Nuclear Energy (Financing) Bill

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Richard Fuller

2nd reading
Wednesday 3rd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

rose—

[Richard Fuller (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)]

rose—

Fairness and Inequality

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Richard Fuller

Tuesday 11th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr MacNeil]

Very good, Mr Deputy Speaker.

It is a slight concern of mine, however, that the captains of industry, as they get called, or the high-bonus City bankers or hedge fund managers, have never had that experience at a young age and have not engaged meaningfully with sympathy for the situation that others may be in as they gobble all the chocolates of productivity that our economy has produced, believing instead that they are self-made men and self-made women who worship their own creators.

[Richard Fuller]

Before the hon. Gentleman moves on from his Milk Tray doctrine of equality, will he accept that very many of us do learn those lessons in school and do not necessarily need the Government to act for us to fulfil our responsibilities as individuals? What would he say about considering ways to exhort people who have wealth, regardless of the taxes they pay, to give more to others?

[Mr MacNeil]

The hon. Gentleman’s intervention is laudable, and I understand what he says, but I disagree. The consensus post the great depression of the 1930s showed the importance of regulation, and that lesson was probably forgotten by the 1980s in the era of the Reagan-Thatcher deregulation that led up to the precipitous problems that finally exploded six years ago. In the absence of regulation, people have to look into their own hearts, but sometimes we can spend far too long doing that. The rule of politics, Parliament and Government is to ensure that we have the structures whereby all can benefit and they are not just dependent on the whim of some well-meaning individuals who may be a minority among the wealthy and could direct their contribution in the wrong way.

Before I get to the body of my speech, I have a final example of something that I think informs the human condition, namely the observations of anthropologists on hunter-gatherer societies. I hope this will also inform the debate, because I think that inequality is essentially about human choices—perhaps even bias—whether they be conscious or subconscious.

Anthropologists note that hunter-gatherer bands did two main things: they hunted and they gathered, hence, of course, the name—there is no need to be a Nobel prize winner to spot that. The crucial observation is that they treated the products of the hunt and the gather very differently. The products of the hunt were shared out almost instinctively, with many people who might not even have been on the hunt getting a share. Anthropologists explain this as the sharing of luck and good fortune, with those on the hunt realising that they might not have had a successful hunt in different circumstances and that, given the way in which the society of the day was arranged, they might earn the good will of others who might be lucky on another day.

That sharing, however, was not mirrored in the gather, and anthropologists reckon that that was due to the labour and endeavours of the individual graft and application of the gather.

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[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

The hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) brings to this House a wealth of experience and understanding from her previous work in the area of health, and I hope that the House listened carefully, as I did, to her comments about the interaction between differences in health and the perpetuation of inequality in our country. However, I did disagree with some points in her critique, which I shall discuss later; most importantly, there was an absence of a full understanding of the context in which this Government are taking actions to address fairness and inequality.

I, like many people, get somewhat concerned and uneasy when I hear politicians bandying around words such as “fairness”, “equality” or “inequality”. History has taught people that when politicians profess themselves in favour of fairness, they too often end up enriching themselves and those politicians who would rally people to the banner of equality too often end up repressing those same people once power has been given to them. So it was with some trepidation that I came to this debate, but the prospect of being able to listen to perspectives on those issues from Members of this Parliament from different parts of the UK attracted me, and I have not been disappointed, either by the opening speech or by those of other hon. Members.

Judgments about what is fair or not fair, or about the balance between equality and inequality, are best left to individuals and families. People are perfectly capable of making those decisions based on what they have learned from their parents and grandparents, on what they have been taught in school or, perhaps, on the lessons they have learned in their church, synagogue, mosque or temple. Politicians fall rather low down the list of people who can be persuasive on those topics. Nevertheless, we shall battle forth.

[Mr MacNeil]

I do not disagree in any way, shape or form that people can make assessments about what is iniquitous or unfair, but the hon. Gentleman needs to go further down the road, because when people see inequity and unfairness they do not have the power to do anything about it. That is when this place and national Parliaments around the world have to regulate, reform things and so on to make sure we have the situation we had after world war two: a better settlement for the greatest breadth of citizenry.

