Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Damian Hinds and Philip Davies(7 years, 1 month ago)
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Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
The Minister for Employment (Damian Hinds)
Outreach is a vital front-facing service to claimants across a whole range of employability and related services. Of course it needs to be tailored to the needs of each area. The DWP is looking at partnerships with organisations in my hon. Friend’s constituency, including with the local authority. Throughout the course of that, we will be working with his constituents, and we will be happy to work with him, to ensure that those needs are met following the closure of the Shipley office.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Damian Hinds and Philip Davies(7 years, 9 months ago)
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Damian Hinds
Of course I will look into the position, but the criterion is that consultation takes place if a jobcentre is both more than 3 miles away and more than 20 minutes away by public transport. Within that, if either of those conditions is met, it is reasonable to ask people to move.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
On Friday I visited Shipley jobcentre to hear at first hand the concerns of staff about its closure, and their concerns for its clients. Will the Minister agree to meet me so that I can go through that list of concerns and, hopefully, he can find a way of addressing them?
Damian Hinds
Of course I shall be happy to meet my hon. Friend, just as I have been happy to meet other Members on both sides of the House to discuss such concerns.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Damian Hinds and Philip Davies(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Damian Hinds
The Government have done a range of things. Universal credit is completely different from the legacy benefits it replaced, so it does not make sense to make a direct comparison with tax credits. We have to see it in the context of greater help with childcare and the introduction of the national living wage. Of course, the increased income tax personal allowance also means that people get to keep more of what they earn.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
When my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne) introduced the national living wage, the Office for Budget Responsibility said that it would cost 60,000 jobs. Does the Minister think that that is a price worth paying, or is that another forecast from expert economists that we should ignore?
Damian Hinds
My hon. Friend is entirely correct about the OBR’s projection at that time, but he will have noticed that that came in the context of considerably larger projected employment growth.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Damian Hinds and Philip Davies(8 years, 5 months ago)
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Damian Hinds
Different countries will have different interests, and no doubt they would come to the surface during the two years of the article 50 negotiations. A very large majority of other countries using enhanced qualified majority voting would be needed to agree a deal. Fundamentally, however, I do not think that this is about the deficit that one country has with the EU, or vice versa; I think that it is about the relative size of the export market to that country. While 44% of our exports go to the EU, the EU figure is 8% in the other direction, which means that in any negotiation, the other side will have the better hand.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
Can the Minister explain why we are paying more than £10 billion net this year for a £68 billion trade deficit with a declining part of the world’s economy, when anyone with even an ounce of common sense knows that it is possible to have a £68 billion trade deficit with a declining part of the world’s economy for nothing?
Damian Hinds
I think that I detected a revised figure in my hon. Friend’s assessment of our net contribution to the European Union. The fact is that for every pound that is paid in tax in this country, a little over a penny goes to the European Union. That is a cost—it is not a trivial cost, and I do not belittle it—but what comes with it are the trade benefits, the enhancement of our economy and the protection of jobs and investment that we want to see.
HMRC Office Closures
Debate between Damian Hinds and Philip Davies(9 years ago)
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The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (Damian Hinds)
I am not quite sure how to follow the hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Roger Mullin).
Protecting the country’s tax revenues is of course a vital part of our long-term economic plan. It is particularly important given the contributions that we expect the tax system to make to delivering an overall surplus in 2019-20. As an integral part of that, we strengthened HM Revenue and Customs’ ability to carry out its job as effectively and as efficiently as possible.
In 2009-10, the tax gap stood at 7.3%. By 2013-14, it had fallen to 6.4%, and that represents an additional £14.5 billion in cumulative tax collected. Over the past Parliament, HMRC has secured around £100 billion in additional compliance yield, including more than £38 billion from big businesses and £1.2 billion from the UK’s richest 6,000 people. Our investments, including £800 million in the summer Budget, helping HMRC to recover an additional £7.2 billion, have been vital to achieving that success. As well as that, it is clearly important that the structure and organisation of HMRC are fully fit for the 21st century, and that is what these changes are all about.
Damian Hinds
I will not just at the moment, if that is all right with my hon. Friend.
The primary objective is for HMRC to bring its workforce closer together in regional centres so that they can collaborate better, providing more opportunities for economies of scale and of scope and for individuals’ career progression. That will allow them to deliver higher quality public services at a lower cost to the taxpayer. It is simply not efficient to have HMRC’s 58,000 employees spread throughout 170 offices across the UK.
Damian Hinds
If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I will not give way.
Keeping HMRC’s valued employees fully engaged has been a central part of the transformation programme. The proposals were initially announced internally 18 months ago. Since then, HMRC has held about 2,000 events across the country, talking to and consulting colleagues on the changes.
Philip Davies
This is a really lazy reorganisation by HMRC, which appears to have picked either the biggest place in a region or the one that is easiest for the London staff to get to by train. Will the Exchequer Secretary consider what has been said in this debate and go away and look at the issues from a properly local perspective?
Damian Hinds
I assure my hon. Friend that that is not the way in which the process to identify the locations has been conducted. My hon. Friend the Financial Secretary mentioned earlier the combination of site and location-specific criteria. Critically, the process has also involved mapping out where HMRC staff live, in order to calculate reasonable travel distances and the locations to which those individuals can reasonably travel. In the case of HMRC staff employed in Leeds and Bradford, 130 live a more reasonable distance from Leeds than they do from Bradford.
