Coronavirus Bill
Andrew Selous ExcerptsMonday 23rd March 2020
(4 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Coronavirus Act 2020 View all Coronavirus Act 2020 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Committee of the whole House Amendments as at 23 March 2020 - (23 Mar 2020)
The Chairman of Ways and Means (Dame Eleanor Laing)
If everyone takes around three to four minutes, they will all get a chance to come in.
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
I will not detain the House long. I rise to speak to new clause 1, which I understand has been agreed in advance with the Government, and I will move it at the end of this evening’s proceedings.
New clause 1 is very straightforward. It enables the elections to the General Synod of the Church of England to be postponed. Quite recently, we postponed all the elections that we in the House are involved in—the mayoral, local government and police and crime commissioner elections—but the General Synod is the National Assembly of the Church of England, and it is a Church that is episcopally led and synodically governed. The General Synod is a devolved body of this Parliament. It is the first devolved body of the Westminster Parliament and has been since 1919. Synods last five years, just as Westminster Parliaments do. The last one was elected in summer 2015 and therefore would expire this summer. There is no legal power to extend the current General Synod. New clause 1 provides that power by allowing the Archbishops of Canterbury and of York to ask Her Majesty to postpone the date of dissolution by an Order in Council. That order postpones the date of the dissolution of the current Synod for as long as would be necessary by dissolving the convocations of Canterbury and of York. The dissolution of those convocations triggers the dissolution of Synod.
Hon. Members may not know what I mean by convocations, but they are the historical assemblies of bishops and clergy. They go back to the time of Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury, who was enthroned in 668, so convocations give this Parliament a run for its money in terms of historical precedent. That may sound a bit dry, but it is important. This will enable the Synod to deal with important matters, such as the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. The Church takes that very seriously, and it will need to react to that body’s findings. This will also enable the Synod to move forward with the important work on cathedral finances and governance, which also need to be addressed urgently.
The Church is fulfilling an important role today. It is caring for the vulnerable, and it is reaching out in helping with the delivery of food, such as working with food banks and with night shelters. I commend new clause 1 to the Government and to the House.
Oral Answers to Questions
Andrew Selous Excerpts(4 years, 10 months ago)
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Stephen Hammond (Wimbledon) (Con)
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
Gareth Davies (Grantham and Stamford) (Con)
Sajid Javid
The Government’s fiscal policy will allow for a step change in infrastructure investment, which is what we need to level up and unleash the potential of the whole country. That is why I am open to looking at ideas for new financing instruments, but I would need to be satisfied that they represent good value for money, that they can be sustained for the long term and that they are consistent with our wider fiscal objectives. I would be happy to discuss that with my hon. Friend.
Andrew Selous
Only 15% of people who start their working lives in entry-level jobs progress beyond such jobs by the end of their working lives. To deal with that situation, will the Chancellor look again at the national retraining scheme to see what we can do to help people to progress further in work, to reduce poverty as well as increase productivity?
Sajid Javid
As usual, my hon. Friend raises an important issue. Some excellent work has been done on the issue, including work to which my hon. Friend has contributed. In our manifesto, we set out our intention to have a new national skills fund, which will help to transform the lives of people who are trying to get on to the work ladder, to get new qualifications or to return to work. I know that my hon. Friend will welcome that.
Unregulated Accommodation: 16 to 17-year-olds
Andrew Selous Excerpts(5 years ago)
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Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
“This cannot be right.” Those were the words of Dr Jackie Sebire, the assistant chief constable of Bedfordshire police, after her officers had spent four to five days trying to find a 16-year-old boy who had gone missing from his unregulated accommodation in Bedfordshire. Her officers had spent an enormous amount of time and effort to return the child to a provision that was inadequate, in which no local Bedfordshire authority would place one of their own children and for which there was no regulatory oversight.
The standards in the accommodation in which the 16-year-old was placed were so poor that this young man regularly went missing, and shortly afterwards he became involved in organised crime and went on to recruit other young people into organised crime. So we have, in effect a multiplier of misfortune as a result. The Local Government Association and the police are concerned that children are being drawn into organised crime, including county lines, from unregulated homes. About 2,000 16 and 17-year-olds are placed outside their home local authorities in this type of unregulated provision. That is a doubling over the last five years. Around 5,000 children in total are in this type of unregulated provision—a 70% increase in the last decade.
Let me provide some further illustrations of why regulatory oversight is needed urgently. We know from the brilliant investigation undertaken by Sally Chesworth and her team at “Newsnight” that a 16-year-old girl was brought to a room in one of these homes late at night. It was freezing cold and had no bed sheets and no curtains, even though it was a ground-floor room looking straight out on to a road. We know that staff regularly enter rooms without knocking. We know that a 17-year-old girl was hit in the face by a 6-feet male staff member who would not let her speak to the police about the incident. We know that staff members are being abusive. One child was told, “It wouldn’t matter if anyone kills you. No one cares about kids in care.” Members of opposing gangs were sent by one London borough to the same home in Bedfordshire, where one duly stabbed the other.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on bringing this debate to the House. I sought his permission beforehand to make a comment. The Social Care Inspection blog on the gov.uk website states that unregulated care homes
“should be used as a stepping stone to independence, and only ever when it’s in a child’s best interests”.
Given what we now know from the BBC investigation, which concluded that young people were at risk of organised abuse, is it not time for the Government to at least examine the ways in which the regulatory regime governing such accommodation is structured?
Andrew Selous
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and I will go on to call for exactly what he has just highlighted to the House.
Many of these homes also have adults up to the age of 25 in them, and we know that drug taking is prevalent in many of them. We know that a young man on bail for knifepoint robbery was placed in a home with 16-year-old girls. We know that two girls were placed alongside a male sex offender, and that one 17-year-old boy was murdered by another resident. The home had not told either sending local authority about an earlier fight between the two boys.
The impact on police forces of the number of missing person incidents from unregulated homes is significant. Police officer availability is an extremely precious resource to local communities. Quite rightly, a missing child is always a high priority for any police force. If there is a significant increase in the episodes of missing children in a police force area, that means that other vulnerable children and adults in the population area of that police force are left much more unprotected than they should be.
Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for bringing this important issue to the House for consideration. Does he agree that one of the major concerns is how 16 and 17-year-olds in care regularly go missing? Does he also agree that local authorities and the Department for Education should reform how data on the number of young children is collected, and that the figures should be made available and published on a quarterly basis?
Andrew Selous
More data is always good. I will come on to suggestions about what local authorities need to do.
In 2018, the top six locations for episodes of missing persons accounted for one quarter of the overall number of missing episodes in Bedfordshire. Of those 1,049 episodes, 779—three-quarters of the total—came from these unregulated settings. The Centre for the Study of Missing Persons at the University of Portsmouth estimates the average cost of investigating a missing person at £2,400. That is a financial cost to Bedfordshire police of around £1.9 million caused by these unregulated homes. It means that the officers involved cannot respond to other serious incidents. What makes the situation worse is that most of those children are being placed in this substandard provision in Bedfordshire by local authorities outside the county.
Michael Tomlinson (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (Con)
Has my hon. Friend come across Home for Good, a fostering and adoption charity, and its five-star campaign, which is looking not for five-star accommodation for young people, but for five-star care? If he has not come across it, perhaps he will look into it and encourage the Minister to do likewise?
Andrew Selous
My hon. Friend is absolutely right; like him, I am a huge admirer of Dr Krish Kandiah, and I will say a little bit about that charity and what it can do later in my remarks.
In three of the unregulated homes that I visited in September with the police, only three out of the 17 children there came from Bedfordshire. All the other children were from other local authorities. They had all gone missing on multiple occasions; one child, indeed, had gone missing 41 times. Local authorities sending 16 and 17-year-olds to Bedfordshire include Stockton-on-Tees, Peterborough, Sandwell, Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire, Swindon, Windsor and Maidenhead, Manchester, Birmingham, Essex, Nottinghamshire, Devon, Enfield, Barnet, Hillingdon, Redbridge, Waltham Forest, Haringey, Ealing, Merton and Croydon. Some of those have lamentable due diligence in their placing decisions.
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
I declare my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I congratulate my hon. Friend, who is generous in taking interventions. It is not just a case of the quality of the accommodation that many of these vulnerable young people are put into, or indeed the services available to them, but the locations they are placed in. Is he aware that some years ago in the Department for Education we produced “heat maps”, which showed areas where children should just not be placed? Children were being placed in homes on the same street as sex offender hostels, for example. There is a duty on directors of children’s services to ensure that the areas in which these children are being placed are appropriate and safe.
Andrew Selous
I completely agree; that is another reason for more regulatory oversight, which I will call for. Perhaps this issue needs to come up in planning policy as well.
Central Bedfordshire sends very few of its own children out of the area. As a Bedfordshire Member of Parliament, I am simply not prepared to accept this wholly unacceptable diversion of police resources caused by other local authorities acting irresponsibly and using provision that no local authority in Bedfordshire would put its own children in.
It is not as if this provision is cheap, either. A typical cost per child in these unregulated homes is around £800 per week, which is £42,000 per child per year. Some unregulated provision will cost considerably more than that, and it is completely unacceptable that taxpayers are paying such enormous amounts of money to private businesses, some of which do an appalling job and are more interested in making money than in looking after vulnerable children.
Given that several members of staff that I spoke to when I visited some of these homes told me that they needed no training whatsoever to undertake this work, I suspect that rates of pay are low and significant profits are being generated for the directors of these companies. Who is overseeing value for money for taxpayers, who are having to fork out these enormous amounts per child for such poor-quality provision, which in turn is placing a huge burden on other parts of the public sector such as the police?
Ruth George (High Peak) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman is making an important speech on an important subject. In my own constituency, we have a high number of homes—often regulated ones, which is good—but because we are in the wilds the children who tend to be sent there are the runners, who have run away from other homes. That means that when they go missing, as they often do because they have a history of it, they can be missing for a very long time and take not just police but mountain rescue out looking for them. Does he agree that it does not help that the care homes themselves are still charging fees when children are missing, so they have no incentive at all to go and look for them, and it is left to the police?
Andrew Selous
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Why should the duty of care fall only on the police and not on the sending local authority or on the home itself? She makes a pertinent point.
It is also completely unacceptable how little information is shared between sending and receiving local authorities, and between sending and receiving police forces. All local authorities have a statutory duty to check the standard of provision in which they are placing their vulnerable 16 and 17-year-olds.
Thirty-four locations in Bedfordshire are providing unregulated supported living for 16 and 17-year-olds. Central Bedfordshire Council has a quality assurance manager, Sharon Deacon, who will not place the council’s own children in many of those homes, and her role has been commended by the Howard League for Penal Reform.
It is extraordinary that other local authorities continue to use much of this provision when Central Bedfordshire Council will not place its own children in these unregulated homes. Those sending local authorities, in many cases, do not even bother to check whether the provision is suitable, which is vital. Sharon Deacon has conferred with her counterparts at Bedford Borough Council and Luton Borough Council, and sending authorities do not always notify the hosting local authority in Bedfordshire about the children they are sending to the county, as required by the Care Planning, Placement and Case Review (England) Regulations 2010, so the current law is not being adhered to and there are no checks or enforcement actions in respect of those breaches.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman is being generous in giving way, and he raises some important points. For some time I have been pushing for a regulator of supported housing for people with addictions and the homeless. I have a high-profile property in my constituency where, again, the local council does not send people but outside local authorities do.
I have secured a meeting with the Minister soon, and I am working with my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Ruth George). I would appreciate it if we all worked together on this issue.
Andrew Selous
I look forward to working with Members of good will on both sides of the House to get this right. This is not a party political issue, and we just have to get it right for children, for police forces and, frankly, for the taxpayer.
Sending police forces do not notify Bedfordshire police of the criminal records of the children concerned. One young arsonist was sent to my constituency without any prior notification to Bedfordshire police, which is simply unacceptable. There should be a full exchange of information between both local authorities and police forces on the quality of provision and the children concerned.
The Select Committee on Education published a report on 16-plus care options in July 2014, and it made the following recommendation:
“There are measures to ensure the quality and safety of settings for children and young people right across provisions: childminders, foster carers, residential children’s homes, secure training centres, schools, sixth form colleges and further education colleges are all inspected. Yet accommodation that falls within the category of ‘other arrangements’ is not subject to individual regulatory oversight. What makes this distinction all the more illogical is that the 22% of looked after 16 and 17 year olds who live in such accommodation are among the most vulnerable young people in society. It is unacceptable for these young people, still legally defined as ‘children’ and in the care of their local authority, to be housed in unregulated settings.
