Chris Leslie
Main Page: Chris Leslie (The Independent Group for Change - Nottingham East)
Mr Andrew Tyrie (Chichester) (Con)
I do not think that there is a great deal of concord in the House about that speech, but I think that there is some agreement across the House about a number of things that the Chancellor said. In fact, I think that there has been a quiet consensus in this place for steady deficit reduction ever since Alistair Darling’s Budget of 2010, and I am delighted that the Chancellor is persisting with that reduction.
Before picking up on a few of the measures, particularly those that affect small businesses, I want to make one point about overall fiscal policy. The Chancellor does not have much room for manoeuvre. He is pretty heavily boxed in, and I see him nodding in agreement. On the spending side, three quarters of public spending is covered by manifesto pledges, so every round of savings has to fall on a progressively smaller area, which makes it painful for it to absorb. On the tax side, he is just as constrained. In fact, he is even more constrained, because he has inherited the tax lock—the statutory prohibition on any reduction or increase in a number of taxes—and a commitment to reduce corporation tax to 15%. That puts over 80% of revenue beyond his reach should he need to raise more money later. Of course, there is also the fuel duty freeze—I think it is a freeze—that was announced in the autumn statement. All those tax and spending pledges are the fallout of an electoral bidding war, but dealing with that is a matter for another day.
I want to pick up on a few detailed measures that we just heard about, particularly on those, as I said, that affect small businesses, because I am particularly concerned about them. I was delighted to hear some good news, but first it is worth going through the list of things that small businesses are having to deal with at the moment: the doubling of insurance premium tax that was announced last year; automatic enrolment for pensions; the extra cost of the living wage; the infrastructure levy; the revaluation of rates—I will come on to the proposals that have just been announced in a moment—and the “Making tax digital” plan. In addition, there are the proposals for class 4 national insurance contributions.
Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)
The right hon. Gentleman is providing a good analysis so far. On the increase in national insurance contributions for the self-employed, does he think that the Chancellor needs to explain why he is breaking a 2015 general election manifesto pledge?
Mr Tyrie
The Chancellor set out his reasons quite carefully. He thinks that there is a strong argument for matching what people get out of NICs on the receipt side to the contribution side. I will look carefully at the hon. Gentleman’s point about the specific manifesto pledge, about which the Chancellor and I will no doubt have a further discussion when he comes before the Treasury Committee.
The Chancellor announced some quite important changes to “Making tax digital”, and we need to be clear about the problem that he seeks to address. Until today’s statement, several million people, mostly small traders, would have been required by law from 2018 to fill in their tax returns electronically for the first time. Some of those traders will not even have a smartphone, let alone a computer. The plan’s effect would have been to impose a massive, unfair burden on small businesses and some of the smallest traders, so it is good news that the Chancellor made a concession today, one which appears to be aligned with at least one of the suggestions made in a Treasury Committee report on this subject. The most important thing that the Chancellor is doing is keeping the starting threshold for another year at the VAT threshold of £83,000. That is the good news, but the not so good news is that the relief is only for a year.
May I ask the Chancellor to consider phasing in the lower threshold over a run of three or four years? He has suggested a lower threshold of £10,000, which seems extremely low—he looks puzzled, but he will find that that is what HMRC has been talking about. Dropping the VAT threshold dramatically from £83,000, or whatever it becomes, in one year strikes me as unreasonable. Of course I understand why the Chancellor is doing that—he needs the money—and I am sure that HMRC has told him that there is a huge amount of money waiting to be collected. He is nodding in agreement with that, too.
I think that I am right to say that HMRC previously suggested that £2 billion of uncollected tax is available, but I doubt that figure, and so does the Treasury Committee. If the Chancellor is brutal about introducing the measure, he might not got very much money. Some businesses will go into the grey economy, and some will cease trading altogether, so the pot of gold might not be there at all.
Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)
It is always good to try to find an area of the Budget on which we can show that there is some common ground, so I want to say at the outset how much I am pleased that the Chancellor focused on the midlands engine. I will talk about that on another occasion.
I want to mention a couple of facts that particularly stand out. There is a shocking 20% cut in local authority spending from £8.2 billion in 2016-17 to £6.5 billion in the following year. A 20% drop in council funding in one year is incredibly difficult for local authorities to cope with, given the services that depend on that money. The other point, which was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) —I very much associate myself with her analysis of the Budget statement—is the incongruence between the £1 billion given to free schools for capital spending, and the £260 million—only a quarter of that amount—provided for the thousands of other schools that our constituents and children use. I think that is typical of the Government’s priorities.
In the short time that I have, however, I want to talk about the two key issues that stand out for me in the Budget speech. One is the issue of the self-employed, and I will come on to that later. The other is the looming hurricane on the horizon, and the fact that the Government have decided not to veer around it, but to head straight towards it by failing to try to negotiate on our ability to stay in the single market. For a Chancellor of the Exchequer, at this point of the economic cycle, to fail even to mention Brexit—our imminent exit from the European Union—is incredible. For our potential exit from the single market not to be part of the core analysis of the economic outlook, let alone for him not to be finding ways to bolster our economy so that we are prepared for the storm, is a real betrayal of the interests of our economy and our constituents.
Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman clearly has not read the report on the Budget, because its very first sentence, on page 1, starts:
“As the UK begins the formal process of exiting the European Union”.
He can hardly argue that the Treasury Bench has not taken into account our departure from the EU, can he?
Chris Leslie
Why did the Chancellor not mention it in his speech? It is true, as somebody said recently, that this is a “mono-purpose” Government, and that everything has been blown out of the water because of Brexit. Why be so coy about it? They are pretending that it is not an issue, saying, “It’s fine. We’ll cope. Don’t worry, there’s nothing to see here.” But Brexit will be at the front and centre of our considerations.
