Covid-19

Debate between Christopher Chope and Steve Baker

Monday 28th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

I rise to do three things. The first is to praise the Government for everything they have achieved on PPE, on testing and on the track and trace app. In my libertarian soul, and in my instinct, my heart and my reason, I consider the Government’s track and trace app to be the very apotheosis of my worst fears. Yet over the weekend I studied what the Government have done. They have moved away from the first version, to the Apple and Google-distributed model, with all the private data remaining on the user’s phone. They have released a source code, both for the server side and for the client, which I very much welcome as a software engineer, although I doubt I shall be grinding through it. Against all my instincts—and in the knowledge that I am not the Member of Parliament for dogmatic libertarians across the country, with whom I generally agree, but in fact the MP for Wycombe—I have done the right thing: I have, against my expectations, installed the contact tracing app. I ran out of excuses, I have installed it, and I am allowing it to run even as we speak. I hope that will be of some reassurance, even to those libertarians who might condemn me for it.

Secondly, I want to say something about the science. I am not going to engage in amateur epidemiology, much as I have been enjoying picking it up, but I will praise my constituent and friend, Dr Raghib Ali, who is an epidemiologist. Unusually, he is an academic epidemiologist and also an acute medicine consultant who works in Oxford, so he is perhaps uniquely positioned to comment on the disease. He has been tweeting and writing about the disease. He is a very reasonable man. He has really helped me to keep my feet on the ground. I say to all Members who, like me, really hate and despise these restrictions on our freedom to look at what Dr Raghib Ali is writing. He has helped to keep me anchored in the truth that this is a very dangerous disease for people who are older and people who have pre-existing conditions, and we have just got to deal with it.

On the science, I wish my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State were present. As he framed the problem between either suppression or letting it rip, I thought that our friend Mr Osborne was back framing the issue in terms of what I think is a false dichotomy. I think we need to take another look at the scientific advice. There are professors out there telling us that this is an optimisation problem—we need to maximise the lives saved and minimise harm. There is, I think, going to turn out to be a third way that enables us to minimise harm. The Department’s own figures have shown, as reported in The Daily Telegraph, that the cost of lockdown in quality adjusted life years, adjusted for comorbidities, was greater than the cost of the disease thus far. So if we wish to maximise human flourishing and save lives, we have to look extremely carefully at the science.

I am working with my friend Professor Roger Koppl, from Syracuse University and author of a book titled, perhaps unfortunately, “Expert Failure”, looking at what actually happens with expertise. I wrote a brief for the Prime Minister, which I have also tweeted. My covering letter points out:

“Pandemic policy making has been asking the impossible of scientists, economists and politicians. There are solutions and they are fundamental to the success of a free society in an era of accelerating complexity and change.

There is a structural problem rooted in the division of labour which, when combined with bad incentives, causes inevitable failures of expert advice. The problems are acute, delicate, dangerous and long-standing. They do not arise from faulty expertise or bad actors.”

I am not going to call for anyone to be sacked.

So I hope people will look at the brief I have put out, which includes concrete suggestions. I will put on the record the Harold Macmillan quote with which the brief leads:

“We have not overthrown the divine right of kings to fall down for the divine right of experts”,

however brilliant they may be.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

Does my hon. Friend agree that what he has just said applies particularly to the university environment, where this year more university students will probably die from meningitis than from covid-19?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Christopher Chope and Steve Baker

Thursday 14th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

Is not it right that we in this country are not able to exercise some of the rights that people would wish us to exercise? The freedom to be able to transport live animals for slaughter is a freedom that we would prefer not to have. As soon as we leave the European Union, we will be able to take control of those things for ourselves.

[Mr Baker]

My hon. Friend raises a point on which I am sure that many of us have received correspondence. I look forward to the day when it is within the powers of this House to change those rules.

Exiting the EU: Sectoral Analysis

Debate between Christopher Chope and Steve Baker

Tuesday 7th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Baker]

I am very happy that I now have so many hon. Friends from Scotland, which is a statement about what the Scottish people think of the competence of the hon. Gentleman’s party. In so far as there is quantitative analysis in the documents, which I have carefully studied, that is a statement of the facts as they were known at the time, not a projection into the future.

[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

Most fair-minded people would accept that it is reasonable that some of this material may not be available until three weeks have expired, but there must be some of the material that could be made available now or sooner than in three weeks. Will my hon. Friend assure the House that he will do his best to make available soon that material which could be supplied before the three-week deadline?

[Mr Baker]

It is our intention to make available a coherent and up-to-date set of information within three weeks.

Child Benefit

Debate between Christopher Chope and Steve Baker

Tuesday 21st February 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Chope]

I will not give way. I want to put my points on record, and it is a very short debate. If I have time later on, I will take some interventions.

