Local Government Finance

Debate between Brandon Lewis and Sheila Gilmore

Wednesday 18th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Brandon Lewis]

We have actually increased last year’s amount. We have put it into the baseline. I appreciate the point made by Members about the need to narrow the gap between rural and urban areas, but they should appreciate that we are acting against the backdrop of the financial mess in which we were left by the last Government and with which we now have to deal. Obviously, that somewhat restricts our room for manoeuvre.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

Is the Minister aware, or willing to admit, that a council tax freeze is a very regressive measure? Those who did not pay previously receive nothing back, and the higher people’s council tax band, the more they gain. We in Scotland have had a great deal of experience of that regressive tax policy over nearly seven years.

[Brandon Lewis]

I am not sure whether the hon. Lady is arguing that councils should increase the tax, but that is certainly not something that we would support. We think that freezing council tax in order to make families several hundred pounds a year better off is a good thing to do for hard-working families.

Work Experience

Debate between Brandon Lewis and Sheila Gilmore

Tuesday 13th March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Sheila Gilmore]

I am not convinced, from the young woman’s description of her experience, that she was in the shop window of anything. I should like to quote the chief executive of the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion. His view is not that there should be no work experience, but that there should be

“a good ‘match’ between the nature of the work experience and the young person”.

He gives an example. He says that

“for someone with a law degree doing work experience at a legal firm would be a much better match than, say, the night shift at a pound shop. We have learned time and again that the better the match,”

the better the prospect of someone getting employment.

[Brandon Lewis]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way again and being so generous with her time. This scheme is voluntary and the work experience that people do is based on an area and an industry in which they are interested. The hon. Lady is a member of the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, but I suggest that she look at what her constituent has brought her, because she may be getting confused—mixed-up—between the work experience scheme and other schemes such as the mandatory work scheme, the skills and training schemes and even the Work programme. It seems as though she is talking about a totally different scheme, which is part of the problem that the Socialist Workers party has had in purposely trying to confuse the situation.

[Sheila Gilmore]

I accept that there is a plethora of schemes and some confusion—the media have been confused—but I am absolutely certain that the mandatory work experience scheme was not involved in this example. It is not good enough to have the view that when people make the point about relevant work experience—relevant to people’s existing experience and skills—they should simply be condemned as snooty job snobs and people who are not willing to work. That is not the case.

--- Later in debate ---

[Brandon Lewis (Great Yarmouth) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Howarth. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones) on securing this important debate.

It is important to start off with why we are here. The scheme, which has worked successfully, has been in place since January last year, and it is only in the past few weeks that it has gained any publicity. It has been working very nicely, the companies involved in it have been taking people on and more than 34,000 people have been through it. That tells us that something has happened in just the past few weeks to bring it to public attention.

[Sheila Gilmore]

I hope the hon. Gentleman will accept that some of us did, in fact, raise questions considerably longer ago than the past few weeks, but we were put down with exactly the same suggestions that we were being over-fussy and supporting people who thought they were too good to work.

[Brandon Lewis]

I thank the hon. Lady for outlining that she supports the Socialist Workers party position on this. The reality is that the publicity came about a few weeks ago, when the Socialist Workers party started a campaign, having placed an advert that was wrong.

Living Standards

Debate between Brandon Lewis and Sheila Gilmore

Wednesday 30th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Brandon Lewis]

Absolutely, and I would add that we also need to look at how to get businesses growing faster and quicker to employ more people. Having more people working in the private sector is without doubt the best way to raise living standards both for them and for our country, because having more jobs reduces welfare costs. That is hugely important and it is why I was so pleased to hear the Chancellor’s announcement yesterday about fuel duty being frozen and not increased in January. That, combined with the work already done to get rid of the fuel duty escalator, will get prices, although high, lower than they would otherwise have been. That is important—

[Sheila Gilmore]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Brandon Lewis]

No, I will not give way again.

The fuel duty measures are important not only to commuters and consumers—parents trying to get their children to school and young people trying to go to work or get to job interviews—all of whom will be better off, but to firms in transport and logistics, which need to be able to invest more in their businesses, to grow them and to create more jobs.

The Government are also working to protect the elderly, who have given so much already. Making sure that they get their winter fuel allowance and the right protection for their pension, as was announced yesterday, means that we are doing all we can, in the circumstances we inherited from the previous Government, to provide for the people who need help the most.

To me, the key is to bring all that together—education and welfare reforms, and the work being done through the Treasury and BIS on taxation and apprenticeships—in an holistic approach. In that way, our country will be able to move forward and we will see the real improvement in living standards that we all want.

Pensions Bill [Lords]

Debate between Brandon Lewis and Sheila Gilmore

Tuesday 18th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Sheila Gilmore]

That certainly is such an example. If we are to give people the opportunity of saving for their pensions into the future, it is important that we take seriously the proposals for auto-enrolment and NEST and build them up in a way to which everybody should give their full support. Although I am sure that the Government have not officially said that they are not giving them their full support, I was struck as I read an article in The Sunday Times a week last Sunday by a suggestion that the Government might be backing off on the speed of the introduction of auto-enrolment. That might have been a piece of kite-flying, as I gather it relates to a piece of work that is being done internally for the Government, which will not be published and which we cannot see, about how to make yet more savings and attempt to grow the economy, but nevertheless that story reached the newspapers. I am sure the Minister will tell us that we have nothing to fear when we reach the relevant part of the debate.

We are constantly asked where we would find the money and, interestingly, despite the comments that Government Members made from a sedentary position a few moments ago, when my hon. Friends the Members for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Gregg McClymont) and for East Lothian (Fiona O'Donnell) made suggestions, they were pooh-poohed.

[Brandon Lewis]

Does the hon. Lady accept that one reason why people were incredulous about some of the suggestions made earlier is that the £11 billion required by Labour is equivalent to the whole budget for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and roughly double that of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport?

[Sheila Gilmore]

We are talking about a spending period over 10 years, so it is not equivalent to the budget in a given year. Even in those terms, we are always making choices, and I will not accept lessons from a party with many members who are publicly saying that, as quickly as possible, they want to reduce or take away the 50% tax rate. That is something they are keen to do and that is their choice. They can make the case for it, but if they bring that proposal forward, I for one will certainly oppose it. That is another way of deciding how money is going to be spent and how money is going to be collected—and that is only one example.

In an earlier intervention, I mentioned the pension tax relief system, which gives a huge amount of money to people who already have a lot of money. If someone wants to save £100 into their pension pot and they are on 20% tax, in order to get £200 tax relief they have to find £800 from their pocket, but if someone is on 50% tax, they have to find only half the amount they want to save. That is unfair; it is a subsidy to those who already have a lot of income and assets. If at the end of this decade we are finding it difficult to make ends meet and we cannot help the group of women we are talking about, perhaps we should be thinking about that system.

The women who are affected by the measure will be making exactly those comparisons. They know that choices are made in politics and that choices are made by Governments, and they know that it is not impossible for the Government to change their mind on this proposal. They did not campaign for it during the election; indeed one of my hon. Friends has suggested that it was probably drawn up in a great hurry and seemed like a good wheeze at the time, but it puts a particular burden on a group of women many of whom cannot easily afford the changes. I want to emphasise, as several of my colleagues have done, that it should not be assumed that these women have a job and can just go on doing that job, or that they will still be in that job in three, four or five years’ time.