Finance (No. 3) Bill

Andrew Love Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Chris Leslie]

We find ourselves in the Committee stage of the Finance Bill, a rather large two-volume measure that, over the coming two days on the Floor of the House, we will no doubt explore in some detail. The Bill will then progress upstairs to Committee, where more detailed scrutiny will take place.

It is a peculiarity of Ways and Means resolutions and of the way in which proposed finance legislation is scrutinised in the House of Commons that hon. Members who are not Ministers may not table amendments to Finance Bills that would have the effect of raising the level of taxation. That was news to me, perhaps because I was in government and did not think about tabling such amendments, but the rules of order are as they are, so the amendment does not propose—because we cannot—an increase in the rate of the bank levy. Instead, it calls for a review of the rate and the general approach to bank taxation adopted by the Treasury. It seeks to look into the rationale behind the rate that the Treasury has chosen for the bank levy and why a number of other choices were made.

[Mr Andrew Love (Edmonton) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that in setting the rate the Government missed an opportunity? The bank levy could have raised significant sums to help with the other policies that we hoped they might pursue.

[Chris Leslie]

Indeed. Were it possible under the rules of order for the Opposition to table an amendment to increase the bank levy rate, we probably would have done so. However, we were unable to do so because of the slightly arcane rules of order. We need to examine the rationale behind the rate chosen by the Minister and understand why the Government moved from a threshold approach to triggering the bank levy, to a tax-free allowance of a certain amount before which banks would pay against the chargeable liabilities of the bank levy.

We also need to understand whether the bank levy is, as my hon. Friend suggests, an adequate step when considered in the context of the wider economy and public finances. Ultimately, we need to understand whether the Treasury is being straight with the public and honest about the taxes that the banks will pay over the years ahead. We have debated the Government’s approach to the banking sector before, and we look forward to the final report of the Vickers commission on the state of competition and regulation of the banks so that never again can these institutions take such extreme risks and gambles that land in the lap of the taxpayer when the going gets tough, as they did before the credit crunch.

[Chris Leslie]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely prescient intervention, because the Chancellor, under pressure from the Opposition, had to cave in to a concession on corporation tax in the March Budget. The Government announced the bank levy last June, so we knew that they would be introducing this tax, yet the corporation tax cuts will clearly benefit the banks significantly. The Treasury claims that in the March Budget it offset the benefit that the banks will apparently get as a result of the reduction in corporation tax rates, but we will have to wait to see whether the slight increase in the bank levy—around £100 million—introduced in the Budget will be sufficient to offset the full corporation tax cuts that the banks will enjoy over the lifetime of this Parliament. I recall that the written answer to a question I tabled on the predicted benefits to the banks of the corporation tax reductions suggested that that would be about £100 million in year one, £200 million in year two, £300 million in year three, and so on, but that largely reflects the reductions in corporation tax rates. That is something of a moot point, because we contend that the design of the bank levy is insufficient. Today’s debate should provide an opportunity to seek proper redress for the crisis and ensure that we put the banks on a fair tax basis, but that is not what the Government are seeking with this pathetically small bank levy proposal.

[Mr Love]

Will not the combination of measures on corporation tax being introduced in the Bill advantage the banks over other businesses, and must we not be very careful not to make it appear that the banks are being let off lightly?

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[Chris Leslie]

Even the Swedish advocate a bank levy, and we must acknowledge that the alternative financial changes are being made in a number of jurisdictions across the world. Obviously, the more jurisdictions in which such measures are pursued, the better, because that will remove the argument on regulatory arbitrage.

However, it is worth looking at the pathology and history of the bank levy, and at how the Chancellor has tweaked the rate. The Government pull back from a higher rate when they think it is too much, but sometimes the Chancellor gets into hot water and feels the need to change that approach. On the fateful morning of 8 February, at 7.30, the Chancellor went on the “Today” programme and announced a mini-Budget. It just so happened, by pure coincidence, that that was on the day of Treasury questions, when he was struggling with the banks in the negotiations on the damp squib that was Project Merlin. While we are on Project Merlin, we should not let go the opportunity to note that borrowing is increasingly expensive for small and medium-sized enterprises, and that according to the most recent data, there is less and not more availability.