[Richard Fuller]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that helpful intervention. Let us assess the ability of Government today to fulfil that positive role. One of the most important aspects of fairness is the future that we bequeath to our children and grandchildren. It is a natural aspect of human behaviour to want to give the best start in life to our children and grandchildren. One of the worst aspects of the context in which we are operating today, as a Government and as a Parliament, is that under the previous Government, we built up the most significant amount of debt to pass on to our children and grandchildren. One of the most important aspects of what the Opposition call the cost of living crisis—my constituents think of it as trying to meet the family budget—is the debt that was left by the previous Government for this Government to deal with.

The Opposition like to talk about the level of Government debt at that time, but a Chancellor of the Exchequer is custodian not just of part of the economy but of the entire economy, and, before he makes a decision, he has to look at the strength of the economy. It is an incontrovertible fact that the level of indebtedness of this country in 1995—Government debt, household debt and corporate debt—was about two times the size of the economy, and when the Labour party left office, it was five times the size of the economy. We do not need to have a credit card to know that we have to pay off all that debt, and not just part of it.

Death Penalty (India)

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Richard Fuller

Thursday 28th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

I join other hon. Members in congratulating the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) on securing this debate. I also congratulate the signatories to the Kesri Lehar petition which has been extremely influential in securing the debate.

Many hon. Members have talked about the importance of this issue to their constituents of Punjabi origin, and that is certainly true for my home town of Bedford and for Kempston, but this issue affects the whole community in the United Kingdom. We should all embrace it as a matter of importance. I draw Members’ memories back to the part of the Olympic opening ceremony that celebrated all that is great about our open, multicultural society, when Tim Berners-Lee said, “This is for everyone”, and talked about the interconnectedness of modern society. One of the things that makes our country unique and so special is that we can draw on people’s experiences from their origins around the world, and it is right that this Parliament, the mother of Parliaments, should debate this issue today.

We debate the issue in a spirit of humility, because we are talking about the legislation and rules of another sovereign country, which is—as the hon. Gentleman said in his opening speech—the world’s largest democracy. We need to be extremely respectful and humble in the representations that we make here today, but we also need to carry forward determination and conviction from our own experiences of the death penalty in the UK, and the ways in which politicians over the ages here worked, on principle and for practical reasons, to seek the abolition of the death penalty. In that there is a message for modern Indian politicians.

[Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point about being respectful of the sovereignty of other nations, but we can also point out that, according to Professor Steven Pinker, the professor of cognitive psychology at Harvard university, western Europe is now the safest place to live in history in terms of person-on-person violence and even war and interstate violence. That is in a society with the complete absence of the death penalty. It is worth pointing that out to other places in the world to encourage them to change, rather than demanding that they change.

[Richard Fuller]

The hon. Gentleman makes the point perhaps more eloquently than I could. This is a matter not just of principle for many hon. Members, but a matter of practical impact. The existence of the death penalty can exacerbate situations and stimulate other criminal activity as a response.

I wish to make a couple of points that perhaps go a bit further than the petition in making representations to our friends in India. Although a moratorium is desirable, the intent should really be outright abolition, because history teaches us that moratoriums are not always an effective long-term solution. As has already been mentioned, India has had a moratorium, and it has ended—the consequences of that remain to be seen. We have also had the experience of the United States, where the Supreme Court issued what was essentially a moratorium. That went away, and before George W. Bush became President he was one of the most excited and active executioners of people under the US criminal code when he was governor of Texas. There are pressures on politicians and the judiciary when there is still the option of ending the moratorium. Modern societies need to strive to achieve abolition if we are to accomplish both the in-principle benefits and the practical benefits of the elimination of the death penalty.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Fuller]

I refer the hon. Gentleman to what has already been said about the situation in India with regard to rape. The broader point is that there are lessons for politicians of all countries about the possible use of the death penalty in political discourse. The hard-learned lessons in this country are that we end up with a more effective and fairer criminal justice system if we abolish the death penalty. There is no stopping point along the way to abolition that will ultimately provide the security of those two outcomes: there has to be outright abolition.

