Finance (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Chris Leslie

Wednesday 17th April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Leslie]

My hon. Friend has hit the nail on the head. Imagine announcing such a scheme, and then delivering only 1.5% of the goal that the Government set out so confidently at the inception of that project, which has clearly failed. We want to see the careful and detailed thought, piloting, workings and evidence that the Government have put into this latest venture.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

rose—

[Chris Leslie]

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is now going to assure us that all that careful and thorough work has been done.

[Mr Jackson]

The hon. Gentleman is being most generous in giving way. We would take his critique a little more seriously, had not his Government’s regional spatial strategy delivered the lowest number of homes since 1923, doubled the number of homeless families and built 117,000 homes on flood plains between 1997 and 2005. Is that not the reality of the Government he supported between 1997 and 2010?

[Chris Leslie]

Setting aside the fact that there is probably the lowest number of Conservative MPs here in the Chamber today since 1923, they do not have room to criticise any previous Government on these issues, let alone the last Labour Government. We believe that there is a crying need for housing, which is one of the crucial foundations for future economic prosperity. It is about time Government Members recognised that they have had three years in power, and have their own record to defend. They have to take some responsibility for the decisions they have been supporting.

I do not know whether my hon. Friends recall the infrastructure guarantee scheme, a key feature of the summer before last. It was part of the Government’s emergency legislation, and they rushed it through Parliament. It was supposed to enable guarantees to underpin £40 billion of investment in infrastructure and £10 billion-worth of new homes, including 15,000 new affordable homes. However, so far as I can see—I am sure the Minister will intervene if I am wrong—not a single tangible penny of support from that scheme has been allocated for house building. I am happy to give way to the Minister if he wants to correct me.

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[Chris Leslie]

I know that the Minister pursues his duty to this House with great diligence and that, in responding to the debate, he will want to update us in detail on the number of extra houses that have been forthcoming as a result of the vital emergency legislation that the Government put through. It would be extremely helpful if he did so. However, it is clear to us that the overwhelming barrier for the housing market to overcome has been the 60% cut in the affordable housing budget made in the 2010 spending review, and of course, matters have been made worse by the subsequent lack of growth in the economy. It is therefore no wonder that the Chancellor felt the need to reboot his various schemes back in March. That is why we come now to the Government’s Help to Buy scheme, the detail of which I want to spend a little time considering.

[Mr Stewart Jackson]

I pay tribute to the Minister, who does indeed know what he is talking about, having been, like me, a member of the board of management of the New Local Government Network. If there is a Labour Government within the next year or so, will the hon. Gentleman abolish the affordable rent model and put funding directly back into social rent—yes or no?

[Chris Leslie]

I will come to some of those details because I think it important that we look at the contrasting policy options for housing support. My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington has been developing our plans for house building and housing supply in a number of different ways, and I will touch on those, if I may, after having looked at the Government’s approach: the Help to Buy scheme, which consists of two parts, the first being an equity loan element. The Government have said that they want to extend what was known as the First Buy scheme—there are so many names that it is sometimes difficult to keep track—whereby people would purchase new build homes up to a value of £600,000 and could borrow 20% of the value of the property interest free for five years in return for the Government taking a stake in the equity. The fee for that would increase annually, but only in line with inflation, so the Government are essentially committing, they say, up to £3.5 billion over the next three years to this shared equity loan scheme.

Section 5 of the European Communities (Amendment) Act 1993

Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Chris Leslie

Tuesday 24th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Chris Leslie]

I am afraid that I am not surprised to hear that that is the case. The hon. Gentleman spends a great deal of time and effort monitoring how these issues progress. Personally, I feel we need to find ways of supporting and stabilising the situation in the eurozone, but I do not think that the Government’s strategy is the right way to do that. However, I digress.

[Mr Stewart Jackson]

I feel it appropriate to give the shadow Minister some friendly advice. One reason why my party was not credible on the economy until quite a few years after we lost the election was that in many respects we did not face up to the fact of the legacy we left. I remind him that he really should be looking at the wider picture of Europe rather than focusing on the national situation here. The fact is that real-terms public expenditure rose by 53% from £450 billion to £700 billion between 2000 and 2010. His party ran a structural deficit in times of economic growth. That is the situation in which we find ourselves now.