The Chancellor changed the rate again in the March Budget, when, as I said, the Government were forced into a U-turn in the face of criticism of the reductions in corporation tax. That would have been a massive cash-back bonanza for the banks—it could still turn out that way, but we must wait for the final figures. At no point during the design of the bank levy have the Government said why they are capping revenues at just £2.6 billion. What is their fixation with that yield?

[Mr Love]

Before my hon. Friend moves off the subject of Project Merlin, does he agree that it was more than pathetic that, after telling the banks that they would increase the banking levy unless the banks came up with the goods, the Government made a pipsqueak change which did not rise to the occasion?

[Chris Leslie]

Absolutely. I cannot figure out why the Government refused to go beyond that £2.5 billion or £2.6 billion. That is a strange way to design a tax. Normally, a Government would think about whether the rate set was fair and just, and about the requirement for revenue yield, and they might even analyse the effect of the levy in a regulatory impact assessment or whatever. However, at no point have the Government said why they are reluctant to go beyond that £2.6 billion. Perhaps there has been a deal behind the scenes between the Chancellor and the banks, but if there has been such a deal, it is probably the only one that he has been able to reach.

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[Chris Leslie]

The Minister needs to answer that question. Hon. Members might care to turn to page 297 of the Bill. The steps might at first appear quite straightforward, but then we get to this odd provision in paragraph 7, with its proportions X, Y and Z of various different amounts and so on. I understand that that provision is triggered because the Treasury has to recoup retrospectively some of the money taken, since the Chancellor tweaked the levels of tax on 8 February and again in March. It therefore becomes incredibly complex and difficult to hold to account. The design of the bank levy has not been made easy by the Chancellor’s decisions.

[Mr Love]

On the intervention from my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), is it not rather strange, given that the Chancellor has set up an Office of Tax Simplification and announced as his first measure in the Budget that he wanted to put the principle of simplification at the forefront of tax consideration, that here we have something that is almost as complex as it gets?

[Chris Leslie]

As I said, the reason for the complexity is that all the variables in the design of the bank levy have to be amended because the Treasury wants to squash it around that figure of £2.5 billion or £2.6 billion of revenue. In other words, the whole of the bank levy is being driven by that particular sum, which is a very odd way of designing a tax.

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[Chris Leslie]

Staffing at HM Revenue and Customs is under incredible pressures. Indeed, there have been a number of redundancies and posts lost. It has not been explained where the extra resources will come from to ensure that the bank levy, in all its complexity, can be enforced adequately. Again, the Minister needs to say what extra capacity HMRC will have to implement this increasingly complex bank levy.

[Mr Love]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Chris Leslie]

In a moment, but I need to make some progress.

I understand that there is a difference between short-term and long-term liabilities. However, what will be the impact on businesses in the real economy if short-term liabilities are less attractive to major banks? For example, if a small firm has a bank deposit of over £100,000—to protect its cash flow or whatever—that happens to be above the level of the deposit guarantee scheme, what is to stop the banks raising their bank charges on SME deposit accounts to try to divest themselves of such short-term liabilities? That is an important point, because there will be consequences from the design of the bank levy. I would like the Minister to explain to the Committee why short-term liabilities and long-term liabilities have been divided in that way.

Can the Minister explain the position on the reported legal challenge under European Union law, which I understand many in the banking community are watching carefully? The Hungarian Government have introduced a levy on their energy and telecoms sectors. I understand that a case has been taken—or is due to be taken—to the European Court to claim that a levy on a specific sector of the economy is somehow unfair or not possible. To what extent is the Minister confident that the case will not have a bearing on the implementation of a banking levy here in the UK?

I would also be grateful if the Minister could answer the question about complexity and opacity in the bank levy accounting systems. As I understand it, overseas banks can sometimes not use IFRS—international financial reporting standards. If those banks do not use them, they will need to re-compute their chargeable equity and liabilities with reference to the UK’s GAAP—generally accepted accounting principles—or IFRS, in other words, by preparing a notional consolidation under those systems, including for branches. Is that anticipated to create a problem? What do the Government foresee as a solution to that level? Obviously we have banks that cross jurisdictions and use a series of different accounting platforms, so I would be grateful if the Minister could clarify some of the comments that have been made about that.