[Mr MacNeil]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way; he is being very kind. To back up his argument from history, again from Steven Pinker, we can draw on the example of England. Some 800 years ago, the death penalty was commonplace and there was a hangman’s hill in every village throughout the British Isles. An Englishman was 50 times more likely to be killed by a fellow Englishman in a society that had the death penalty than they are in the modern day when there is no death penalty.

[Richard Fuller]

That is an interesting statistic, which I am sure also pertains to Scotland.

Another point that I humbly submit for our friends in India to consider is that this issue shines a light on the general operation of the judicial system in India. Those who study the British empire—I have read only a few books on it—learn that the English judicial system is one of the gifts we gave to the world. I am sure we talk that up a lot, but there is a lot of truth in the fact that many people around the world see the British judicial system as a reliable and trusted friend when they are in conflict situations. There are issues relating to the Indian judicial system that exacerbate concerns about the existence of the death penalty. I have mentioned the implications for the mental health and well-being of people on death row. With the case load in Indian courts so backed up, what is it that says that a certain case should move forward or not? How are those decisions made? What is the due process in a system that finds itself not fully capable of dealing with its work load?

Constituents of mine who have had legal disputes in India have always made the point that they have had to go back to India to deal with them. Without putting too fine a point on it, sometimes that is because of issues to do with money in the criminal justice system. I have no idea whether that is true and certainly, of course, none of my constituents has been involved in any of that, but it is interesting that there is that question. Our friends in India, being part of a great hope for the world, need to address those issues. The petition shines a light on how the world will look on the decisions made regarding the death penalty in India as a result of those issues.

The Minister kindly responded to the question of what India moving forward with the death penalty would mean for UK relations in certain circumstances. He was right to talk about considering cases on an individual basis. However, if India became a more active proponent of the death penalty, that would have significant implications for how the UK would look at extraditing people to India. We do not want the death penalty to affect our relationship when there is so much that is positive that we want to talk about, and we do not want to have ongoing disputes on this issue. I therefore hope that the British Government would look very dimly on extraditing any person to India that might result in their being subject to the death penalty, and seek assurances that it would not be applied in any such cases.

I again thank the signatories to the petition. This issue may be of particular concern to our Sikh community, but it is a concern for all of us in this open United Kingdom and for all of us in Parliament. May we together send the message to our colleagues who sit in the Indian Parliament that on the issue of the death penalty it is often the politicians who have to lead public opinion, not the other way around? They should have the courage to halt executions immediately, and to step forward not just to reinstate a moratorium but to effect outright abolition.

Public Sector Pensions

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Richard Fuller

Tuesday 19th June 2012 Westminster Hall

[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Leigh, for, I think, the first time, and it is a particular pleasure, if I may say so Sir, to have the Economic Secretary as the Treasury Minister responding to the debate.

We live in a time when nation after nation is being told: “You are not as rich as you thought you were.” As a result, nation after nation is facing cuts—sometimes mild, sometimes severe—in the services their Governments can provide, the real incomes that their labour can earn and the value of their assets, calculated as the debt that can be raised against their businesses and homes. We are living in such times because for more than a decade nation after nation rapidly increased the amount of its borrowings as a proportion of its economy—its national leverage. It was not just excessive Government borrowing, but an entire national pastime undertaken by millions of households, companies and banks in many nations. That beggaring of future generations is now—sometimes harshly but ultimately correctly—being brought to an end, and it is in that context that we review a future fund, including how it may help and how it might fit with current Government policies.

So, what is a future fund? A future fund is shorthand for moving the burden of paying for public sector pensions from the current tax-as-you-go model to a proceeds-from-invested-capital, or fully funded, model. It is fair to say, and I am sure that the Economic Secretary will confirm this, that Lord Hutton’s recent review of pensions ruled out a move to a future fund. Like you, Mr Leigh, I do not have any wish to be a champion for lost causes, but I hope that I am able to make some strong points about why the Treasury should reconsider Lord Hutton’s proposal to move on and not make a transition in the way in which public sector pensions are funded. This is not about public sector pension negotiations or about changing public sector pensions; it is about the process that the Government undertake to fund the pensions.

