Finance Bill

Debate between Bob Stewart and Richard Fuller

Tuesday 1st July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Richard Fuller]

I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans), who spoke with great authority, drawing as he did on his experiences as a trade union official before he was a Member of Parliament. I will, if I may, draw on some of my own experiences of working with small businesses. In that regard, I draw Members’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Interests.

I apologise to the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) for missing the beginning of her comments. I thought that she spoke persuasively and eloquently about some of the issues and about the policy that the Government have introduced. She had me persuaded all the way, until she referred to the spare room subsidy as a tax. It is just not a tax, and it is such a shame when bad slogans happen to good people because all the persuasion power of their speeches is lost. The rest of her speech raised some important points.

We should put the new clause into context. The Government have an extraordinary long-term economic plan that is delivering improvements to the economic lives of my constituents in Bedford and Kempston. It impacts on their ability to find work and get into work. It also raises their average weekly earnings, which is a major concern for many people. It is good to see the plan starting to bear fruit.

Perhaps now is not a good time for an ordinary Tory Back-Bench Member to criticise the Government, but if my hon. Friend the Minister will forgive me, I will do so. We are looking here at a policy in search of a problem; we are not really looking at something that will have a dramatic impact on the well-being of our businesses or our employees. I am open to being persuaded by the Minister. He usually persuades me and I am sure that he will do so today, but perhaps I could go through some of my experiences from when I was in business relating to two parts of our debate.

On the one hand, we have employee and workers’ rights and, on the other, we have employee shareholdings. The approach seems to be to conflate those two issues into one policy and I am not sure whether that will ultimately prove to be wise. In my experience as an employer, although employees’ issues in employment sometimes concerned the extent of employee rights, red tape and regulation often led to far more concerns about the impact of government on the business. In addition, the problem was not necessarily the rights per se but the complexity of the regulations. For a small business, just understanding the regulations to comply with them causes problems. I am not sure that the problem was specifically the rights that were given to employees. Is the objective in this case to reduce the complexity of regulation for businesses through the use of the combination of employee shareholdings, or is there some other objective?

The hon. Member for Islwyn mentioned some of the issues when companies give shares to employees. For a large part of my life, I have worked with technology businesses and the provision of shares was a norm for business. It was a way in which many companies could afford to start, to grow and to prosper. In those circumstances, people were given shares not because of their employee rights but as an incentive either to reward effort or to encourage effort to promote the success of the company. It was also a matter of the trade-off of rewards. Many small companies did not want to use the cash they got from investors to pay high or market rates to their employees and wished to defer that by providing people with the opportunity to have shares to share in the ultimate long-term success of the business. That is a tremendously powerful model for many sectors, not just the technology sector but other sectors of our economy, in that people are willing to trade off immediate returns for long-term rewards.

When we consider other ways to think about compensation, which will, I think, be a growing issue over the next five years, we must consider how to encourage people to defer some of their compensation until later in their lives. I can understand how the promotion of employee shareholding helps with short and long-term rewards, but my concern is that combining that with employee rights means that clarity might be lost. Rather than being given a positive impression about why we are encouraging employees to become shareholders, people will instead ask whether there is a catch. It should be absolutely clear that there is no catch when people are being offered shares. This is clearly an issue of deferring compensation from period x to period y.

I am concerned that, as I have said, this is perhaps a policy in search of a problem. As with so much that Government do, we will see unintended consequences. If the new clause is targeted at small businesses, we must remember that the Government have other options at their disposal. Just a week or two ago, the Centre for Policy Studies produced some very positive policies about abolishing corporation tax for very small businesses and abolishing capital gains tax for investors. To my mind, that would have more of an impact on encouraging more entrepreneurial businesses. We have recently seen news about the merger of national insurance and income tax, which would alleviate some of the burdens and complexity for business in managing employees.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

When I visit small businesses in my constituency, I am sometimes quite shocked that, say, one person out of 10—a large proportion of the staff—has to spend all his or her time dealing with regulations and sorting out the problems they cause rather than getting on with making money.

Death Penalty (India)

Debate between Bob Stewart and Richard Fuller

Thursday 28th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Bob Stewart]

If someone is executed, they can very quickly become a martyr. Martyrdom by execution is rather sad: I would prefer to see people punished by imprisonment. I hate the idea that people become martyrs, especially when they have done great wrong.

[Richard Fuller]

My hon. Friend obviously speaks with great experience from before he became a Member of Parliament in dealing in highly conflicting situations with people of different religious and ethnic backgrounds in Europe. Those differences can lead to extremism and the actions of governing authorities can create martyrdom situations that exacerbate divisions. Any healing democracy always wishes to heal the divisions within society. The death penalty is not a friend of that aim; it is an opponent. As we can see from the petition, there are real concerns that the existence of the death penalty in India will exacerbate the tensions within Indian society rather than achieving a better long-term solution.

The human aspect for those under threat of the death penalty must also be a considerable concern to us. It is inhumane treatment to leave a human being on death row for many years. No one should have to go through the psychological trauma of not knowing if or when their appeal may be heard and whether they may be executed. That is not a mark of a decent society.