However, it is the Government’s general approach to banks and banking taxation that concerns many hon. Members—a general approach that, as we know, is quite woeful. Hon. Members have already raised their concerns about some of the bonuses that we have seen and the breathtaking behaviour that the banks have engaged in, even though they were the root cause of the credit crunch.

That makes the Government’s tax giveaway to the banks even more staggering. The post-Budget reaction last June, when the bank levy was announced, was indeed positive from the bankers themselves. They enjoyed the Government’s decisions on the bank levy. One commentator said:

“We’d expect most domestically-orientated banks…to be better off after four years than they were pre-Budget”,

and a City insider said that

“some banks will have a feeling of glee at the way this has worked out”.

Clearly, we need to advocate a bank bonus tax to raise £3.5 billion, as it did before. That deserves to be repeated this year. Even if it were to raise just £2 billion, that would make a massive difference to our society and our economy. For example, we have calculated that such an amount could be used to establish a youth jobs fund—using a similar model to the future jobs fund, which this Government have abolished—creating 90,000 new youth jobs at a time when youth unemployment is close to 1 million, with one in five young people on the dole.

That money could also help to construct 25,000 new homes for low-cost home ownership and affordable social renting. That would create tens of thousands of jobs in the construction industry and new apprenticeships alongside them. The money could also provide £200 million of funding for the regional growth fund, the Government’s rather lamentable replacement for the regional development agency funding. That could help to provide for regional projects and promote growth. The Government’s changes represent a two-thirds cut on the previous funding, and the first wave of £450 million in grants was several times oversubscribed with bids. We therefore need to revisit the regional growth fund, and a repeat of the bank bonus tax could support that.

The bonuses being paid are still vast; they remain at eye-watering levels. Despite the smoke and mirrors of Project Merlin, in which Ministers broke their promises to take action despite the warm words in the coalition agreement, the bonuses remain high. Let us just remind ourselves of what the coalition agreement promised. The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats said:

“We will bring forward detailed proposals for robust action to tackle unacceptable bonuses in the financial services sector; in developing these proposals, we will ensure they are effective in reducing risk.”

That is on page 9 of the agreement, right up front among the promises that the coalition made.

The Government could not even bring themselves to promote the basic transparency that we expect when it comes to bonuses and remuneration. The most that they could extract voluntarily from the banks in Project Merlin was an agreement to report anonymously on the total remuneration of the five highest paid senior executives of the bank, excluding board members. That is a weak and shameful compromise. The Government are not even forcing the banks to disclose all bonuses above £1 million, even though Labour’s legislation allows them to do so. That provision is already on the statute book.

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[Chris Leslie]

“But surely that is a complete coincidence”, he said ironically! I do not know whether my hon. Friend was making the point that this is payback time, but the level of these bonuses is incredible.

Let me finish my point about Barclays. I was saying that £38 million in bonuses and salaries went to just the top five earners. That is enough money to pay the wages of more than 1,000 qualified nurses in our NHS. That gives some meaning to the scale—enough money to pay for 1,000 qualified nurses.

[Mr Love]

Does not the refusal to be transparent about bonuses lead to the conclusion that hidden behind the chief executives on whom we have the facts are a series of individuals whose bonuses dwarf those that my hon. Friend has listed?

[Chris Leslie]

Absolutely; but, quite apart from the obscenity of the scale of some of those bonuses, there is a hard-headed economic rationale for more transparency. If shareholders cannot see what senior executives in the banking sector are being paid, that indicates a dysfunction in the corporate governance of the banks, and if the bonus pots of certain executives are being swelled by their behaviour—by the choices that they make and the risks that they are taking—perhaps those were some of the antecedents of the credit crunch. We need transparency to prevent us from repeating the problems that occurred in 2008.