[Chris Leslie]

I obviously disagree with the hon. Gentleman’s assessment, but he made an important point earlier about the plight of those who are suffering as a result of the austerity approach being applied in southern European countries in particular. I worry greatly about that; it is a matter of concern. It is also a concern, however, for our constituents here in the UK. We take a different approach on principle about the right ways to repair our economy. We believe that a stronger emphasis on growth is necessary to generate revenues; it is not just about public expenditure cuts, which do not provide the way out of the situation. I also disagree that the motion is a general debate about the state of the European economies. We are debating whether the Red Book provides a right, accurate, fair and good assessment of the state of the British economy such that we can submit it, as we are required to do by the treaties, to the European Commission. I am simply following the strictures placed on us by the Maastricht treaty.

Finance Bill

Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Chris Leslie

Tuesday 28th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Stewart Jackson]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Chris Leslie]

Well, why not? More from the hon. Gentleman.

[Mr Jackson]

On the subject of unfairness, would the hon. Gentleman like to apologise for the fact that in the financial year 2007-08, under his party’s Government, the tax burden on one-earner married couples with two children, on the average wage, rose to 44% greater than the OECD average? That is a matter of fairness. Does he think any responsible party should ignore it?

[Chris Leslie]

I am not quite sure what the hon. Gentleman’s point is. Maybe in the cool light of day that intervention will have more light shed on it. In his contribution earlier, he asserted that there was a causal link between marriage and the socio-economic well-being of society, child well-being and so forth. He may well have a set of statistics in which he sees a correlation, but I am sure he understands the difference between causal and correlative effect. It may well be that car ownership has a similar correlation with child well-being, but that does not mean that setting up the tax system to the advantage of a particular institution will necessarily have the outcome that he seeks.

My hon. Friends the Members for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), for North Durham (Mr Jones) and others have overwhelmingly proved that we need a tax and benefits system focused on need and on poverty alleviation, particularly poverty among children. That must be the driving force behind a sane and rational tax system. We do not want a system with the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies that Conservative Members advocate.

Communities and Local Government (CSR)

Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Chris Leslie

Thursday 13th January 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mr Jackson]

I am always happy to facilitate an advertising break for Yorkshire and the Humber, as I am sure the Chairman of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Sheffield South East, would be. In the previous Parliament, a report published by the Local Government Association found that the specific argument against regional development agencies was that they had not overcome the differences in economic growth within or between their areas, and work by management consultants Ernst and Young also found that.

The philosophical underpinning for local enterprise partnerships is that we recognise that there are very local economies. Even in an area such as the north-east of England—I am mindful of the need not to go off the point too much, Mr Robertson—there is a quantum difference between the economic issues that inform decisions taken on Teesside and those that inform decisions taken in Tynemouth, north of Newcastle or in Stockton-on-Tees. Even within that area, there are sub-regional economies, so I think we have made the right decision on local enterprise partnerships.

I want to talk now about the less than benign fiscal climate that we face. I think we will have a mature and grown-up debate today, but it is worth saying that Her Majesty’s Opposition committed themselves to a 20% reduction in local government funding. If members of the Labour party in Parliament and beyond are not going to make that reduction now, and given the Minister’s very good point about the Office for Budget Responsibility having looked at the net reduction as a function of local authorities being able to recoup funding in a way that the Ministry of Justice, for instance, cannot necessarily do, the question is what core services Labour party members will cut.

We have had a lot of lectures from the Labour party recently about local government cuts, so let us look at one example: Durham county council. The unitary authority there will see its formula grant reduced from £263 million to £235 million. We should bear it in mind that Surrey county council, for instance, will see its grant reduced from £178 million to £152 million. Durham seems to find enough funds to spend £3.73 million on communication. It has five diversity officers, four European officers, two climate change officers and an undisclosed number of staff working full time for trade unions. It has also refused to say how much its chief executive is paid. Funnily enough, it is sitting on £93 million of reserves. If I can be slightly partisan, my colleagues and I will accept lectures about the impact of cuts only if all the alternatives to cuts are being pursued.

[Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)]

I assume that the hon. Gentleman is proud to be giving a £1 billion cut in corporation tax to the banks in the coming year. That is value for money, is it?

[Mr Jackson]

I am mindful of the fact that the hon. Gentleman has great expertise as a member of the shadow Treasury team. That is true not least of local government issues, because he and I sit on the board of the New Local Government Network. However, to pick up on the exchanges at Prime Minister’s questions yesterday, the former Government’s lack of effort and application speaks volumes about how imperative they saw the need to deal with that issue.