We recommend that the DfE consult on a framework of individual regulatory oversight for all accommodation provision that falls within the category ‘other arrangements’ to ensure suitability while allowing for continuing diversity of provision.”
The Government of the time did not accept that recommendation, but I am hopeful that the current Government will because members of the Select Committee who wrote that report include the Foreign Secretary, the Minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation and the Under-Secretary of State for International Trade, my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart).
Five and a half years later, progress on this issue has been too slow. The Department for Education met Ofsted and the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers on 13 December 2018, and I met the previous Children’s Minister, accompanied by the assistant chief constable of Bedfordshire police and officers from Central Bedfordshire Council, on 27 February 2019. I had a follow-up meeting with the Minister, accompanied again by the assistant chief constable, on 24 June, and I know that Sir Alan Wood hosted a roundtable to look at this issue on 11 September. It is now time to act, as we have all the evidence we need that local authorities are unwilling or unable to provide the necessary level of scrutiny of these unregulated homes.
Many providers of unregulated accommodation have been allowed to get away with unacceptably low standards, which have horrific consequences for some of the country’s most vulnerable children, because of a lack of scrutiny. Given that the current attempts to ensure standards have failed, it is now time for Ofsted to provide proper regulatory oversight. We also urgently need a fit and proper person test, so that the directors of the businesses that run these homes can be held to account personally. We need a duty on sending local authorities and police forces to notify receiving local authorities and police forces.
Of course, we need to work on providing more good- quality provision, especially for those with complex needs. The Local Government Association reports that the number of looked-after children reached a new high of 75,420 in 2017-18. That is an average of 88 children entering local authority care every day. A rising proportion are over 16—the figure was 23% in 2018, which was 17,330 children. The LGA also points out that only 28% of accommodation is local-authority-run, with 5% being run by the voluntary sector and two thirds provided by the private sector. This means that as the scale of need grows, it becomes even more urgent to rapidly improve the quality and quantity of provision.
We should mandate the implementation of the Philomena protocol brought in by Durham police to provide police forces with the very best information to help them quickly locate missing children. I am also grateful to Home for Good for its suggestions as to how we could encourage more fostering for these children, as exemplified by its own work, and to the Shared Lives movement for the example it provides. Of course, as always in these difficult matters of social policy, we need to think about what more we can do to slow down the demand and to provide greater support for families so that they can continue to be able to look after challenging children.
In that regard, I wish to single out the work of Wigan Council, which no longer places any of its children outside its own area. I am very grateful as well to the all-party group on runaway and missing children and adults for its report last month on children who go missing from out-of-area placements. The Children’s Society provided very valuable support for that inquiry, and I am grateful to it for its help with my preparation for this debate.
As a nation we need to do far more to support and strengthen families to help them keep children safely at home, and I am pleased that this Government have now appointed the Chief Secretary to the Treasury as the family champion across government. It is now high time to take decisive action to improve the standard of accommodation for 16 and 17-year-olds, as the Select Committee called for more than five years ago.
NHS Pensions: Taxation
Andrew Selous Excerpts(5 years, 3 months ago)
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Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)(Urgent Question
To ask the Chief Secretary to the Treasury to make a statement on the implications for patients of the taxation of NHS pensions.
The Chief Secretary to the Treasury (Elizabeth Truss)
The Government keep public sector pay and pensions policy under constant review in the context of the wider public finances. For the majority of savers, pension contributions are tax-free. The annual allowance is a fiscal measure that operates across all registered pension schemes in both the public and private sectors, alongside the lifetime allowance. The measure is kept under review by the Government to ensure that the benefit of tax relief on pension schemes remains affordable.
Some senior clinicians face pension tax charges owing to the increase in the value of their pension accrual. I understand that the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care is currently engaged in discussions with senior representatives of the British Medical Association. The Government are taking this issue very seriously, and that is the right place for those discussions to be held. However, the House will recognise that the same tax rules must apply identically to everyone in the same situation, regardless of their employer. It is simply not possible for the tax rules applying to senior clinicians in the NHS to be different from those that apply everywhere else.
I understand that the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care is to publish a consultation on proposals for a new 50:50 scheme providing pension flexibility for clinicians in the NHS. The scheme will give senior clinicians in England and Wales more choice in respect of their pension accrual, and will thus control tax charges. Since last autumn, all members of the NHS scheme on the taper have been able to elect for the pension scheme to pay any tax charges now, and so avoid any impacts on take-home pay, in return for an actuarially fair reduction in their pensions.
I recognise the concerns that have been raised, and I assure the House that the Government will continue to monitor the impact of pensions policies on public service delivery.
Andrew Selous
The unforeseen consequences of recent pensions legislation, initially supported in all parts of the House, are now resulting in very worrying consequences for the NHS as hospital doctors who have regularly worked weekend overtime to get waiting lists down are understandably refusing to continue to do so because they are being made worse off as a result. Can we imagine a conversation between couples along the lines of, “So you are leaving me and the children again this weekend to go voluntarily to work to make our family worse off?” It is not going to happen, is it? The same applies for GPs, many of whom are now doing fewer sessions each week than they want to and their patients desperately need in order not to be made worse off by breaching their annual pension allowance.
We do not have conscription for healthcare staff; we cannot force them to do weekend overtime or more sessions than they want to, and it is not surprising that they choose not to if they are being made worse off as a result. For example, in The Guardian this morning we learned of one senior anaesthetist who worked 27 Saturdays last year in order to reduce waiting lists and has now said he cannot afford to work any extra Saturday shifts this year because it would give him a large tax bill he cannot afford to pay.
Very few doctors have earnings that exceed the adjusted income threshold of £150,000, but due to the inclusion of hypothetical pension growth as income, doctors are being affected by tapering. This is different from what the Chancellor said in Treasury questions on 21 May when he said that someone has to be earning over £150,000 a year before the tapered annual allowance affects them. Taxable income and adjusted income are very different as regards pensions taxation.
