National Insurance Contributions (Secondary Class 1 Contributions) Bill

Lord Porter of Spalding Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 6th February 2025 Grand Committee

This amendment is a probing amendment, but it is no less serious for that. On this side, we are laying down a marker which demands a response to yet another broken promise. The Minister should know that this tax is not just a free hit on the man from the council. Will he just admit that the effect is actively targeting the most vulnerable in our society and the people I thought the Labour Party came into existence to protect? I beg to move.

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise if it is inappropriate to speak now, when I have not paid any attention to this debate previously—there is a good reason for that, which I will explain in a minute. I declare my interests as they pertain to this: there are a number, but the two main ones are that I am a vice-president of the LGA, so clearly I agree with some of what my noble friend Lord Fuller said, and I am also a non-executive director of a care company owned by another council. I could have spoken in a number of these debates, but I have chosen to speak now only because my noble friend Lord Fuller was speaking, and somebody has to put what he said in loads of words into a few short words. That is no disrespect to my noble friend, who is obviously much more eloquent than I will ever be.

I have not spoken before because I do not agree with my side on everything. I do not think it is the Ministers’ fault, or my colleagues’ fault when they were Ministers, or the coalition’s fault when they were Ministers. All the pressures facing public services have been in the system for at least 20 years. In 2006, before the 2008 crash, we had a declining budget for public services; all the political parties have fingerprints on that. I do not want to get involved in the debate about whose fault it is, why we are here and how we got this far. I really love civil servants—I was a NED in a department for a while—but it is their fault that the Government are now doing the wrong thing. The Government have created a jobs tax that will increase unemployment because it was an easy model that has been sitting on the shelf for the best part of 15 or 16 years. Other Governments resisted going down this route; the current Government have been caught on the hop and are acting against their own stated aims.

I really do not want to criticise the Government or the Civil Service, but if we are to have more money to spend on public services, which everybody agrees are underfunded, we have to get it from somewhere, so somebody is going to pay more. Hopefully, we will all make more, so we can all afford to pay more, but this will not give us more. It will end up giving us less, because people will be laid off and we will have to pay their benefits. We will get worse public services and more expensive benefits—nobody wins, but it is an easy solution to a big problem. So, while I agree that we are going to play Committee games and not move any of these amendments, at some point we will end up going through a Division Lobby and we will vote against the Government—not because we do not like them, but because we think they are being sucker-punched by people who have an easy solution that will not fix the problem.

This is a hard problem; we have to find the proper solution to it, and NI is not the way to get better public services. For those reasons, I have to agree with my friend John—my noble friend Lord Fuller—but I cannot speak as eloquently as he can.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly on this issue. I find myself in agreement with both my noble friends Lord Porter of Spalding and Lord Fuller, because they are both right. My noble friend Lord Fuller puts his case with great elegance and eloquence, and has experience of having led a district council and being involved with the District Councils Network. We have something in common because I was also once vice-president of the Local Government Association and had the great honour of being a Front-Bencher for Communities and Local Government in the other place.

I want to focus on a particular aspect that concerns me about the unintended consequences of these fiscal changes and their effect on local government. There are huge demographic pressures that no government can get absolutely right, because no government can deal with, for instance, the problem of unaccompanied children that faces councils such as Kent County Council; social care for the over-85s, the number of whom is going to double in the next 20 to 25 years; children’s transport services, with the number of children who are given statements for special educational needs; and, of course, pensions in local government. These are all issues that any party in government is going to have to deal with, irrespective of how well-meaning Ministers are and how hard civil servants work.

My concern stems from what has happened recently in Peterborough, where the gap between the available budget and spending is around £20 million, which, for a small unitary, is a significant amount of money. The reserve has been reduced, over just one year, from £45 million to £14 million. My worry is about what Lord Macmillan, Harold Macmillan, described in 1985 as “selling off the family silver”. The problem with such a broad-brush fiscal change as this is not that it will necessarily force many authorities into a Section 114 situation where they are, de facto, bankrupt, but that it will force them to dispose of very important long-term assets, which they will never get back.