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[Nic Dakin]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention about intervention. More intervention is needed from the Government, who have a stake in the banks. In fact, it is taxpayers and the public we serve who have that stake in the banks. He is quite right that the Government should be exercised about how they get the benefit back to the British people.

[Mr Love]

Have the Government not failed lamentably? If we look at Project Merlin, where they intervened with the banks on bonuses and on lending to small businesses, we can see the bonuses that are likely to be given this year and the fact that the Government have failed lamentably to deliver finance for small businesses in this country. They simply are not working.

[Nic Dakin]

I thank my hon. Friend for that observation. Project Merlin’s record is a sorry tale so far. We see a failure to deliver on bankers’ bonuses and a failure to reinvest the taxation from them in the economy. He is right that the record on lending to small and medium-sized enterprises is woeful. Small and medium-sized enterprises, as I think all Members recognise, are the lifeblood and the engine of our economy, and he is completely right to underline that point.

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However, the force of our argument is not just the contrast between the difficult situation of those people and the greed at the other end of the scale. It comes from the fact that there is a direct causal relationship between the two—the bankers are the ones who have caused the misery that our constituents will be enduring. More than that, the funds from the bank levy—the funds that are being paid in bonuses, from which we would seek to extract more for the Exchequer—could be better spent in tackling the problem in the other dimension. Instead of considering the matter from the point of view of its inequity, we should consider it in the context of achieving a resolution to the deficit crisis. That resolution can come through growth and through the spending of these resources in ways such as my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) explained clearly. We want the Government to accept the amendment, so that we can consider the adequacy of the bank levy in the context of other reforms to the banking system. We want a policy that is for growth in the economy, not simply one that is for taxes.

[Mr Love]

Is it not also the case that the taxpayer has given the banking system an unlimited guarantee, and that according to the Bank of England, we are subsidising the banks to the tune of about £100 billion a year? Yet even with all that support, they still demand that they should be able to pay massive bonuses.

[Barry Gardiner]

Indeed. The support that the country has given the banks is perfectly right, in my view. I disagree with the right hon. Member for Wokingham on the matter. He said that he would not have bailed out the banks at all. His position was very clear—he takes a very hard monetarist line and says that if the banks fail, they fail. Labour Members believe that the consequences of that failure cannot simply be ignored.

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[John McDonnell]

That is exactly my point. It might be that the levy is being set in relation to other banking reforms, particularly those on bonuses and remuneration, but not only have we seen the complete disregard of the Chancellor’s and Prime Minister’s exhortations, with bonuses continuing at a very high level, but we have seen, as another Member said, a diversion into other forms of remuneration and salary increases. That is almost an abuse of the system as set out in the Government’s proposals.

If the debate is about the adequacy of the levy, and in view of the fact that in spite of the Government having set down a marker in the proposals, bonuses have continued and remuneration has increased, can the Government not support the amendment? If the review reported at least by December—I would prefer the autumn—we could consider increasing the levy to ensure adherence to the wider banking reform proposals the Government want implemented. It is clear from the evidence produced today that the banks need a continuing threat—a sword of Damocles—hanging over their heads, if we are to get any change in the bonuses and remuneration that are so offensive to all our constituents suffering in the recession.

It might be that the levy was set so that the Merlin agreement could become fully operable and lending might start in earnest again. As my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham East noted, however, so far all the indications are that the revival of lending has not taken place. The Government’s proposals therefore warrant a review at the earliest stage, because even now, while they are still being implemented, they are not working. The evidence for that is all around us. It is clear now—this is why the review is so important—that the levy has become almost irrelevant to the real issues of capitalisation and regulation.

[Mr Love]

I agree with my hon. Friend about the review’s importance. On the one side, bankers are telling us that they are lending money and that money is available to lend; on the other side, we have small business organisations united in saying not only that money is not available, but that the terms on which it would be made available are so onerous as to make it impossible for them to take out a loan. The review could resolve who is right and who is wrong.