The Government should also be aware that members of the imposed 2015 pension scheme had no option but to become a member of multiple schemes including the GP CARE—career average revalued earnings—scheme and as a result incur significantly higher annual allowance tax bills than those members who are protected members in only the final salary scheme. This means that all full-time consultants who are a member of more than one NHS pension scheme will be affected by the tapered annual allowance and will need to reconsider how much work they do for the NHS to mitigate these tax charges. Furthermore, this punitive pensions tax penalty means that doctors are not just working less but are retiring earlier than they would like to in order to avoid significant additional tax charges. In a survey of more than 2,400 consultants, more than half cited pensions taxation as a reason for their decision to retire early.
I therefore have five questions for the Chief Secretary. As the 50:50 pensions accrual option proposed does not remove the unintended consequences that are forcing doctors to reduce the work they do, can this be included in the consultation so that this issue is raised? Once the scope of the consultation has been extended to cover this essential aspect, can it then be launched as quickly as possible? Can the consultation be brief as the issues are well-known and well-rehearsed, and can the Government then respond quickly to it and if necessary legislate given that there is likely to be cross-party support for these important measures to protect the NHS? Can timely pensions statements be provided to all NHS staff who are affected by these measures? Finally, can the Government confirm that they understand the urgency and importance of this issue and that they will act without delay to prevent a deteriorating situation from getting even more acute?
Elizabeth Truss
The answer to my hon. Friend’s first question is that the Health Secretary is currently in discussions with the British Medical Association and other health representatives about precisely what can be done, and of course the consultation will come out shortly. Some of the issues he mentioned in terms of legislation will clearly be a matter for the new Prime Minister and Administration, but the fact that my hon. Friend has raised this urgent question today will draw to people’s attention the urgency of this issue and one would expect it to be considered very early on by a new Administration. The point I was trying to make earlier is that there is a fundamental distinction between how we deal with the issues in the NHS, on which the Health Secretary is leading, and the broader issue of our pension system, which is there to encourage people to save. That has to be considered in a holistic manner so we cannot just design it around one workforce. It has to be designed to work for everybody in both the public and private sectors. That takes time of course, and we are working through some of the conclusions of the reforms that took place a few years ago.
Equitable Life
Andrew Selous Excerpts(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Bob Blackman
They have been denied proper compensation for nine years. It is time that this was settled.
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
We know that many of the victims were retired nurses, teachers and factory or shop workers, and therefore not people of huge means, but one particular group is affected: small business owners who had no choice but to set up a pension. Does my hon. Friend agree that we owe a particular debt of honour to these small business owners who had to set up a pension and thought Equitable Life was a perfectly proper company to do that with?
Bob Blackman
Many companies in this country encouraged their employees to invest with Equitable Life thinking that it was a safe haven. In fact I can speak from personal memory, in that I was an employee of BT at the time and we were encouraged to invest in Equitable Life. Thank goodness we had a choice—I made the right choice, but I could be in the position of the victims.
Taxation of Low-income Families
Andrew Selous Excerpts(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
It is a pleasure to speak in this debate under your chairmanship, Sir David. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) for opening it so well, to my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), who did so much to launch the report that we are considering today, and to my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Chris Green), who was also part of that important work.
I will start by giving credit where credit is due, because it is always important to do that; it is both the polite and the correct thing to do. I therefore say to the Minister, who is a friend in these matters, that we need to put on the record our huge gratitude and appreciation for the 3.4 million jobs created under the Conservative-led Government since 2010. That is 3.4 million people who have the security of a monthly pay packet, who can look after their family, put food on the table and clothe their children. It is hugely important that that is recognised.
Consider youth unemployment rates around the world. I understand that in Greece youth unemployment is at 57%, and it is far higher in France and many other parts of the world. Our youth unemployment rate is a fantastic achievement. There has been a British jobs miracle since 2010 and we need to be hugely appreciative of it and not take it for granted. It has taken a lot of hard work and focus to create the environment in which businesses can flourish.
Universal credit has also been good, in getting rid of the pernicious effect of the old 16-hour rule. My hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) talked about when he was an employer and he gave us the example of employees who did not want to work more than 16 hours a week, as it was not worth their while because they would be so penalised by the 16-hour rule. Universal credit has swept that away. Now, for every extra hour that people work, at least they get something more. Lastly, the increase in the personal allowance has been enormously welcome to the group of people we are talking about.
Many of us—certainly among Government Members, but I think across Parliament—understand the damage that high marginal rates of tax do in discouraging enterprise. Entrepreneurs do not have to set up businesses. It has to be worth their while to do so and if the odds are stacked against them, with regard to the returns they will make, they will not start up businesses. This Government understand that well, and because they do we have created this fantastic environment for businesses, which has created those 3.4 million jobs that I just mentioned. All credit is due to the Government for understanding that.
However, I say to the Minister that businesses do not just exist for their own right and for their own benefit; they exist to benefit society and to benefit their employees. Humans are not resources; they are the point of it all. Businesses are there to benefit their employees, and if we are trapping people in low-paid work, so that they cannot progress in the way that many of us here in Westminster Hall have been able to progress throughout our careers, that should be of acute concern to our friends in the Treasury. I am sure that point is not lost on the Minister.
I reiterate the point that, sadly, the United Kingdom is an outlier in this respect, because the marginal tax rate for a one-earner couple with two children on 75% of the average wage is 73%, which is more than twice the EU average of 22%. No other OECD country treats low-income working families as badly as the United Kingdom does, with regard to effective marginal tax rates and work incentives.
It is really important to put on the record that, notwithstanding all the good work that has been done since 2010, this area is unfinished business. I want the Minister to go back to the Treasury and impress on the Chancellor and his fellow Ministers, who I think have an appetite for this work and do get it, the need to say to officials that more work has to be done in this area, so that everyone can benefit from the fruits of their hard work throughout their working life.
The problem of high effective marginal tax rates does not just affect single earners. It affects a million of them, but we know that there are also 600,000 dual earners who are similarly affected and—really importantly— 900,000 single parents as well. So this is a problem for all types of family structure.
We are not calling for the abolition of independent taxation; I do not think that would be the right thing to do. However, I think it would be right to introduce an element of choice, because Government Members certainly believe that choice is a good thing. It gives flexibility, because families have different priorities and different needs at different stages of their lives. As has also been said before, we are in fact extremely judgmental, because the tax system is very prejudicial when only one member of a couple chooses to work and the other member chooses to care for children or frail elderly relatives.
