Finance Bill

Baroness Kramer Excerpts

Tuesday 13th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, I feel rather sorry for the Bill. In the number of fascinating speeches that we have heard, the only noble Lord who focused on the Bill to any significant extent was the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull. His description of the complexities of the taxation system—added to rather than diminished by the Bill—left us with our jaws dropping and terror in our eyes. But that has been almost the extent of the discussion of the Finance Bill.

I was in Alaska over the summer. There, when a mother bear is with her cubs, if a potential new papa bear comes along he slaughters the cubs. I rather think that we are in that situation now, with the Bill set for the slaughterhouse and unlikely to survive Brexit, the new Prime Minister and the new Chancellor.

Most noble Lords who spoke today covered broad issues, mainly Brexit-driven but with a very broad scope and range. I will extract two things from the speeches. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, laid out the timetable according to which detachment from the EU has to progress. It is an exact timetable; it is not an issue but a series of representations of the actual fact of the timetable and the length of time it will take to go through Article 50, the negotiations, the WTO process and other stages. I hope that the Government will take on board that timetable. I have now had conversations with two government Ministers who seemed to have no idea that that is the timetable that we face and that has to be part of the thinking and decision-making of the Government.

The second issue is to say to the Government that the ongoing uncertainty is simply unacceptable. “Brexit is Brexit” three months after the referendum is not a satisfactory set of answers. I speak regularly with businesses, as do many noble Lords. We have gone from being asked questions about what we think the Government might be thinking to questions about whether the Government have any competence. That is dangerous territory to get into and I honestly think that we deserve to see the framework and the basic principles. One noble Lord said just now that it is possible that they will be told to the world at the Conservative Party conference. But this is Parliament and this is the place where those principles and frameworks should be brought before us. This is a big, important issue that goes far beyond the entertainment of a party conference.

I will talk a bit about the Bill. There are a few good measures that are worth saving, including raising the personal tax allowance to £11,500, which is a good Liberal Democrat policy, and cutting business rates for small businesses—a long-overdue relief for small businesses. But I hope that the Government will treat this just as a holding measure, because the framework for business taxes in this country is frankly unfit for purpose. I do not mind quick interim measures to tackle a problem, but we need something far more fundamental. Reforms of stamp duty must be right. Improvements to ISAs matter little with interest rates so low, but they go in the right direction. The whole issue around pensions, pension inequality and the structure of pensions was not tackled in the Bill—and it must be done.

The power of the Treasury to force companies to publish how much money they make and the tax they pay in each country where they operate, and the transparency amendment which the Government accepted, are both good as part of the programme to tackle tax avoidance. But again, this is a very timid and limited programme to tackle tax avoidance. On income tax relief for irrecoverable P2P loans—a small issue that pleased me greatly—if we are going to have challenges to the major banks, as surely we must, we have to make sure that issues like that are put on a level playing field.

However, there are serious problems and omissions in the Bill. First, it was predicated on a fiscal mandate that made no sense from the beginning: creating an overall budget surplus by 2019-20, and not just in the current account. You can argue about the date but quite frankly, the way it was defined, not as a surplus in the current account but including investment spending, was always daft. That target has had the impact of diminishing the Government’s infrastructure ambitions. At a time when we need growth, that is not an acceptable way to treat investment spending, and is particularly misjudged, as other noble Lords have said, when borrowing is so cheap. We debated that to some degree in my Private Member’s Bill on Friday. The Minister today will be aware, although I am sure that he will not admit it, of our lack of ambition in housing, broadband, energy—especially renewables—hospitals, schools and even transport outside London. Today some noble Lords have criticised HS2. I remain a backer of HS2, because quite frankly the Indian system of strapping people to the roofs of trains is not acceptable. I do not know how you will deal with the number of people trying to travel north out of London without a new line, and HS2 is the answer.

The Bill cuts corporate tax rates. The Government cannot make a coherent argument for such cuts, especially when they are financed by welfare cuts to poor working families, disabled people and young people. We already have among the lowest corporate tax rates in the OECD. However, it has evidently done us absolutely no good in persuading businesses to invest in new projects or in R&D: both are already at exceptionally low levels and major companies are sitting on a mountain of cash. Further cuts in corporate tax rates may please business but we have already learned that they will not motivate it. A race to the bottom in corporate tax rates is not a wise move for any major economy. It simply becomes beggar-my-neighbour.

Despite toughening the tax anti-avoidance rules in line with BEPS, which I totally support, it still looks as if the online giants will have plenty of scope in the UK to limit their tax payments. Action on tax avoidance is timid in the Bill, which still focuses on abuse, leaving plenty of grey areas where many companies stake out their tax minimisation strategy. I look forward to the debate in the House we will have later tonight which addresses that issue. As Liberal Democrats, we have commissioned Vince Cable and a panel of experts to look at business tax as a whole. The annual exercise of trying to catch the loopholes has become a nonsense. We need a new framework for business tax that recognises that value has shifted from hard assets to intellectual property, from local to global, and from employees to what is optimistically called the shared economy, in which the workforce carries the risk.

As for the cut in capital gains tax, which the Minister presented as such a positive, in the coalition years we raised capital gains tax to be close to income tax, which is a genuinely sound principle. Frankly, how the Government could think of cutting capital gains tax at a time like this, when so many people are still feeling austerity, is beyond me. It shows this ongoing focus on people who are much better off rather than on ordinary people.

In closing I challenge the Government on just three narrow but important issues. The first is to join the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, in calling for much more support for small businesses to go digital in their tax filings; and to be absolutely certain that they stand by their commitment to make quarterly tax reporting voluntary and not mandatory, which is an impossible burden for many small businesses.

The apprenticeship levy—essentially a payroll tax—is structured in such a way that an employee share ownership company pays more levy than a conventional company because of the way the dividend exclusion is defined. That is wrong; we need to embrace and encourage those shared ownership and mutual companies, which should not be deliberately disadvantaged.

Young people have received numerous blows from Conservative Budgets. In this Bill they are hard-hit again by the hike in tax on insurance premiums, because young people pay—I often suspect unfairly—higher insurance premiums for just about every insurance product. The Government did not think this through and acted as if they were not aware of it. They need to remedy this rapidly.

The Bill may soon become an Act, but shortly after that it really will be forgotten. I hope that the Government will take on board what has been discussed in this debate; it has brought up a wide range of general issues, including intergenerational fairness and the oncoming impact of artificial intelligence and machine learning, which will completely change job structures in the next five or more years. There are so many issues to be looked at and this is a great opportunity to do so. I hope that the Government, before they get to the Autumn Statement, will allow this House and the other place to engage in a much broader debate on many of the issues that were raised today.