Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Bill Esterson and Mark Hoban

Monday 20th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hoban]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I congratulate the voluntary mentors who are taking their role seriously, helping people to get into work and identify ways of setting up their own business. On Thursday, I was in Bradford talking to a group called Inspired Neighbourhoods, which promotes self-employment in its area and provides many voluntary mentors to help people take advantage of those opportunities.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

Given the difficulties and challenges in setting up a business, does the Minister agree that it is essential that the advice given ensures that people can succeed, so that they do not end up in a worse situation than if they had not gone down that route in the first place?

[Mr Hoban]

The hon. Gentleman is right. That was one of the lessons from Inspired Neighbourhoods, which sat down with people and said, “This is the amount of money you need to make from your business to ensure you become free from benefits and help your family to look after themselves.”

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Bill Esterson and Mark Hoban

Monday 10th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hoban]

My hon. Friend is right to highlight take-up in Yorkshire. In his constituency, 40 claimants have started with a mentor, and so far 30 have started training. That is a good result—better than the national average—so clearly people in his constituency are getting good advice. We need to ensure that the quality of advice increases. We want more people to see self-employment as a way into the work force.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

The Minister is right that more people should go self-employed; the problem with the way the system has been set up is that it assumes people earn the minimum wage for every hour worked, when that is far from the truth, as he will know. Will he assure me that he will make changes where they are needed to ensure that self-employed people can take advantage of the scheme and not be disadvantaged, which is a potential problem at the moment?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Bill Esterson and Mark Hoban

Monday 5th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hoban]

My hon. Friend has made a good point. I think that we should try to give good examples to jobseekers about where they can start businesses. Under Get Britain Working, we can set up job clubs to encourage people to see self-employment as an option for the future. I think that that is a good route out for many people with great skills.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

Self-employed people in my constituency are experiencing increasing difficulty in finding work because of the Government’s austerity measures. Does the Minister accept that the bureaucratic requirement for self-employed people to produce two forms of evidence relating to their income is making it very hard for them to claim benefits and to find a way back into work?

[Mr Hoban]

We try to do as much as we can to reduce the burden of red tape on businesses. That is why the Government set the red tape challenge and introduced the one in, one out rule. All those measures lift the red tape burden from businesses to help them to focus on what they should be focusing on—creating jobs and wealth.

Finance Bill

Debate between Bill Esterson and Mark Hoban

Tuesday 3rd July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Bill Esterson]

Youth unemployment is higher than when Labour left office, unemployment generally is higher than when Labour left office, and the economy was growing when Labour left office whereas now we are back in recession. Will the Minister confirm all three of those facts?

[Mr Hoban]

The challenge that we face is dealing with the economic legacy left by Labour, with the huge boom in financial services and the huge bust that followed.

We have heard Labour Members’ story that they presided over a golden age in the financial services sector. The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) could not bring herself to admit that the scandal over LIBOR fixing took place between 2005 and 2008 or that the interest rate mis-selling that affected so many small businesses took place in the same period leading up to the financial crisis.

Labour Members deplore the bonus culture, but let us not forget that when they were in government, bonuses were paid out in the year that they were earned and paid out in cash. That was the hallmark of the age of irresponsibility that characterised their time in office. This Government are taking action to tackle the bonus culture. This Government have introduced rules to ensure that bonuses are not paid out in the year they are earned but spread over a three-year period, that they are not paid out in cash but in shares, and, crucially, that they can be clawed back where there have been problems in the business or where there has been wrongdoing. This Government have tackled the bonus culture in the UK whereas the previous Government let it run riot, and we have seen the financial consequences of their so doing.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Bill Esterson and Mark Hoban

Tuesday 21st June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hoban]

The corporation tax arrangements for banks are similar to those for other businesses. That is one reason why we have imposed the additional bank levy, which will raise more each year over this Parliament than the previous Government’s bank payroll tax did. It is important that the banks make a contribution to reflect the risk that they pose to the wider economy.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

11. What recent assessment he has made of the effect on the economy of trends in the rate of unemployment.

Eurozone (Contingency Plans)

Debate between Bill Esterson and Mark Hoban

Monday 20th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hoban]

Madame Lagarde is a strong candidate for the role of director-general of the IMF. My hon. Friend is absolutely right to point out that she is French; that fact has not escaped us in ECOFIN meetings. Madame Lagarde said on “Newsnight” a couple of weeks ago that she recognised that the bail-out of Greece involved a series of agreements between eurozone countries, and that that should remain the case.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

The Minister has an extraordinary level of confidence—well, I think it is confidence—in the Greeks’ ability to repay the loans they are currently receiving. I just want to check with him: how much of the £19.7 billion UK contribution to the IMF forms part of the Greek bail-out and how long he is prepared to see us continue to make our contributions through the IMF?