I encourage the Economic Secretary and the Treasury to reconsider a future fund for three main reasons. The first is that it promotes intergenerational fairness, and reinforces the Government’s view about long-term thinking for the security of our economy. Secondly, it offers an opportunity to rebalance the structure of earnings, to restore emphasis on pension provision—deferred income—rather than on immediate income and, thirdly, it enables the creation of a UK sovereign wealth fund, to stimulate investment in long-term projects.

I shall take each reason in turn. First, on a future fund promoting intergenerational fairness, those of us of a certain age look back on our lives and, being part of a bulge bracket of population—some of us at the latter end of it—perhaps realise that we have taken a lot for ourselves and that, as a generation, we have been somewhat greedy on the nation’s resources. That is one reason why this Government came into office at a time of such enormous debts, which future generations will need to repay. One thing that guides me as a Member of Parliament is looking for ways in which we can use fiscal probity to unburden future generations of some of those liabilities. Let us be under no illusion: it will not be easy for our children and grandchildren to compete in the future world economy. It will be tough. We have new competitors coming up all the time, so they will need every advantage, one of which is to bequeath them lower taxation rates than they otherwise would have.

[Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

Does the hon. Gentleman consider the Norwegians to have been a great example of setting up an oil fund for future generations to ensure that their oil wealth was not squandered in one generation?

[Richard Fuller]

The hon. Gentleman makes an extremely fair point. I was not in Parliament in the 1970s, and I am not sure whether such points were made at that time, but clearly countries that have received the beneficence of resources—Norway is one example, and Australia another—have seen the value of looking at the long-term investment of natural resources, and have set up future funds to provide for future pension liabilities. The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point in support of my argument. Of course, we are not as endowed with natural resources as those countries are, but the fundamental point about fairness between the generations is still solid.

Let us remind ourselves that the current level of public sector debt—the debt that we all talk about and are so worried about—is £1 trillion. The public sector pensions liability, which we do not often talk about, is £1.1 trillion. All those obligations have to be paid by future generations and, as we have so significantly ramped up this first amount of debt, should we not look for ways to reduce the unfunded part of public sector pensions for future taxpayers? A future fund would, over time, eliminate that burden from taxpayers and transfer it to the returns that would be generated from a funded pension scheme.

The Intergenerational Foundation has noted some questions about public sector pensions, and also some of the risks, and this change would reduce risk. At the moment, Lord Hutton’s proposals manage risk by way of a view of a cost ceiling on total public sector pension liabilities, which is based on projections of economic growth. The projections show the liability as a steady share of gross domestic product, falling in the long term. I am not sure that history is littered with Governments who under-predict economic growth; in fact, I think that it is often the other way around, with Governments having a rather rosy view of future growth. So, inherently, as we consider the risk that will fall on future generations, there is a likelihood that the Government, under current systems, will underestimate the liability that they are passing on. As Lord Hutton said:

“What we’ve seen is how very quickly the assumptions which underpinned my assessments of the long-term sustainability of public services pensions have been shown to be too optimistic…That is going to affect the sustainability of public sector pensions in a negative way.”

The change in the pensions structure would considerably eliminate that risk.

I shall now talk a bit about the second point, which is the rebalancing of the structure of earnings, to restore the emphasis on pensions. Over the past few decades, the role that pensions have played in the round of the compensation offer made to potential employees has reduced considerably and, I would say, undesirably. There is much more emphasis today on the immediate levels of compensation, on “How much will I earn this year?” rather than on “How much of what I earn am I putting away for my long-term retirement needs?”.