[John McDonnell]

The review would certainly test the adequacy of the levy as an instrument for influencing banks’ behaviour, which I believe is its purpose. However, the problem is not just the lack of lending; it is the continuing profiteering in the mainstream banking system—let alone the shadow banking system that my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) has been so assiduous in exposing. In the main Budget debate, I highlighted some of the interest charges being made. A report by Moneyfacts last August showed that the profit margins enjoyed by the banks on fixed-rate deals are the highest since 1988, and that the average interest rate on personal loans was 12.6%, which at 12.1% over the base rate is an all-time high. So far, the threat of the levy has done absolutely nothing to change banks’ behaviour in any aspect, whether remuneration, bonuses or lending. We are in danger of allowing the banks not merely to return to business as normal, but to get even worse. Even those in public ownership are out of public control. I find that extraordinary.

The review must take place in the context of other attempts, such as the Basel discussions, to restrain or control banks’ behaviour. Basel II seems to let the banks off the hook on a range of issues, from remuneration to capital ratios. The levy is meant to come in the context of the reforms the Government are engaging in nationally and internationally, but the Financial Times reported today that discussions about global standards on bank lending risks are not moving towards an agreement, so now we are not even moving forward in capital ratio discussions.

We need to consider the levy in the context of the banks’ role overall and the anger in our wider communities. Many believe—rightly—that the banks played the key role in creating the recession, and now, if we are not careful, by not lending or engaging in economic growth, they will play a role if not in tipping the economy into a double-dip recession, at least in leaving the economy to scrape along the bottom of economic activity. I have referred before to the words of Graham Turner, from the Left Economics Advisory Panel. He works in the City and is an expert on what happened in Japan. We face the prospect of a long, low-level, depressed, deflationary spiral if we do not use the levy to stimulate the banks into playing a responsible role within our economy.

We will come out of recession only through an astute mix of fiscal and monetary policy. In the 1930s—this is the whole point about Keynes—it was about not just deficit funding and quantitative easing, but more importantly banking reform. Banking reform is one element of the strategy that any Government must adopt to take us out of recession, and the banking levy is one of the few tools and weapons at our disposal that can force through banking reform. So far, the threat of the banking levy has failed to engage even those banks that are in public ownership in a proper discussion about banking reform and the role that they will have to play in tackling the recession and encouraging economic activity.

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[Mr Love]

I congratulate my next-door neighbour and right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) on a very competent speech.

It will not come as a surprise to those in the Chamber that I support the amendment. I support it primarily because there is so much public interest in and concern about bankers’ bonuses and the contribution being made by bankers when we are all supposed to be pulling our weight. I also support it for the reason given by the shadow Minister: a peculiarity of our system is that we cannot amend upwards any proposal in the Finance Bill, and the amendment offers an alternative way to look critically at the levy by proposing a review, which is not unreasonable. By December, we should have some idea of how it is working.

The most important feature of the amendment, as discussed earlier, is that it asks for a report to be published that can be debated by this House. Because of the importance of the issues involved, that is critical. The report will include an account of how the rate and the threshold were decided. As we have watched the measure’s development over the past few months, we have started to have a sneaking suspicion that Ministers decided what amount of tax should be paid by the banks and then worked back to what the threshold and the rate should be. I will come back to that point later.

Much has been said by Opposition Members about the measure’s adequacy. It is right to say that it will not raise as much as the bank bonus tax did and it is felt widely, within the House and outside, that the levy does not reflect the contribution that bankers ought to make. That relates to new subsection (2)(c) in the amendment. I will come back to bankers’ bonuses, because they have an important implication for the contribution that bankers should make.

In what the Government propose, we are being asked to agree to a levy on UK banks and building societies and on the UK operations of foreign banks. It is estimated that it will affect between 30 and 40 institutions, covering all the largest financial services institutions in the City of London and throughout the country. That proposal seems reasonable, but it is important that it is reviewed to see whether it is appropriate.

The tax will be levied on what the Chancellor termed the wholesale funding of banks, which is the liabilities and equity minus a number of items that are considered safe, such as tier 1 capital and insured retail deposits. I think that we are being asked to agree that that will incentivise the use of prudent balance sheets, rather than risky balance sheets. Of course, the wholesale funding that the Chancellor talked about was a major cause of the difficulties in the credit crunch. We all remember the collateralised debt obligations and the exotic funding regimes, although I do not think that any of the major institutions are into any of that now. The proposal, which mirrors the proposal that was discussed internationally, is intended to incentivise our banks to hold safer liabilities than they held before.