[Mr Hoban]

I do not think the hon. Gentleman is suggesting that we should withdraw our membership of the IMF—[Interruption.] It is not clear from the question he is asking. Part of the condition of any bail-out of an economy by the IMF—whether it is a eurozone economy or another economy—is a debt sustainability plan, which is a rigorous part of the assessment process. As was clear in the Eurogroup statement last night, the IMF and the Eurogroup have signed off on Greece’s debt sustainability plan, so they expect that money to be paid back.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Bill Esterson and Mark Hoban

Tuesday 22nd March 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Mr Mark Hoban)]

My hon. Friend is right. The mortgage market needs reform, but it needs stability as well, which is why I welcome the statement by the FSA today. It says that it will not introduce reforms this year and will take into account overall economic stability before it introduces any further changes. It has also made it clear that lenders should not pre-empt any conclusions from its review.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

T5. Can the Chancellor confirm that between 1990 and 1997 the proportion of tax paid on a litre of fuel rose from 59% to 75%? Can he also confirm that the proportion of tax paid then fell by more than 10% between 1997 and 2010?

Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Bill

Debate between Bill Esterson and Mark Hoban

Monday 22nd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hoban]

If the hon. Lady reads the comments of international organisations such as the OECD, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, and those of rating agencies such as Standard & Poor’s, she will find that mainstream opinion agrees with the Government about the need to take action now to tackle the deficit in order to avoid the crises that we are seeing elsewhere in the world. All that we hear from the Labour party is “Let us delay the difficult decisions. Let us go into the election with the structural deficit, and try to deal with it in four or five years’ time rather than now.” That has been the theme of Labour Members’ contributions throughout our debates on the Bill. They have denied the need to tackle the deficit now, and have ignored the lessons that are being presented all around us.

[Bill Esterson]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Hoban]

Let me make some progress and explain why we are repealing the Saving Gateway Accounts Act 2009. The repeal is part of our deficit reduction policy. The right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) quoted from my Second Reading speech. It was the third time that I had heard him use the same quotation. Let me now, for the third time, expand a little on what I said on that occasion. I said:

“The pilot scheme demonstrated some benefits, but it demonstrated some challenges too… What are the long-term benefits? What are we getting in return for the quite generous bonus that we are giving to savers?.. In the second pilot, questions were raised about whether the scheme was effective… First, there was no statistically significant evidence that, in delivering genuinely new savings, the saving gateway accounts delivered higher overall net worth.”

I referred to a

“number of anecdotes, rather than hard evidence, used to support the proposal”,

and added:

“It appears that money was moved from one set of savings to another, perhaps from a current account to a savings gateway account, simply to secure the Government match.”—[Official Report, 13 January 2009; Vol. 486, c. 145.]

While accepting the principle behind the saving gateway account, we nevertheless flagged significant concerns about its effectiveness.

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned the pilots. According to the conclusion from the second pilot,

“when we look at a broader measure of net worth (including investments as well as all cash deposit accounts), there is no statistically significant evidence that funds held in these forms have increased… we nevertheless do not find statistically significant evidence of an increase in overall net worth among this group.”

Carl Emmerson said in his evidence to the Committee:

“There was not any really strong evidence from the saving gateway that it led to more overall saving from lower-income households.”––[Official Report, Saving Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Public Bill Committee, 2 November 2010; c. 18, Q42.]

Given the fiscal constraints that we face, we must question the value for money to be obtained from this project. It would be nice to be able to proceed with it, but the evidence suggests that it does not increase saving and does not possess the benefits ascribed to it by Labour Members. Not only is the evidence of its effectiveness in question, but it would cost more than £300 million over the next five years, which makes it unaffordable in the light of the need to reduce the deficit.

The other strand of the argument, touched on by the hon. Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue), is access. Who would be able to gain access to the saving gateway account? My hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) echoed Adrian Coles, the director general of the Building Societies Association, who said that

“no building society had committed to offering a saving gateway account”.

Eric Leenders of the British Bankers’ Association said

“there were only a couple of providers who felt that it was suitably beneficial for them to provide the account.”

The banks that said they would provide accounts were Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds. The Post Office would take part in the scheme only if it received more taxpayers’ money.

I do not think we would have seen the easy access that the hon. Lady believed to be a key part of the scheme’s attraction. The only credit union outlet in my constituency is in a deprived area, and is open for only a short time each week. In my constituency, credit unions would not have been a vehicle for access to the saving gateway account.

Given that we do not intend to proceed with the scheme, we should leave no room for uncertainty among financial institutions or advice-giving bodies, and the best way in which to be clear about our intentions is to repeal the 2009 Act. I believe that if a future Government revisited the scheme, they would design it very differently. If the right hon. Gentleman wishes to press his amendment to the vote, I will ask my hon. Friends to oppose it.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Bill Esterson and Mark Hoban

Tuesday 13th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hoban]

I welcome the interest shown in Teesside as a location for the green investment bank. Throughout the north-east, on Teesside, Wearside and Tyneside, we are seeing significant investment in green technology, which is a key way of rebalancing the economy and creating more private sector jobs in the north-east.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

rose—