Finance (No. 2) Bill

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee of the Whole House (Day 1)
Monday 19th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Jones]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a good point, as he always does. I have considered that point, and I know that the Government have also considered it, but this is about striking a balance between encouraging the recovery and choking it off. Part of that recovery is ensuring that we have sound public finances. We have had two supposed once-in-a-century events in just over 10 years, and the lesson we should draw is that financial responsibility allows Governments to respond to crises at scale. That is what we have just seen here, and that has helped the finances of families across our nation when they needed it most.

That is also why the economic recovery, with its focus on growth and investment and on households and Government, cannot be put off. The personal allowance measure in the Bill should proceed. We should not listen to the Labour party because, quite frankly, its Members have voted against all the personal allowance increases in Budget measures over the past 10 years. We need to get the focus that we have had on saving lives back on to recovering livelihoods.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

I will speak to new clause 10. This UK Government said they would be led by data, not dates, and the Chancellor has stood in the Chamber on several occasions and said he will do whatever it takes to ensure recovery, yet in this Finance Bill he has seen fit to put an arbitrary date on ending the furlough scheme. The Labour shadow Chancellor has been critical of the Government’s previous dithering on extending the job retention scheme, so I hope her colleagues will support the SNP’s new clause, which will protect jobs and workers across the UK.

New clause 10 would introduce a reporting requirement to compare the effect of continuing the coronavirus job retention scheme and the self-employment income support scheme until both 30 September 2021 and 31 December 2021. Reports would be required on the specific impacts of continuing to both dates on business investment, employment, productivity, GDP growth, and poverty. SNP Members believe that the furlough and self-employment support schemes should be continued for as long as our economy requires them. It is economic recklessness to confidently predict the end of a pandemic that has thrown us curveballs time and again. Any winding down of support schemes should be linked to the numbers of covid cases in the population, with proper care taken to make sure that no badly hit areas are left behind.

We have seen the potential of new variants such as the Kent and South African variants, with the Indian variant causing the country to be added to the red list and prompting the Prime Minister to cancel his travel plans just this week. On the variants and support for people who need tests, I welcome the change to exempt coronavirus tests from income tax, but SNP amendment 93 would seek to extend the income tax exemption for payments to employees in respect of the cost of obtaining antigen coronavirus tests to cover specific antibody coronavirus tests, too. There is a wider argument for broadening the provision to future proof the Bill for future pandemics and other such incidents, so I hope Ministers will give the proposal some consideration.

Businesses have found themselves in a position of having to make payments on VAT deferred last year in the first week of the crisis while we are still in lockdown in the second peak of the crisis, and now the biggest lifeline supporting our economy is being pulled away without any due consideration for the impact on jobs.