Finance (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Alison Seabeck and Huw Irranca-Davies

Wednesday 17th April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Alison Seabeck]

My hon. Friend has put his position on the record, so I will not take further interventions on that point.

I come back to the amendment and its call for a review.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

My hon. Friend has raised the issue of the disparity between the £2.5 billion that the Prime Minister said on repeated occasions would be raised by the bank levy and the nearly £1 billion that is now missing. Does she share my hope that when he responds the Minister will identify where that £1 billion a year is? If we could find it, it could go towards the job creation schemes that we are talking about. Some £1 billion is being nicked from the Treasury every year.

[Alison Seabeck]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right in suggesting that if there is a £1 billion gap, it should be explained. I am sure that the Prime Minister would like to know, given that he has repeatedly stood at the Dispatch Box using that figure, which seems to have been plucked from the sky.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

It would be completely remiss of anybody in the House even to suggest that the Prime Minister was in any way misleading the House when on repeated occasions he cited the figure of £2.5 billion a year. But could it be possible that he has been misled inadvertently by Treasury officials or other Ministers?

[Alison Seabeck]

That is exactly my point. Has the Prime Minister been given duff information? If he has, that is pretty shocking. Ministers should take responsibility if that is the case.

I come back again to my point. The amendment is calling for a review, which is absolutely right. The hon. Member for Bristol West (Stephen Williams), who spoke in the previous debate, is not in his place, but I hope that this time the Liberal Democrats will not pursue the line taken by the hon. Gentleman, which was that it is unreasonable for the Treasury to carry out a review—of a mansion tax, in the context of the previous debate. He seemed to have forgotten that the Government are carrying out a review, at taxpayers’ expense, into the future of Trident. Obviously, that is basically a review for future Lib Dem policy. As I said, it is a shame that the hon. Gentleman is not here, because there was a bit of a contradiction between the two positions from the Liberal Democrats.

In Plymouth and the rest of the south-west, we are still lagging behind the rest of the country when it comes to finding the full-time jobs that young people desperately need. The number of unemployed is still higher than in 2010 and the number of long-term unemployed is growing. Although the Government keep telling us that more people are employed—the mantra has come from them again today—their figures hide the simple fact of the contrast with the position in 2008.

Then, when people were asked whether they felt they were working excessive hours, the answer came back as a resounding yes; people felt that they were working more hours than was reasonable. Now that figure is different—in large numbers, people are seeking more hours to work. It is estimated that there is a shortfall of 20 million working hours, which equates to a real unemployment figure that runs closer to 3 million. Questions have also been asked of people who work part-time and want to work full-time. The number who want to switch from part-time to full-time is 1.5 million—that is just in the three months running up to February.

There is clearly a problem. People are working part-time; indeed, some are trying to hold down two or three part-time jobs, as was evidenced during a street surgery that I held in Whitleigh a couple of weeks ago. Some people have used their redundancy money to set up as self-employed, and those figures are slightly skewing the evidence on what is happening on the ground. Some people have been transferred from the public sector to the private sector, often on reduced hours. That shift partly explains the rise in the number of jobs in the private sector; they are not new jobs but simply transferred jobs.

The tax proposal in the new clause would fund a job for every young person who had been out of work for a year or more. That number is up, year on year, by 37%. They would have to take up that job or risk losing their benefits. This is no soft touch but a serious attempt to give hope to young people and to help them get a foot on the ladder and contribute to society. Unemployment among young people is higher in this country under this coalition Government than it was at any time under Labour. The number of people claiming jobseeker’s allowance in my constituency remains above the national and regional average. Reinstating Labour’s bank bonus is therefore the right thing to do.