Many Opposition Members have commented on the threshold of the tax, which has been set at £20 billion. I hope that the Minister will respond to the concern that that figure is far too high. The rate has been a moveable feast, and there have been many different rates and proposals. As was mentioned earlier, the Chancellor got up one morning—it just happened to be the day of Treasury questions—and announced another change. Changes have also been announced presumably because of corporation tax, and there has been concern that the rate may have been raised as a result of the failures of Project Merlin, which I will talk about later. We have had many different threshold rates, and I ask the Minister to clarify how we reached all those rates, where we are now and how much money the levy will raise. It is suggested that it will raise between £2.5 billion and £2.8 billion, which, as other Opposition Members have said, seems a very low figure in the present situation. I hope that he will respond to that concern.

What is the levy meant to achieve? Supposedly, it deals with a number of matters. First, numerous speakers have mentioned the implicit public subsidy that we provide to banks. The Bank of England has done some work and suggests that there is a £100 billion subsidy; others have suggested lower figures, but there is consensus that the figure is very substantial. If the bank levy will raise only one twentieth or one fortieth of that sum, that puts the matter in context.

To pick up on a point that the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) made, the bank subsidies make life for new entrants to the marketplace—they are called challenger banks—very much more difficult, as they do not have any of those subsidies, reflecting the idea of banks being too important to fail. That notion should be the crux of our discussion about the financial services sector, because it raises the question of moral hazard: will banks that are too important to fail take riskier decisions, as happened in the lead-up to the credit crunch? I would like the Minister to explain how those issues relate to the levy. We understand that it will provide only part of the contribution that has to be made, but what contribution will that be?

I mentioned banks being incentivised to hold less risky liabilities. The reason for that is clear: if things go wrong, it is not just the financial services sector that is affected. Unlike other industries, in which problems affect other companies in the same industry, if the financial services sector hits difficulties, the whole economy is hit, as we found out to our great cost in 2007. It is critical that we reduce the possibility of that contagion happening in future.

We must deal with a number of issues peculiar to our financial services sector. Many believe that too much is concentrated in four or five very large banks and that as a result there is not sufficient competition. I will not go into the details of the Banking Commission’s report or the most recent Treasury Committee report, but those who have read them will know that both have strongly suggested that consumers do not have a great deal of choice in our banking system, that the banks are too concentrated and that it is very difficult for new banking companies to come into being. There is not sufficient competition and, by common consent, the cost is that banks make excessive profits. The levy should tax those profits. I would like the Minister to say whether he believes it will do that sufficiently.

To return to a point that I made a few moments ago, in the light of the subsidy given to the banks—£50 billion is one suggestion, £60 billion is another and the Bank of England says it is £100 billion—a levy of £2.5 billion, which is between a twentieth and a fortieth of that subsidy, does not seem to address the problem that we face. Why does the Minister believe that the measure answers the concern about the financial services sector?

I could be more generous and suggest that the Government are moving in the right direction. After all, all the changes in the rate of the banking levy have been increases—from 0.07%, to 0.075%, and for longer held assets, from 0.04% to 0.05%. I think I got those right, but I would be unsurprised if someone stood up and said, “You’re wrong. It’s changed,” or if I woke up tomorrow to find that the Chancellor had re-announced the rate. Those changes have raised the take from the levy by £200 million or £300 million, so that £2.5 billion will be raised in the first year. However, as I said at the start of my speech, given how the £20 billion threshold was constructed and the rate changes, we cannot escape the conclusion that the Government have set the overall amount that they wish to take and then gone back to work out the threshold and the rate. I should like the Minister to explain why that is not the case.