The Prime Minister and his predecessors have so frequently professed their support for “hard-working families” that the expression has become a political cliché. How extraordinary, therefore, that the Government are still persisting with a policy that will undermine those hard-working families, especially those families in the squeezed middle. What families could be more hard working than those 55,000 or 60,000 single parent families where the lone parent works long hours in a demanding job to earn more than £43,000 a year, thereby qualifying as a higher rate taxpayer and a victim of this policy? Such families also often have very high child care costs. In the league table of hard-working families, they are closely followed by two-parent families where the breadwinner supports a spouse who cannot work, whether because of disability, long-term sickness or the need to support a child who is disabled or sick.

A family in the last category came to my constituency surgery in autumn 2010 and impressed on me the utter folly of the Government’s proposals. I then engaged in correspondence with the Treasury. On 18 January 2011, the Exchequer Secretary responded to my letter of 16 October—the fact that it took three months to get a response indicates something—in which I had specifically asked the Chancellor about the impact of his policy on those in receipt of carer’s allowance. My constituent’s wife earns slightly above the higher rate threshold, while he stays at home to look after his two children, one of whom has Down’s syndrome. The point that I wished the Chancellor to address was my constituents’ concern that in households where, through circumstance rather than choice, only one parent is able to work, the higher rate tax payer is normally compensating for the lack of earning capacity of the other. As my constituents said:

“This penalises families of those who live the true spirit of social responsibility each and every day.”

After a three-month delay, I received my reply; I had hoped for a better response. It merely asserted that the policy is tough but fair and that affected families are within the top 20% of the income distribution of all families. I immediately wrote back asking my hon. Friend the Exchequer Secretary to address specifically how the impact of the proposals on families such as that of my constituent could be regarded as fair. I am sorry to say that it was another three months—on 12 April—before my hon. Friend replied. He said:

“Inevitably, introducing a simple change to a universal system can create some difficult cases and it would unfortunately be difficult to create an exception for families where one partner is a carer.”

He repeated the assertion that the Government believed the policy to be fair, but how can it be fair to target such families, by asking them to make a greater contribution to reducing the deficit, while exempting families with earnings of up to £84,000 a year that are spread equally between both parents?

Fewer than one in 10 of the families from whom child benefit is to be taken away contain two higher rate taxpayers; I think that the number is 130,000 families. Almost all the remainder, therefore, will or may be in a weaker position to bear such a loss of benefit than those households with two persons earning up to £84,000 a year between them.

When I corresponded with the Treasury, the threshold for higher rate tax was £43,876. Since then, despite rising inflation—there has been a 3.1% increase in the retail prices index in the last year—the starting rate for higher rate tax has been reduced by £1,400, while the threshold for 2013-14 is still unspecified. Therefore, even more families will be affected by this change than was originally envisaged.

The policy that we are discussing today has never been properly thought through. By all accounts, it was included in the Chancellor’s speech at the 2010 party conference at the last minute, after an earlier plan to announce the withdrawal of child benefit from all children over the age of 16 was scrapped. That is why the early estimate of the contribution that this policy will make towards reducing the deficit was £1 billion. That early estimate was wrong, but in typical Treasury fashion the Government now say that anyone who opposes the withdrawal of child benefit must come up with an alternative means of producing £2.4 billion a year to go towards deficit reduction.

It is worth reminding ourselves that families are already contributing to the reduction of the deficit through the freezing of child benefit. That policy alone will save about £1 billion in 2013-14 and the total contribution that it will make during the three-year freeze is about £3 billion. In addition, many of the families who are affected by withdrawal of child benefit will lose £550 a year in basic child tax credit from this April onwards.

In responding to this debate, I expect the Minister to argue that he is in pre-Budget purdah and that he will treat what I have said as a representation, but I want him to say specifically why the Government’s proposal to increase the tax burden on hard-working families is not being defined as a tax increase but as an expenditure reduction. We know that the Chancellor has always been keen to present his deficit reduction plan in terms of achieving a fair balance between Government expenditure reductions and tax increases. Without getting into an argument about the extent to which the original target of expenditure reductions has been missed, I must ask: is it not disingenuous to regard the withdrawal of child benefit in terms other than a tax increase? After all, the antecedents of child benefit lie in the concept that there should be a higher tax allowance for those with dependent children than for those without dependent children. In essence, the Government’s policy is to remove that tax allowance and thereby increase the tax burden.

[Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful case. Does he share my inclination to believe that the Government might be able to extricate themselves from the set of powerful problems that he describes through some combination of a transferrable child tax allowance and the universal credit system?