Chris Green
I agree that this sense or understanding of the system being judgmental is a problem. Would it not be far better if the system, rather than judging one way or another way, had a far more neutral position, because that would enable individuals and families to make their own decisions?
Andrew Selous
Yes, I completely agree. I think that it comes back to choice and recognising that families face different challenges at different times of their lives, particularly regarding the needs of children, the frailties of elderly parents and so on. I hope that our social care reforms, which are forthcoming, will go some way towards addressing that situation, but the tax system absolutely has a huge role to play in addressing these important issues, which my hon. Friend quite rightly raises.
Effectively, what we are saying through the tax system is that, despite praising with warm words family members who choose to stay at home if they can make the financial choice to do so—not every family has members who can make that choice, but there are families in which one person makes the sacrifice to stay at home, to be with their children or to look after elderly relatives—we think they are making the wrong choice, because we penalise them for doing so; there is no recognition of what they do.
The Centre for Policy Studies, which was referred to earlier, has made a proposal that we should consider, which is to look at the transfer of unused personal allowances. The Child Poverty Action Group—the report that we are considering today looked across the political spectrum; I have great respect for CPAG—made some suggestions about perhaps increasing child benefit for children under five in lower income families. One way that we might be able to fund that—it is a golden rule with me that if anyone calls for an increase in expenditure, my next question is, “Where is the money coming from?”
Andrew Selous
I see that the Treasury Minister is nodding; let me give him a suggestion, as I have made a call on the public purse. At the moment, we give child benefit to families that have an income of £100,000, where both members of a couple are earning £50,000, whereas that stops at £62,000 when there is only one earner in a family. So there is £38,000 worth of income in respect of child benefit to play with.
The Minister will have to go back to the Treasury and get all his super-clever officials to run those figures through the Treasury modelling system, but there will be some money there that could perhaps be better targeted at child benefit or the transfer of unused personal allowances. We are not being prescriptive here; we want Ministers to go back and look carefully, and reflect carefully, on these matters.
In respect of the work that parents do within the home—looking after children, or looking after frail or elderly relatives—last October the Office for National Statistics said that unpaid household work had a value to the British economy of £1.24 trillion. That is a big figure, as the Minister will appreciate, and just some recognition of the good that is done to society by that work—the costs that are not accruing to the public purse because of it—would be welcome. I think that on average that work comes down to a value of £18,932 per person, which is a significant amount.
Fiona Bruce
Are we therefore saying that some recognition by the Government of family in the tax system would go a long way towards changing the culture in our society, whereby we ought to value much more greatly that kind of work within the home, which is unpaid but provides so much benefit to society, economically as well as socially?
Andrew Selous
I agree with my hon. Friend, who makes an entirely reasonable request, and I will tell her why it is so reasonable: all our main economic competitors across the OECD do exactly what she suggests. It needs to be said a lot more often in this House that, as I said at the start of my contribution, we are an outlier in not doing this. We have taken for granted the fact that we have independent taxation that quite often ignores the second person in a family if they are not earning, which has led to some perverse consequences. I ask the Minister to go back to the Treasury and ask his officials to contact the economic councillors in British embassies around the OECD to get good data on how other countries do this, whether Finland, France or Germany. Let us look at what those countries do; let us look at how that increases the net take-home pay of lower income families; and let us look at the choices that it gives to those families, and at the overall satisfaction that is derived.
We have been talking about low-income families, and it is important to get on the record that the effects of high effective marginal tax rates can go quite high up the income scale. For example, a single-income family with three children paying rent of £157 a week has a marginal tax rate in 2018-19 of 96%, but that does not come down to 32% until income reaches £40,776. That might sound like a very high income, and for a lot of people it is, but for a person who lives in a high-cost housing area, that income disappears very fast. We need to remember that across large parts of the country, particularly those regions south of Birmingham in which many millions of our fellow citizens live, housing costs are extremely high, and that leaves a much smaller net take-home income for families to pay for all their needs with.
To repeat a point that was made earlier, in 1990 the effective marginal tax rate for a single-earner family on 75% of the average wage with two children in the UK was 34%. Today in the OECD it is 33%. Today in the UK it is 73%. We have diverged massively from our friends and competitors in the OECD since 1990, and I do not think that is because of some malicious plot in the Treasury; I think it has happened in spite of good policies.
Fiona Bruce
Does my hon. Friend think it is interesting that we also have one of the highest rates of marriage breakdown in the developed world? Is there perhaps some interesting connection to be made there?
Andrew Selous
We need to look at everything we can do to strengthen family life, because we know that strong families—healthy, supportive, committed, mutually respectful couple relationships—are the bedrock of our society. As a Government, we used to talk a lot about reducing the couple penalty; certainly when we were in opposition and preparing for Government, that was a significant objective. We have made some progress towards that, given what we have done through universal credit, but it is still a big issue, as all of us see week after week in our constituency surgeries. We sometimes speak to single mums who are on their own, who are not acknowledging their partner because of the loss of income that would entail. That is not a good state of affairs, because there exists a loving, respectful relationship in which mum and dad want to live together, but they are not doing so because they would be penalised. It is all very well for us to talk about people doing the right thing, but for a lot of our constituents that is not possible if they are hit in the pocket. That message needs to hit home.
I will conclude by coming back to the importance of family, which my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton has quite rightly pressed me on. I know that I am pushing at an open door, because I rechecked the excellent speech that the Chancellor made in Birmingham in October. When he listed the principles that inspire him as a politician, strong families and family stability were right up there. I think the Chancellor gets this—I think the whole Treasury team gets this—so I hope that when the Minister responds he will give us a commitment that he will go back to the Treasury, talk to the Chancellor, and do detailed preparatory work and study of other countries to look at how we can make some of these changes. We are not asking the Minister to come up with specific answers today, as we know there is a lot of detailed work to be done, but I hope he will give us an undertaking that he will go back to the Treasury and make sure this work gets underway.
Sir David Crausby (in the Chair)
I had wanted to call the Front Benchers by 10.25, but I will call Sir John Hayes for a tiny contribution.
Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir David. I must say that as a feminist, I feel as though I have fallen down some kind of vortex to the 1948 film “Every Girl Should Be Married” in this debate. I fundamentally disagree with many of the arguments that hon. Members have put forward so well; I respect their right to do so, but they have ignored the elephant in the room, which is that lots of the stresses and strains on our society are caused by austerity, not by whether people are married or not. That is a personal choice.
Tax is often thought of as a boring, dreaded thing—a duty to be avoided, something best left to stuffy men in suits. However, like all economic tools, tax is a mechanism that opens up opportunities to shape the kind of society we want to live in. It incentivises good behaviour and punishes what some would consider to be bad behaviour. The UK Government’s tax system remains quite a blunt tool with which to tackle income inequality. It is riddled with loopholes that benefit the wealthy, and according to figures from the Institute for Public Policy Research, the UK is the fifth most unequal country in Europe when it comes to income.
The tax system is very gendered. In its analysis of last year’s Budget, the Women’s Budget Group said that raising the income tax threshold is not a policy that helps women. It argues that 70% of those taken out of the higher rate of tax, and 73% of higher rate taxpayers who will benefit from raising the higher rate threshold, are men. We cannot claim that this will benefit women in any particular way, especially those in low-income jobs. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, minimum household budgets have risen by about a third since 2008 for most types of household. Inflation is sky high, wages are being squeezed and a no-deal Brexit would see an additional 6.4% of lower incomes being spent on food. That is a penalty that most families cannot afford.
I mention families, because they are central to what many Members have talked about. The hon. Members for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double), for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) and others have mentioned universal credit and the impact of the 16-hour rule. Figures from the Church of England show that a single mum with three kids, who is working 16 hours, would have to work 45 hours to make up for the cuts that the Conservative Government have made to the benefits system. What impact would a single mum working 45 hours have on family life? When is she actually going to see her kids? Who is going to tuck them into bed at night? That is not going to happen.
I have been working on a campaign for the removal of the two-child limit in the universal credit system, for which I would welcome hon. Members’ support, if they wish to give it. There was some movement from the Secretary of State last week, but it will still be in place for children born after 6 April 2017. The disincentive within the system is rife. Someone with two children who wants to get remarried, into another family, will lose out, because that will cause a change to benefits. If that person, once they have remarried, wants to have a child in that new family, they will not get the child element of universal credit, which is nearly £3,000. If any Government Member wants to speak to their colleagues in the Department for Work and Pensions and get them to get rid of this policy, that would be welcome, because it is a disincentive. If a family has four children, there is actually an incentive under this policy to separate and become two families with two children each, rather than one family with four children, thereby saving a huge amount of money. That needs to be removed from the universal credit system. If hon. Members are serious about it, they need to ask their colleagues in the DWP to do that.
Nobody mentioned the impact of the immigration system on families. I get many people coming to my surgeries who, because of the minimum income threshold in the immigration system, cannot bring a spouse to live here. I met a chap who is working two jobs at the moment, but cannot meet the threshold to bring his wife and his child over from another country. That is separating families. The number of Skype families out there, who are not being well served by this Government, who claim to support families, is an absolute scandal and we should do something about it. The stress of living in poverty probably contributes more to the break-up of families than anything else.
The report by Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, which Conservative Members never want to mention, says:
“Families with two parents working full time at the national minimum wage”—
that is the Chancellor’s pretendy living wage, because it is not a living wage that anyone can live on—
“are still 11% short”—
11% short—
“of the income needed to raise a child.”
Andrew Selous
There is no disagreement on these Benches that poverty leads to family breakdown, but in the impact assessment for the Child Poverty Act 2010, brought in by the last Labour Government, there was also a recognition that family breakdown leads to poverty. Does the hon. Lady accept that it is circular and that the one leads to the other, both ways?
Alison Thewliss
I would accept the hon. Gentleman’s arguments far more if he would argue for an end to austerity, for an increase to low wages and for the minimum wage to be equalised. At the moment the thresholds for 16 and 17-year-olds and for 18 to 21-year-olds are very different. The gap between the lowest paid—those on the UK’s pretendy living wage—and the people at the top of the age threshold is increasing. It has got wider over the last three Budgets because increases at the top of the scale have not been met with increases at the bottom of the scale. It should be a fair wage for everybody. A 21-year-old parent does not get enough income in to support a family, and that will bring additional pressures to bear on what they can bring in and provide. People who have spoken today have entirely missed the point.
Treating families as a unit within the tax system, as often happens with universal credit, has been widely criticised by women’s organisations because it removes women’s agency. It also removes women’s ability to provide for their families. Under the universal credit system, a woman is disincentivised from leaving a relationship, because all the money goes to the man—the main earner in the household. I appreciate that the Secretary of State has said that she is looking at this issue, but it creates a risk. That also exists within the rape clause of the two-child policy, where the only way a woman can claim this vile clause is to leave the relationship. Women’s organisations across the board say that the most dangerous time for a woman is when she leaves a relationship; that is when she is most likely to be murdered. There is serious stuff about women’s place in this policy.
I was glad to hear that the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire is not calling for the abolition of independent taxation. I am relieved about that. Individuals should be able to exist within the system by themselves, for a very serious reason, which leads on from my point about universal credit. Incentivising marriage is disincentivising separation. There may be very reasonable grounds for separation, particularly in cases of domestic abuse. The marriage allowance, which benefits the higher earner in a family—almost always the man, as I have laid out—exacerbates inequality. To take this to its logical conclusion, if a man assaults his partner, so she cannot go to work, or he prevents her from working through coercive control and financial control, which we know a lot more about and which the Government have said they want to tackle in the Domestic Abuse Bill, he effectively gets a tax break for doing so. That is why this should have no place in the taxation system. It is important that women have agency and are able to get money in. When money is taken away from women, that agency is removed, as well as their ability to look after themselves.
I had many more things I wanted to say about this policy. I had a whole speech written out about other things. We need to recognise that indirect taxation is also a huge issue. VAT disproportionately affects low-income families. According to the latest figures, those at the bottom end of the income distribution now pay nearly one third of their income in indirect taxes. The poorest fifth pay 31% in taxes such as VAT, alcohol and fuel duties, which is much higher than the 13% paid by the richest households. As I have been sitting here, I understand that the European Parliament has finally agreed to abolish the tampon tax. That is something that the UK Government have now delayed for almost four years. I hope that, now that the Minister has the green light that apparently the UK Government were waiting for, that tax on women will go as soon as possible.