Of course, critically, at £2.5 billion or £2.8 billion, the levy does not raise as much as the bank bonus tax, so the suggestion—I put it no stronger than that—is that the banks are getting off lightly. The corporation tax reduction—corporation tax seems to have been constructed because the banks do not invest a great deal but have high turnover—and other changes could have been ideally designed for the banks. There is therefore a suspicion that banks are doing really rather well out of this year’s Budget. If that is not so, I should like the Minister to tell us why not.

There are many good reasons why the Minister should have been more draconian in introducing the levy. After all, as has been said by many hon. Members, when the coalition parties were in opposition, they told us that negotiations between the Government and the banking industry on proposals such as Project Merlin would produce certain results; on bonuses, however, the Government got absolutely nowhere. Statements were made about constructive negotiations, so it was embarrassing to find bankers telling us that there was no change.

Of course, still more critically, we were told that small businesses are the lifeblood of our economy—that mainly small businesses in the private sector would make a reality of the Government’s so-called strategy of getting the private sector to take up the slack created in the public sector. If they are to achieve that, they need to grow.

[Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)]

May I draw my hon. Friend back to the use of the bank bonus tax to promote growth? We heard last week that the construction industry was struggling to come out of the recession. Of course, applying the bonus tax and giving it to the construction sector to, for example, build affordable homes, which are very much needed in my constituency and many others, would have helped to stimulate the economy.

[Mr Love]

I agree with my hon. Friend. Clearly, the sector of the economy that has lost out the most is construction. If the Government intend to contribute only the homes bonus and changes to the planning regulations to the construction industry—they are creating uncertainty up and down the country—I foresee a bleak future for the construction sector in the next two to three years. I urge the Government to consider that carefully. They say they have a growth strategy but they do not, and we are now suggesting one. It would repay them to listen to what people are saying and to address the inadequacies of their response, particularly in the construction sector.

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[Mike Gapes]

My hon. Friend mentions the national insurance holiday for new businesses, but it discriminates against London and Londoners. Some of the poorest people in the poorest communities in the poorest boroughs in this country are in London, as are some of the areas with the highest unemployment, yet the national insurance holiday does not cover London, which he, as a London Member, knows as well as I do.

[Mr Love]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. He is correct. When that legislation was passed, we argued that many parts of London had suffered tremendously from the credit crunch and were as deserving as—if not more deserving than—other parts of the country. However, that argument was not listened to. Perhaps the policy would be a little more successful if the Government had included London, along with all the other parts of the country.

The policy has clearly not been a success. The Government’s growth strategy is not producing growth. I would therefore like to suggest an alternative growth strategy, the merit of which is that it was beginning to bear fruit at the time of the general election.

I will pick out just a few areas at which the Government need to look carefully, while searching their conscience and trying to construct a positive growth strategy and address these concerns. First, youth unemployment is just about topping 1 million. One in five of our young people aged 16 to 24 are unemployed, and to focus on getting young people back into work, as we were trying to do before the general election, would pay dividends. We shall lose a whole generation if we do not address the youth unemployment problem, and that should be a priority for the Government.

[Mr Robinson]

The whole House will agree with my hon. Friend that youth unemployment is the single biggest threat on the unemployment front at the moment, at 20% and rising. Was not the cancellation of the future jobs fund a short-sighted, perverse reaction by the Government that could well result in a repeat of what happened in the 1980s—a whole generation being lost to the working population because of the rise in youth unemployment?

[Mr Love]

Yes, the future jobs fund was the very vehicle to provide a job, training or relevant work experience so that our kids did not have to sit on the sidelines without a future, getting demoralised and not being in a position to take up the job opportunities that will be available when the economy turns round. It is a dereliction of duty on the part of the Government not to address that issue.

[Nic Dakin]

My hon. Friend is giving a cogent and coherent analysis of the amendment before us. Does he not agree that the review suggested in the amendment represents a real opportunity to find the money needed to invest in young people and their job opportunities? It is not too late for the Government to address this error.

[Mr Love]

Absolutely. The merit of the amendment is that it would give Parliament, and particularly the Government, the opportunity to review the operation of the levy, as well as providing the banking sector with other opportunities to make a contribution to sorting out some of the deep-seated economic problems in our country. I hope that the Liberal Democrat part of the coalition will be sympathetic to our arguments and speak up where it matters, to try to get the Government to recognise that there is an alternative that would be good for the economy and good for our society.