Let us look at what has happened since sterling has been devalued so significantly. Consumer spending, which has propped up our economy so much in recent months, has started to feel the squeeze. Retail sales are already starting to head down. If we do not have consumers with such spending power—if living standards are squeezed, and wages do not keep pace with that—we should not be surprised if our economy starts to shudder. The OBR says on page 6 of its report that we will see a squeeze on GDP growth in the year ahead.
We know that we have a productivity problem, and at least the Chancellor acknowledged that, but unless we can find some way to catch up with the Germans and the French and to narrow the productivity gap—they produce in four days what our employees in this country take five days to produce—we will not generate the wages we need to ensure that there is growth and prosperity.
The uncertainty hanging over businesses that export and depend on trade for their income is immense. That is not just about market access, because services account for 80% of our economy, and whatever free trade agreements Ministers manage to get—they had jolly well better get a free trade agreement—such agreements tend not to deal with service sector trading issues. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research predicts that there may be a 61% fall in our trade in services, even with a free trade agreement. Ministers have got their work cut out, and I think it is astonishing that the Chancellor did not mention Brexit. That is the big issue in the Budget.
Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)
I hate to deflate the hon. Gentleman’s main argument, but the Chancellor did actually mention Brexit. In fact, in the second sentence of his Budget speech, he said: “As we start our negotiations to exit the European Union, this Budget takes forward our plan…for a brighter future.”
Chris Leslie
The Brexit analysis that should be in the Budget should take into account the drivers that produce economic growth. Brexit will affect consumers, as we know—the Chancellor did not touch on those issues. It will affect business investment—he did not touch on some of those issues. Trade will obviously be affected and, of course, public sector investment and public service expenditure will be radically affected by it. The reason I keep banging on about the impact on the financial services sector is that it generates £67 billion of revenue for our Exchequer. I need that in my constituency of Nottingham East to pay for the schools, hospitals and vital public services, and the Economic Secretary knows that. Brexit therefore has to be at the centre of our analysis and our policy expectations, and I am astonished that the Government are trying to skirt around it. They do not want to talk about it; they are hoping that it will just disappear.
Labour Members have to acknowledge that there is no magic money tree to deal with all the issues that lie ahead. We know that debt is very high and that borrowing is high. In fact, the Chancellor did not talk about the fact that he is projecting borrowing actually to rise—to go up—in the next financial year from £51 billion to £58 billion. We have to be very prudent and careful with taxpayers’ money. That is absolutely the case, and the OBR predicts real problems over the next 20, 30 or 40 years, because of the ageing population and health expenditure questions.
Just as there is no magic money tree, however, there is also no such thing as the “Have your cake and eat it” world outside the single market. I have to say to those on the fringes of politics and the hard Brexiteers who think they can continue our economic relationship with the 27 other European Union countries with no economic effect whatsoever that they are living in cloud cuckoo land. We should be doing all we can to salvage our relationship with the single market and to preserve the frictionless tariff-free trade that very much serves as the cornerstone of many of our industries, particularly manufacturing ones such as the car industry.
The other big issue I want to talk about is self-employment. There are 5 million self-employed people in this country, and I have 5,100 self-employed people in Nottingham East. They will have seen the Chancellor’s decision to break the solemn manifesto promise made at the last general election, when the Conservatives promised that there would be no increase in national insurance contributions. They have ripped up that promise. I feel that people will see the increase in national insurance contributions for the self-employed—it is not a 1% increase; it is going up to 11%—as a betrayal of the offer or promise that was made by the Conservatives at the last general election.
Those 5 million self-employed people have a number of disadvantages, relative to those with stable salaried employment contracts, that make their lives more precarious. These are the entrepreneurs who generate much of the wealth and prosperity that this country needs. As my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West said, they do not necessarily have the opportunities of holiday pay and sick pay that exist in full-time salaried employment. They are less likely to be able to save for the long term and often do not have the company pensions and so forth that exist in other forms of employment. They face enormous risks if they fall ill, given the poor insurance coverage for loss of earnings. The self-employed also find it much harder to get a mortgage because their income is far less predictable than is the case for those on stable salaried contracts.
Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)
The hon. Gentleman is making a telling point about the self-employed. Is the change not also an attack on rural communities, where many people are not able to access employment and have to be self-employed?
Chris Leslie
That is exactly right.
The self-employed do not have the same security, which is why we have had the discrepancy in the levels of taxation historically. Nearly half of those who are self-employed in the UK are on low pay, compared with a fifth of those in employment. Social Market Foundation research suggests that 1.7 million self-employed people earn less than the national living wage, yet the Government’s new universal credit rules will cap self-employed recipients on the assumption that they receive the living wage over a standard working week, which is not necessarily the case in seasonal work and elsewhere.
The self-employed, who work longer despite earning less, and twice as many of whom work 50 hours each week than those in employment, will be paying a significant price. If they take home £27,000 of profit, they will be hit by an extra £30 a month because of this decision. I say to my hon. Friends that another change that the Chancellor announced—cutting the dividend allowance to just £2,000—is also a hit on the self-employed because the dividend allowance is part of how they derive their income.
It is a double whammy for the self-employed, who are hit by a broken promise from the Conservatives—they said they would not increase national insurance and they are doing so—and hit again by the cut in the dividend allowance. That will harm those running small businesses by really hitting their incomes and devalue the trust that should exist in politics. When politicians make a promise, they ought to be able to keep it. This erodes the trust that people have in the words of Ministers. I say on behalf of my 5,100 self-employed constituents in Nottingham East and the 5 million self-employed people nationwide, they will not forget this betrayal.