High Cost Credit Bill
Debate between Damian Hinds and Philip Davies
Damian Hinds
I agree, and I shall come on to the point, albeit briefly, later.
The second issue on which I think the vast majority of us could agree is that the loan should get paid down within a reasonable period and not be left hanging over people who never get the loan reduced in size—and it gets even bigger for some.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend said he was concerned about people taking out these loans because they had just seen an advert, and my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) suggested that some people take out loans irresponsibly. Research by the university of Bristol personal finance research centre seems to suggest something different—that there were logical reasons why people took out these loans: convenience, having no or limited access to other sources of credit, and the customer service and reputation of the firms concerned.
Damian Hinds
And there are multiple other reasons why people take out credit products, many of which are just as rational. I shall come on to some of them later in my remarks, but there is ample evidence to show that many people taking out loans—and the same applies when they access a debt management plan—choose something that is inappropriate. Even where comparative, side-by-side, costings are available—to those of us who studied economics and believe in consumer sovereignty and rationality, this is difficult stuff to get our heads round—consumers often take the more expensive option.
Damian Hinds
As ever, my hon. Friend makes a perceptive point.
I do not think that health warnings on advertising will solve every problem, but I do believe that there is a role for them. If we have health warnings on all sorts of other things now, it is reasonable that we have them on debt advertising.
We must also consider the representation of costs. APR is not a particularly helpful measure in many ways—once it goes past the first 1,000%, people start to think, “What difference does that make?” There is a natural argument for saying that there should be a cash cost comparison instead. However, there is no perfect solution. The formula that Which? proposes of pounds per 30 days seems to deal with the immediate issue, which is the growth of payday loans. It does not necessarily help with the comparability of all products, however, and with any cash comparison—the amount-to-pay-back figure—there is still the issue of how to deal with behavioural charges, which are an additional way of making money out of the customer. Companies can in theory charge a relatively low headline payback rate in the knowledge that they will make more money from missed payments and various other behavioural penalties. We may in the end decide that a cash comparison is useful, but we will still need the representative APR figure, and we will also need to have a proper analysis and debate about which behavioural and other charges should be reflected within that.
On agencies and intermediaries, I support the Bill’s provisions on credit brokers, underwriters and guarantors, and the Amigo model, but there is something else we need to be aware of: as the online market develops even further, there is a tendency in every sector—I saw this in my old sector of hotels and travel—for intermediaries to come in, particularly on paid search, and intermediate, and there is a natural inflationary pressure in that process, which in the end only ever gets passed on to the consumers. Whereas the internet is supposed to make things cheaper for consumers, and comparisons easier and markets freer, it actually tends to concentrate power with other people and add other costs, a lot of which end up going to search engine providers.
Affordability and cost limits is another important issue. Two types of limit can be applied. One is a limit on the cost of the loan—on how much companies can charge to anybody. The other is a limit on affordability, or how much credit can be extended to an individual given their circumstances. Both of them are very complex, which is implicitly acknowledged by the fact that the hon. Member for Sheffield Central says in his Bill that the FCA would have to decide exactly how these things work.
There are big arguments against having a cost cap, because of all the unintended consequences that I have mentioned, but if there is to be a cost cap, it ought to reflect the actual cost structure of extending a loan. In principle there are three elements of cost in extending a loan. The first is the initiation cost, including customer acquisition and credit checks. The second is the actual cost of capital. The third is the risk element, which will vary by customer-type.
If we recognise that and want to reflect it in a limit on the amount of interest that can be charged, we should end up having two elements to the cost cap. One of them is to cover the initiation of the loan, and the second is to cover the cost of capital and risk factor. The figure here would be something like a cap of 15% of the capital as a one-off, plus 30% as an annual interest rate. Sub-prime and high-cost credit providers that offer a range of loans seem to follow that sort of formula.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend talked about assessing affordability and I just wondered whether he had any views about what information should be provided to the lender in terms of bank statements, proof of income and so forth. If this was just done on a self-verification basis, people could say anything they wanted to make sure they got the loan.
Damian Hinds
As ever, my hon. Friend tees me up nicely for my next point, which is about affordability. This is different from the issue of an overall cost cap. People need a bank account to get a payday loan, and payday lenders will typically require proof that they have a pay day on which a regular amount of income comes in. The Bill proposes a single real-time database. For myself, I think that is a step too far. This would be a database of every loan that everybody in the country has, and to be effective it would need to cover not only payday loans, but credit card debt, mortgage debt, car debt and all sorts of other debt. There are massive worries in that, relating to privacy, civil liberties, the concentration of data and, of course, what happens when, inevitably at some point, it goes wrong. I do think we need to look at serious reform of the existing credit reference agency system, however. It does not seem to work as it should when people who are overstretched and who have had eight, nine or 10 lines of credit extended to them go to debt advice agencies.
Another issue is making sure the loan actually gets paid down over time. There is a big fashion for restricting roll-over. We need to be careful about that, however, because it deals with the immediate issue we happen to face in 2013. I remind Members that 10 years ago roll-over was something we understood only in the context of the national lottery and 20 years ago we understood it only in the context of “10 in the bed and the little one said”. In terms of loan products, it is a new thing, therefore, and I would rather we instead had a general duty to make sure the loan gets paid down over time. That should apply to instalment credit and revolving credit as well as to payday loans. A product that is advertised as a 30-day loan should, therefore, be paid down fully by 60 or 90 days, but the payback should start before that 60 or 90 day point is reached.