A second issue is house construction. In my local authority area we have the fourth worst housing stress in the country. Things are difficult, and they are going to get significantly worse. I mentioned earlier the Government’s incoherent construction policy, with its homes bonus that is not a bonus, and its planning system that is so riddled with inconsistency and lack of certainty that major construction is now off the agenda. It is a system that allows local considerations to dominate and outweigh much-needed construction in different parts of the country. I can see only a bleak future for public and private housing construction—but our proposal provides one small, modest way in which the Government could improve the situation.

[Mrs Chapman]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is not only the house builders who have a hard time when the construction industry suffers? In Darlington last week, we heard the announcement of the loss of almost 200 manufacturing jobs in a company that builds conservatories. Obviously, that is a difficult business to be in with the construction sector in its present state.

[Mr Love]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend, and I hope that someone on the Government Front Bench is listening. These are urgent problems.

Let me mention two other brief points about a growth strategy. We do not have a Sheffield Forgemasters contributing to growth. I remind Government Members of that because a viable, well-thought-through and supportable project was put forward, yet it has still not received any funding—

[The Chairman of Ways and Means (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. As we know, we are debating the bank levy. There has been some stretching of the debate already, and we are in danger of stretching it even further. We have had a good debate so far, and I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will want to keep to the amendment.

[Mr Love]

I bow to your advice, Mr Hoyle. I will conclude my remarks about the lack of a growth strategy by saying that as an optimist, I believe that it is never too late. I hope the Government will think carefully and recognise that the growth strategy they produced on paper simply does not respond to the real needs of the economy.

I finish where I started, by commending the amendment to the Government. It poses no threat to them; it simply seeks to review the bank levy system that they are introducing. They will know, because they have spent a great deal of time on this, just how important the public think the role of the banks in getting our economy sorted out is. After all, it is widely perceived that the banks were the main cause of the problem in the first place, so people are looking to them to help our economy in a meaningful way. For the reasons that I have stated, the amendment will address some of those issues and provide an opportunity to examine how the levy is working in December. I hope that it will provide us with an opportunity to straighten out and ensure that the levy really addresses the needs of our country.

[Mr Hoban]

Amendment 9 seeks to require a report into the effectiveness of the new bank levy, which is introduced in clause 72. I will come to the components of the amendment shortly, but I think it would help hon. Members if I first explained the role and features of the levy.

The levy is a new tax that will ensure that the banks fairly contribute to the Exchequer, while encouraging them to move to less risky forms of funding. This levy forms part of the Government’s far-reaching plans for banking reform. We have already announced an overhaul of financial regulation, marking a break from the light-touch regime championed by the shadow Chancellor when he was the City Minister. We have created an Independent Commission on Banking, which published its interim report last month and is due to publish its final report in September.

When Labour Members were in government, they refused to debate the structure of the banking sector. They were afraid of banking reform and they were afraid to understand and tackle the lessons from the financial crisis. This debate would have been better if one of them had had the courage to accept the failures of the previous Government on the regulation of the banking sector. Not one of them did so. I think this whole debate is a cover for their bluster. When we proposed in March last year to introduce a bank levy, on a unilateral basis if necessary, Labour Members were against it. The then Chancellor was against it and the present leader of the Labour party, who wrote the Labour manifesto, was against it, too. What we have heard today is a whole load of bluster, rhetoric and empty words about how we must tax the banking sector properly when Labour Members lacked the courage to champion these moves when they were in government. We have taken the lead on the issue, when they would have hung back and waited for international consensus and agreement. We have taken the lead, as I say, and France and Germany have joined us in announcing levies. Others have since followed, including Hungary, Austria and Portugal.

The hon. Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie) made great play of the various rates that other countries were introducing. Let me point out to him, then, that in France the levy is expected to raise only €500 million. In Germany, the levy is expected to raise €1 billion annually. The hon. Gentleman prayed in aid the US on two occasions, but the US has not yet introduced legislation, so his comments are empty—