House of Commons statistics have tracked the active membership of occupational pension schemes for private sector and public sector employees, and have compared 1995 with 2010. Over that period, the number of public sector workers in such pension schemes increased, from 4.1 million to 5.3 million, but the number of private sector workers halved, from 6.2 million to 3.1 million. That was a halving in the coverage of occupational pension schemes in a very short period—15 years—which is why I say that the change has been dramatic. Being conservative, I like to see things in the round of their consequences. We are now seeing that many people fear that they do not have enough money for their retirement, and the Government have rightly recognised the need to encourage pensions through auto-enrolment programmes. This would be another measure that would encourage people by, as I shall explain in a minute, creating a floor on public sector pensions that would enable the focus to turn back to how pensions will be provided for private sector workers.

The third point is the role of a future fund in creating a sovereign wealth fund. To create a future fund, we have to fund it—and, boy, does it take a lot of money. If we have £1 trillion of liabilities, that is a lot of money to save up, so a long period is needed. The Australian future fund set a period of 14 years before money could be taken out: the law was passed in 2006, and no disbursements can be made until 2020. For the UK, taking a 20-year period, it would require a minimum of at least £20 billion a year—probably significantly higher than that; somewhere between £20 billion and £30 billion a year—fully to fund all the Government pension schemes over those 20 years.

To put that in context, that figure is equivalent to 3% of total Government expenditure. It sounds a lot, but the Government spend a lot—it would be 3% of expenditure—and it would be only half the money that the Government are spending on the interest on their own debt. It is therefore a manageable amount of money, even though the amount is significant. In addition to looking to fund that out of annual public expenditure, it would also be possible to make asset sales into the fund. In fact, the Australian future fund started with an asset transfer, from the sale of part of the telecommunications company Telstra, for its seed investment. I have checked—with the Minister here, I wanted to be absolutely sure—and the Government’s deficit reduction targets would not be imperilled by any future sale of assets going into a future fund. Quite rightly, if I may say so, the deficit reduction targets are set absent of any funds from the proceeds of the disposal of certain assets, such as those of Royal Bank of Scotland.

Some may say that taking £20 billion out of public expenditure when we are trying to create demand is a very odd suggestion, but of course the £20 billion would not be lost from the economy. Essentially, £20 billion would be transferred from current expenditure to an investment fund for long-term investment. That money would become a fund of resources that could be used to invest in long-term projects. If we take the Ontario teachers’ pension fund—I hope you will look it up later, Mr Leigh—it involves patient capital that is invested in long-term investment projects. It is there to secure the pensions of those wonderful teachers in Ontario; they are not quite, but almost, as good as the teachers in Bedford. It is there to protect their pensions, which it does by looking for long-term investment returns. It is the fund that seeded the money for Birmingham airport. If we had our own infrastructure fund set up as a future fund for public sector pensions, we could provide resources to fund long-term investment projects.

Let me say something that I rarely say, which is that I agree with the comments made by the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, who spoke yesterday about the need for a significant investment in housing construction. Of course, we need other construction projects, but we understand that we are under fiscal restraints because we must demonstrate that our deficit is being reduced. I ask the Treasury team to consider this very carefully: in current market conditions, particularly with the constraints of fiscal responsibility and the lenient conditions for monetary policy, a future fund would be uniquely placed to provide the long-term patient capital to fund such infrastructure investments, without there being any challenge to the probity of the Chancellor’s deficit and debt reduction policies. This environment provides an opportunity to fund and seed a future fund with the resources from the Government’s credit easing or quantitative easing programmes, and that would happen in such a way that markets would see that it was matching a reduction in the country’s long-term public liabilities for funding public sector pensions.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Richard Fuller

Tuesday 12th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr MacNeil]

The hon. Lady misses the point which is the way in which the UK is constructed, the way in which finance goes into the media in the UK, and where the media broadcast from and are centralised. Everybody accepts that that issue will dominate.

[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

It is not clear whether the hon. Gentleman’s position is that there should be a referendum on another date, or whether he views the issue as so irrelevant that it should be held on no date. Is it no date or a different date?

[Mr MacNeil]

I have clearly engaged the hon. Gentleman well, because he anticipates my next point. I remind him of what I have said: it is not that the electoral system is unimportant; it is just that it is lower down the hierarchy of needs and importance.