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend makes a really good point. Many of us thought, because we went into a general election committed to having transferrable tax allowances and to promoting family values, that those allowances would be implemented. Although there was provision in the coalition agreement for the Liberal Democrats to abstain or vote against those allowances, it was expected that the Conservatives would introduce them and that the House would have an opportunity to judge them.

A lot of the difficulties that have been brought about as a result of the analysis of the proposal to remove child benefit come from the fact that we have abandoned the idea of using the tax system to say, “Well, if you’ve got two equivalent families, one with three or four children and the other without any children then the costs of the family with children must be greater than those of the family without children, and therefore there should be a greater tax allowance for the family with children than for the family without children.” That is the basic principle. We could have restored it or indeed enhanced it by having transferrable tax allowances, which was a commitment in our manifesto.

What depresses me, however, is that in the 16 months since October 2010, when the original proposal was made by the Chancellor, nothing seems to have been done to take forward those issues and to try to find a fair solution. Obviously, implementing something like transferrable tax allowances would take some time; we would need to have draft legislation and any such allowances probably could not be implemented by January 2013, when the Government have committed themselves to impose this burden on higher rate taxpaying families.

The Government have missed a big opportunity on transferrable tax allowances, and I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will have time to explain why that happened—because, as I have said, introducing those allowances was a Government policy that had been announced—and also why the Government recently reconfirmed that they have no intention whatsoever of proceeding with transferrable tax allowances.

I will give my hon. Friend the Minister some time to respond to this debate, but I should like to make some other points. I think that the Liberal Democrats are rather in favour of the policy of withdrawing child benefit from higher rate taxpayers, because they want to remove as many tax benefits from higher rate taxpayers as possible. But of course the Liberal Democrats would also like that policy to be dressed up as an expenditure reduction, because that expenditure reduction would be balanced with a tax increase and therefore there could be an additional tax increase on top of removing child benefit from higher rate taxpayers. That would also take the pressure off finding genuine reductions in expenditure, which would be achieved by reducing the size of the state.

I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister can address that issue in his response to the debate, because there is a real definitional problem here. The way that the Government are proposing to introduce this tax penalty on higher rate taxpayers with children is effectively to require the family to declare whether or not the taxpayer or their partner are in receipt of child benefit, and then the taxpayer would be taxed 100% on that child benefit. Surely, that is a tax increase rather than an expenditure reduction.

As a contribution to this debate, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has produced a devastating but none the less very useful report, and I hope that some of the issues identified in that report, which my hon. Friend the Minister will probably have been studying closely since it was published about a fortnight ago, will be addressed in his response to this debate.

Why do the Government want higher rate taxpayers with children to make a greater contribution towards deficit reduction than higher rate taxpayers without children? Surely, it would be fairer if all higher rate taxpayers contributed equally towards deficit reduction. Any changes in the higher rate tax band needed to achieve that aim would be simple, fair, easy to collect and difficult to avoid. In other words, they would meet all the original objectives of a good tax, unlike the Government’s current proposals, which, as I have said, have been the subject of withering criticism from the IFS. In its report, the IFS estimates that £90 million of the supposed yield from this new policy would be uncollectable, that £60 million would be lost through non-compliance, that £280 million would leak through what is described as tax planning and that, in addition, there would be administrative costs and a need for extra Inland Revenue staff. There has not been a defined estimate of those additional administrative and staff costs, but a rough estimate of at least £130 million has been proposed.

Could anyone think of a more absurd and ludicrous policy to introduce than this one? It increases the complexity of the tax system; it adds to the demand for more civil servants in Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to examine the changes that will be made; it encourages people to fiddle their arrangements; and it exacerbates the problem of what happens when people live together during a year without declaring it. The Government were committed to reducing the couple penalty, but this proposal will actually exacerbate it. I do not think that there is anything commendable or sensible about this policy, and there are alternatives to it.

I asked the Library if it would be possible to come up with an alternative. I do not take this view myself, but if one thought that the way to deal with this issue was to say, “If there are two higher rate taxpayers in a family, they should forfeit their child benefit”, that change would affect only 130,000 families. It would not generate much income, but it would apply to those 130,000 families who definitely have a joint income that is greater than the £84,000 to which I referred earlier.

I asked the expert in the Library whether it would be possible to have a system whereby people could claim relief against loss of child benefit by certifying that the total gross income of their household did not exceed £85,000. The answer was that, in principle, that would be possible, but that it would require joint filing for households with at least one higher rate taxpayer. One presumes that having made a return at the end of the year showing total joint income was no more than £85,000, child benefit would not be withdrawn from that household.

There are ways of generating some income in the context of this policy, but I do not think it is worth the candle, because it cuts across the dearly and long-held principle that we should have a universal benefit for families with children.