Local Authorities: Budgets

Lord Porter of Spalding Excerpts

Tuesday 19th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

No, I do not agree. In recent years, a small number of local authorities took on excessive debt through their commercial strategies and investments. The Government have taken action both to bring this practice to an end and to revise the framework by which local authorities can borrow and invest. The levelling-up Bill expands statutory powers to directly tackle excessive risk within the local government capital system.

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

My Lords, the scrapping of the Audit Commission was one of the best functions of the previous coalition Government. The Audit Commission wasted billions of pounds of public money.

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My noble friend sets out the rationale for the decision that was taken, and the Government have made sure that, in the commission’s place, we have strong controls so that local government spending is done in the best possible way.

Budget Statement

Lord Porter of Spalding Excerpts

Tuesday 14th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

My Lords, first, I remind noble Lords of my registered interests. One of them was referred to earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, who is not in his seat, as I am chairman of the Local Government Association, but I need to remind Members that it is a cross-party group, and the only reason I am the chairman is that we are the largest group in it, and we have more councillors and control more councils than any other political party in this country. I should also apologise before I start, because I have sat through nearly three and a half hours of debate and for the majority of it have been really pleased that Members in this House are not members of the Treasury and not responsible for the Budget. No doubt, by the time I sit down, your Lordships will be equally glad that I am not a member of the Treasury or responsible for the Budget.

I want to be a little critical of the Government for missing out housing, which is the biggest item on the agenda but was not mentioned in the Budget. We should be encouraging councils to build more council homes. If the Government’s intention is to do large-scale system-build, the only way of doing that is through the state getting back into housing, and at some point, somebody in the Treasury will have to realise that. I also regret that the Budget did not take the opportunity to reverse the retrospective changes to the new homes bonus. That was counterproductive.

On the upside, the £2 billion is the biggest single lump of money going into adult social care for years, and we should not downplay that. The Local Government Association asked for £1.3 billion this year, and we got £1 billion. That is not the same as we asked for, but I have a sneaking feeling that we might have been asking for a little more than we actually needed, and that the Government have probably given us a little less than we needed, if I am being truthful about it. The reality with adult social care is that the Treasury could not print enough money for us to do the best job possible. This country’s fiscal system does not allow us to do what we would all in our hearts want to do, which is to make sure that our most vulnerable people do not go into hospital when they do not need to, because that costs us money and gives them a poorer quality of life.

I should also mention business rates. Local government loves the changes to the businesses rates: £300 million of relief to be handed out at a local level and our being able to choose which of the businesses that benefit our community the most are most deserving of the relief. That is another good move. I also like the £1,000 for pubs—I just wish somebody would let me take all the cheques round in South Holland, where I am the council leader, and hand them out personally to the businesses, but perhaps that is not going to be the way the system works.

However, now I start to be critical—of both sides. The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, said we need to do revaluations for council tax. We have just seen what happens when we do them for business rates. Do we want to drive every single citizen in the country through that level of pain again—for no real gain, because it is only redistributive and fiscally neutral? I cannot see the point of doing it. I cannot see why the Government did it with business rates and I certainly would not want us to do it with domestic taxation. A noble friend on this side talked about increasing fuel duty. I look after a very rural community, and if you increase fuel duty around there, you are impacting on people’s ability to have a decent quality of life. Just because people drive a lot, it does not mean they earn a lot. Fuel duty is the wrong way to increase revenue. If we are sure that we need to take more money off the population, it needs to be through proper taxation and not through stealth taxation.

Another downside of that is that we would end up increasing the cost of all the goods we buy and sell, because all of that travels by roads. Councils would have to pay more for their refuse collection and school transport, hospitals would have to pay more for hospital transport, and the police would have to pay more to go and catch criminals. Fuel taxation is not the way to do this, unless—if the Minister could take this back to the Treasury, I would really appreciate it—you let all state vehicles run on red diesel, on which there is no duty. Rural councils would do a much better job if they did not have to pay tax over to the Government on the fuel they use. You can do it if you run a tractor, and I do not understand why you cannot if you run a dustcart.

I want to sit down on a happy note. The noble Baroness, Lady Burt, right at the beginning of the debate, made one of the best suggestions I have heard in here, which is to allow girls on free school meals access to free sanitary products. If there is a way of exploring that, I would welcome it, and I hope my noble friend the Minister can at least ask whether it is feasible.