it on a reasonable budget and within a sensible timeframe.
Lord Howarth of Newport
My Lords, will the Minister confirm that, as a result of the postponement of major capital projects until the later part of the decade, they will incur significantly higher interest rate costs than they would have done if they had been planned and financed earlier? Will he also confirm that, as a result of the postponement of employment-generating projects, the social security bill will be significantly higher than it would otherwise have been in the interim?
Lord Newby
My Lords, the Bank of England has expressed the view that low interest rates are here to stay for a significant period ahead. Only an idiot would predict what interest rates will be in 2020 but if we look at the next three or four years, I do not think that anybody would say that interest rates were going to rise significantly, if at all. As for whether employing lots of people to build houses or roads means that fewer people are unemployed, that is self-evidently the case. That is why we are keen to get these programmes moving as quickly as we can.