While we can talk about taxes and marriage, the real elephant in the room is austerity and the cuts that have been made to women’s budgets. Women need to have agency; that is the most important thing for families across the UK.
Peter Dowd
No, because I have not got much time and I have given way several times. I have other points to make.
The manifesto is linked to the issue of taxation of families, but it is not just the fiscal issue that we have to identify—that is the problem; it is the wider determinants that go way beyond issues of taxation. The hon. Member for Stafford referred to the Christian background. I think it is in Matthew that Christ says,
“render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”.
Effectively, he was saying, “Pay your taxes.” He is a fantastic role model for people who avoid paying their taxes. The bottom line is that a society can be cohesive only if everybody plays their part in it, whether through paying their taxes, charitable interventions or political inventions of the sort we make every day. That is what we have to do.
In the report, the hon. Member for Congleton talks about fathers being registered on birth certificates. That is fine, but an Office for National Statistics report on registration identified the fact that the vast majority of fathers are registered on birth certificates and that of those who are not, something like two thirds or a third are identified as being very much involved with the family. The idea that the registration of a father on a birth certificate will somehow solve some sort of problem is—I will not say laughable—only one element of the totality.
Peter Dowd
I will, but the hon. Gentleman will appreciate that I do not have much time.
Andrew Selous
It will be, Sir David. The point that my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) was making was that if registrations take place in family centres, the fathers become more involved in what the family centre can provide.
Briefly, in the impact assessment of the Child Poverty Act 2010, which was introduced by the hon. Gentleman’s party when it was in government, there was a recognition that, although poverty leads to family breakdown, family breakdown also leads to poverty. Is that still the Labour party’s position?
Peter Dowd
We would reintroduce the targets that we set in relation to child poverty, which the hon. Gentleman’s Government got rid of. That is what is frustrating—Conservative Members are coming to us with all these ideas that the Labour party had for many years and which the Conservative party got rid of when it came to power. The Government got rid of all the things that hon. Members have been talking about and introduced austerity. They said, “Austerity is here. We’re all going to play our part. We’re all in the boat together,” but in reality, we are not.
Although I recognise many of the worthy points made by hon. Members, that worthiness has got to be put in place, not by mechanisms, but by everybody playing their part in society and paying their taxes, and by corporations not getting tax breaks or being able to avoid this, that and the other. The point that the hon. Member for Stafford makes about tax reliefs is fair; I will potentially look at them.
There is a complicated pattern, and on that basis, although I understand some of the points that the hon. Members for Congleton and for Stafford have made, I would say that actions speak louder than words. We need more action and fewer words.
Draft Gaming Machine (Miscellaneous Amendments and Revocation) Regulations 2018
Andrew Selous Excerpts(5 years, 10 months ago)
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Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
I am very pleased to be serving under your chairmanship this evening, Ms Ryan, I think for the first time. Rarely will a statutory instrument have elicited the joy that this one will. It represents success at last for a long, hard-fought campaign. We should have succeeded years ago, and would have done were it not for the fact that the Treasury were profiting from the shameful racket to which the statutory instrument will finally put an end.
It is right, as others have said, that we give credit where it is due. My hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East has led the campaign as chair of the all-party parliamentary group with a unique blend of passion and warmth, and we are greatly in her debt. My hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East, as my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting pointed out, has played an exemplary and crucial part as well.
Like others, I pay tribute to the Minister’s predecessor, the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford, who was absolutely right to resign last month when the Government tried, shamefully, to delay this change, and to the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green—with whom I disagree about virtually everything—who has played a positive role in this campaign.
I also pay tribute to local authorities outside of the House. My local authority, Newham, has provided valuable support to the all-party parliamentary group on fixed odds betting terminals—the one local authority to do so. I pay tribute to the current Mayor of Newham, Rokhsana Fiaz, and to her long-serving predecessor, Sir Robin Wales. I also pay tribute to Christian Action Research and Education, which has been a consistent supporter, with Newham Council, of the APPG.
Unfortunately, the role of some others has been lamentable. Some in the House have lobbied for the continuation of this shameful racket, which has destroyed the wellbeing of so many families. The Chancellor of the Exchequer should be ashamed of himself for apparently caving in to the lobbying. The Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport also behaved lamentably in failing to support his Minister, who was forced to resign,.
Ministers missed the chance to act on the growing menace of FOBTs five years ago, in the 2013 triennial review. Five years ago next month, we had a debate in the Chamber, which made the scale of the menace crystal clear. I reported in my speech—my constituency has a lot in common with that of the—that at that time in East Ham, on High Street North we had 14 betting shops open from 7.30 am to 10 pm, each with just one member of staff.
I quoted a former Paddy Power manager, who told me of families and businesses ruined while he was managing a shop, and of students who gambled away their student loans. He estimated that on a typical day in any Paddy Power shop with four fixed odds betting terminals, as they all have, one could meet half a dozen people whose lives had been destroyed by their addiction to these vile machines. A big use of the terminals has been to launder the proceeds of drug crime, giving criminals an apparently legitimate source for their cash. They are in those shops day in and day out.
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
It is right to say that it is not just a case of lives ruined; in some cases lives are lost, because of the amount of suicides. That needs to go on the record as well.
Stephen Timms
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. A fair number of people, I am afraid, literally have blood on their hands through what has happened.
Often, punters losing huge sums would smash up terminals in the shop in anger, but the one member of staff there was instructed not to call the police, so that the incident would not feature in the crime statistics. Some of the shops act as honey pots for drunken louts intimidating decent shoppers who pass by. We were warned in the course of this campaign that if it succeeded in reducing the maximum stake to £2, the danger was that the number of betting shops could be halved. I must say, if the number of betting shops in East Ham falls by only 50%, I shall be very disappointed. I hope we will see a much larger reduction than that.
These vile machines have been cynically fostered by shameless, irresponsible conglomerates in the poorest communities, as the hon. Member for Glasgow East has rightly pointed out, destroying hard-working families and, on occasions, lives—the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire is right about that. They are a magnet for crime. They launder the proceeds of crime. They are a tawdry and soulless presence on high streets such as the one I represent, driving decent shops away and repelling family shoppers.
