Business of the House

Debate between Lord Swire and Mel Stride

Thursday 18th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mel Stride]

The hon. Lady raises an important point. The thoughts of the entire House are with the family and friends of those involved in the incident. Knife crime, as she knows, is a complex issue, and there are a number of reasons why we have higher levels of it, although crime generally has been falling since 2010. Often, knife crime is related to drugs, as she will know, and to county lines. That is why we have a cross-Government approach to tackling the issue. Some £100 million was provided in the last spring statement to make sure that we have the appropriate co-ordination to tackle the problem. I am sure that the Home Office and other Departments will have heard her question.

[Sir Hugo Swire (East Devon) (Con)]

The National Crime Agency was first warned about the activities of the paedophile Matthew Bell in September 2016, but he was not arrested until March 2018, which allowed him to continue to abuse Filipino children, some as young as 11, until April 2017. The right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), Chairman of the Select Committee on Home Affairs, described this as “incredibly disturbing”, and went on to say:

“I’ve been concerned for many years that there just aren’t enough resources going into this given the scale of the escalating problem we face.”

May we have a debate in Government time, or a statement from the Home Secretary, on the resources available to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection command and the NCA, so that we can ensure that we are properly resourced to combat a crime that sometimes, alas, includes children around the world being peddled by their own family, and so that we can make sure that we are doing everything that we can to control and stamp out this abhorrent behaviour?

[Mel Stride]

My right hon. Friend raises an appalling and deeply distressing set of issues that would be well served by a debate. Perhaps the hon. Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) might consider this a subject for a future Backbench Business debate. I would be very happy to go further and offer to facilitate a meeting for my right hon. Friend with any particular Minister.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lord Swire and Mel Stride

Tuesday 11th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mel Stride]

I can enlighten the hon. Gentleman, although it is contained in the documentation that has come out of the negotiations. There will be an enhanced equivalence regime in respect of financial services. It is there in black and white. I am very happy to speak to him after questions and take him through the relevant paragraphs.

[Sir Hugo Swire (East Devon) (Con)]

11. What recent discussions he has had with the airline industry on air passenger duty on UK domestic flights.

Business Rates

Debate between Lord Swire and Mel Stride

Wednesday 13th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Mel Stride)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr Gray.

I congratulate the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) both on securing the debate and on the tenacious approach she has rightly taken to the extremely important matter of business rates. I thank her for her comprehensive contribution, and in particular for the examples she gave of high street businesses—I think we all recognise that many face considerable challenges. I also thank the various other speakers, who raised numerous points. I intend to pick up on as many as I can, but I would of course be happy to engage with Members outside the Chamber on any that I omit.

I thank my right hon. and gallant Friend the Member for East Devon (Sir Hugo Swire) for his kind remarks about the amount that I care about this issue and for referencing my business background. I fully appreciate what a struggle it is in the business world, even when times are extremely good. It is never easy to go out and employ people, to generate wealth and to have a successful business. I also appreciate that business rates are one of those taxes that businesses simply cannot avoid—they are paid irrespective of profitability, which of course has particular consequences in some cases.

We need to put this debate in context. A number of Members said that business rates are an issue but are not the totality of the pressures that our high streets face. We heard much about the challenges of online marketplaces and of the planning system—when there is a change of use of businesses that reside on our high streets, for instance—and my right hon. and gallant Friend raised the issue of parking. Myriad issues impinge on this space, and I think we are all seeking to ensure that taxes right across the system are competitive, that there is fairness among those who are expected to pay them, and that they are collected, so that we minimise tax avoidance at every stage.

That brings me to the comments by the hon. Member for York Central about possible alternatives to the current rating system. She mentioned a tax on revenue or on profitability. As soon we started to tax revenue, we would run into the problem that businesses that were not profitable still had a turnover. For example, a new entrant on the high street that we all wanted to thrive may get throttled by the kind of approach that she suggests. If we went for a tax on profits, there would be the potential for profit shifting. If there were a particular regime in one area, businesses may move profits around between multiple enterprises to reduce their overall tax.

The hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) recognised that. He made the important point that business rates have a distinct advantage when it comes to avoidance, because buildings cannot be shifted around in the way that it might be possible to shift other metrics. He also raised the 100% business rates retention pilots and expressed hope that we would pursue that measure. We will pursue it with vigour. I am watching it very closely in Devon, where the pilot scheme is also operating. I very much look forward to catching up with the report of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, which he chairs.

My hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas) raised the issue of second homes being designated as businesses because they are holiday lets. We are engaged with the VOA to ensure that no abuse occurs in those circumstances. He will be aware that certain criteria have to be met for individuals or companies to treat properties in that way. I am happy to engage with him outside the Chamber on that issue, because he raised one or two interesting points. He also raised the issue of different businesses paying different rates and gave an example of two businesses right next door to each other. He and I have discussed that, and I look forward to looking in greater detail with him at the examples that I know he will come forward with.

The hon. Member for High Peak (Ruth George) raised a point about pubs and suggested that information being made available to the public might drive crime. I am certainly prepared to look at that. I imagine that those who are out to raid the premises of pubs have other measures by which they might be able to discern whether a lot of cash is being taken—how many people are in there drinking on a Friday night, for example—but I am certainly happy to speak to her about that. She also raised the way pub rates are calculated. They are valued by the VOA using the fair maintainable trade method, which has been agreed with the British Beer and Pub Association.

Let me point out the numerous things that the Government have done on business rates to support businesses. In 2016, we announced around £9 billion of relief on business rates. We made the 100% small business relief permanent, which took 600,000 businesses out of rates altogether. We increased the threshold for the standard multiplier, removing 250,000 businesses from the higher rate of business rates. Of course, we were able to do that only because of our prudent stewardship of the economy, which has allowed us the space to provide that relief to the business community.

I have limited time, but I will dwell for a moment on the online business threat, which a number of hon. Members rightly raised. There is a growing number of online businesses in this space, and an increasing number of purchases are happening through online companies. It is important to make the point up front that when we refer to some of those companies paying relatively small amounts of tax compared with high street operations, we are talking not about tax avoidance but about whether the way the international tax regime operates is appropriate or functional for the 21st century. It is not. We need to find different ways of taxing online platforms, whether they are search engines, social media platforms that generate revenue, or online marketplaces, where significant value generation occurs through the relationship between users based in the UK and the platform itself.

[Sir Hugo Swire]

It is reassuring to hear the Minister say that we need to look at ways of taxing those rather more mobile forms of purchasing online. Will he say whether there is a team in the Treasury doing that, and when it is likely to report?

[Mel Stride]

There is indeed. I am personally engaged in that matter, which has been taken up at the OECD and the European Union. They have both produced interim reports on the issue and suggested that we might look multilaterally at some kind of revenue-based taxation, albeit—to get back to the problem of revenue-based tax—we do not want to choke off new entrants to the marketplace, which may be loss-making, so there may have to be some de minimis thresholds associated with that formula. We are actively pursuing that on a multilateral basis with countries in those two institutions. I discussed exactly this issue with Finance Ministers from OECD countries at the ministerial meeting of the OECD in Paris last week. We have made it clear that, although it would be most beneficial to move multilaterally with other countries, we will make a unilateral move if we need to.

I am conscious that we are down to the last minute and I would like to give the hon. Member for York Central an opportunity to respond, so I will draw my remarks to a conclusion.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lord Swire and Mel Stride

Tuesday 16th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sir Hugo Swire (East Devon) (Con)]

T8. The cost of the backlog of repairs to our historic buildings is now estimated to stand at an alarming £1.3 billion, in large part because of the changes to VAT levied on repairs. Will my right hon. Friend show that, as a Conservative, he genuinely believes in conservation and that something will be left standing for future generations to enjoy?

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Mel Stride)]

I certainly agree with my right hon. Friend’s assertion of the importance of our heritage, which was recognised when last year the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport gave grants of more than £140 million in that respect. On VAT relief for repairs to historic buildings, the situation that currently pertains to EU regulations is that if we were to make changes or reductions, we would have to apply them to all buildings in the UK, at onerous cost, but that is something we can look into as and when we leave the EU.