How can it have taken five years from the time of that debate, which made the extent of the damage so clear, to bring about this statutory instrument? So much money has been made by the betting companies that they have been able to employ armies of unscrupulous lobbyists and lawyers, and—let us be honest—sold-out former police officers, to give evidence for them from time to time. Of course, the Treasury has been among the principal beneficiaries of this vile trade.
Having spread blame around the place, I want to recognise that—unwittingly, at the time—I bear some personal responsibility for what has happened. From 1999 to 2001, I was the Treasury Minister responsible for betting duty. I introduced a series of reforms to betting duty designed to recognise the fact that gambling was moving online. Indeed, there was a real worry, which to some extent has been fulfilled but not as far as it might have been, that the online betting companies were also going to move offshore.
With the reform package that we introduced, part of its aim was to make low-margin betting products viable. I did not know then about fixed odds betting terminals, but I remember asking industry representatives—I particularly recall a conversation with somebody from Ladbrokes—whether the industry would use this change and behave responsibly. Looking me in the eye, that individual assured me that it would.
Rarely have I been so badly misled. The industry has been utterly irresponsible in the way that it has behaved with these terminals. The vast sums that it has raked in have completely blinded people to the ruin that it has caused. The Association of British Bookmakers, with which I worked in that period at the Treasury, has behaved shamefully, and industry leaders, who comport themselves as respectable businessmen, should hang their heads in shame for the lives they have destroyed in their pursuit of profit.
The Minister said that only those showing social responsibility would be able to take part in this industry. The industry has shown zero social responsibility; it has not even shown morality, let alone social responsibility. Let nobody try to pretend otherwise, because I am afraid that nobody involved in this vile trade knows anything of social responsibility. They have been completely blinded by the enormous sums they have been able to make.
I am absolutely delighted that we have finally got the chance to vote for this statutory instrument, but let us never forget the lessons that must be learned from this sorry and shameful saga.
Oral Answers to Questions
Andrew Selous Excerpts(5 years, 10 months ago)
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Elizabeth Truss
What is important is that we are achieving better results for 16 to 18-year-olds. We are seeing more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds going to university and improvements in the quality of apprenticeships that are being taken up by young people. We are also putting extra money into the new T-levels, which are due to improve technical education.
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
Our FE colleges are great poverty-fighting institutions that provide vital ladders of opportunity for our constituents. Given that school pay rises have been fully funded and FE has only had 0.1%, is there not a case for parity of esteem for teachers in FE colleges?
Elizabeth Truss
It was indeed very good that we were able to give teachers, particularly those on the lowest wages, a 3.5% pay rise this year—the highest pay rise seen for a decade. FE colleges are set up differently. They are independent institutions that have the wherewithal to change the pay for lecturers who work within them.
Elizabeth Truss
We are doing city deals right across Scotland and they are having huge benefits for the local economy. We have also announced in the Budget a freeze in whisky duty. The question now is how the Scottish Government will respond to that in their budget tomorrow. Will they cut income tax, and will they also cut business rates?
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
How many more trees will be planted as a result of investment announced in the recent Budget?
Mr Hammond
A very large number. I will go back to the Treasury and write to my hon. Friend with a precise figure.
European Union (Withdrawal) Act
Andrew Selous Excerpts(5 years, 11 months ago)
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Mr Hammond
No. In all scenarios, we expect that economic growth will continue and the economy will carry on growing. What we were looking at in the analysis we published last week is a ranking of five different scenarios based on their impact on the overall size of the economy over a 15-year horizon.
The theme of today’s debate, as Mr Speaker has reminded the House, is the economy, and the economy has always been at the heart of the UK’s relationship with Europe. It was definitely not the lure of political union but the prospect of jobs, wage growth, trade and prosperity that brought Britain into the European Economic Community, as it then was, in 1973—I was there, and I remember. For most of us who campaigned 43 years later to remain in the EU in 2016, it was certainly not the political institutions and the paraphernalia of the Union that provided the motivation to do so, but a hard-nosed appraisal of our economic interests.
The fact is that our economic and trading relationship with the EU has been built over 45 years, during which time our economies have shaped themselves around each other and become inextricably intertwined: supply chains criss-cross borders; workforces draw on talent from across the continent; and a firm in Birmingham can deal with a customer in Berlin as easily as one in Bradford—so much so that almost 65% of all UK trade is now with the EU or through EU trade agreements. These trading relationships and commercial partnerships were not built overnight, but in a no-deal exit many of them would be destroyed overnight, as the market access and free-flowing borders on which they are based were lost. Although new trade partnerships with countries outside the EU undoubtedly offer new and exciting opportunities for UK companies, the analysis the Government published last week is clear that the benefits flowing from new free trade agreements would not compensate for the loss of EU trade from a no-deal exit.
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
On Tuesday, the House of Commons Library wrote to me to say:
“The backstop comes into force automatically, if the Withdrawal Agreement is signed, at the end of the transition period.”
This morning, the Prime Minister said:
“If we get to the point where it might be needed, we have a choice as to what we do, so we don’t even have to go into the backstop at that point.”
Can the Chancellor help to explain that because there seems to be a variance between those two statements?
Mr Hammond
The backstop remains as the ultimate default, but the agreement we have negotiated with the EU very importantly gives us the choice, if we are not ready to move to our new future partnership on 1 January 2021, to seek an extension of the implementation period for one or two further years. That is a very important part of the architecture of what we have negotiated. I make no bones about this—I have said it before. In my view, it would be much better for the UK to seek an extension of the implementation period if we need a further period of time before we are ready for the new long-term arrangements, rather than go into the backstop.
Oral Answers to Questions
Andrew Selous Excerpts(6 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Hammond
Obviously, the element of funding that can be provided by net savings from contributions to the European Union will depend intrinsically on the deal that we negotiate with the European Union. We will be working to get the very best possible deal that we can for Britain to ensure that that contribution makes up the largest possible proportion of the additional NHS funding.
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
The Chief Secretary to the Treasury (Elizabeth Truss)
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The way in which we will get higher wages is by improving productivity and skills, which is why we are investing in a record level of apprenticeships and the national training partnership.