Windrush: 70th Anniversary

Damien Moore Excerpts

Thursday 14th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Nigel Adams)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is a great privilege to be at the Dispatch Box for the second time in front of your good self. I thank and commend the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) for securing this fantastic but vital debate. It has been incredibly powerful, and I congratulate all right hon. and hon. Members on sharing stories and memories of their families and those of their constituents. We have had passionate, brilliant and moving contributions not just from the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood, but from my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat) and the hon. Members for Glenrothes (Peter Grant), for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) and for Brent Central (Dawn Butler). We also heard, yet again, an incredible speech from the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy). I hope to be able to address some of the points raised in the time that is left.

Seventy years ago, in 1948, Britain had just emerged from an exhausting, destructive but victorious second world war. The country was making key decisions about its future direction, its prosperity and its position in the world. We rose to the challenge in that year by creating the national health service and by hosting the global community at the London Olympic games.

[Damien Moore (Southport) (Con)]

I had the opportunity to learn about the Windrush generation at university. Does my hon. Friend agree that we should give children in schools the opportunity to learn about the contribution that that generation made to this country in getting Britain back up off her knees after the second world war?

[Nigel Adams]

That is a very fair point. It is incumbent on schools and on teachers to ensure that the Windrush generation is included in the curriculum, because children could learn an awful lot as a result.

As has been discussed today, another seminal and momentous occasion took place as the United Kingdom welcomed the HMT Empire Windrush at the port of Tilbury on 21 June 1948, and what followed the day after has been subsequently and regularly debated in this House. While it should be recognised that black British history does not start with the Windrush, the arrival of 492 West Indians, many of them ex-servicemen and women, has become synonymous with the first wave of mass migration and the beginning of modem British multicultural society. Those people include Alfred Gardner, who lives up the road from me in Leeds. I understand that he is still going strong at the great age of 92, and I am sure that the whole House sends Alfred its best wishes.

Many from the Windrush generation left their homes to answer the call to come to a strange, foreign and cold land in order to help rebuild the mother country. The welcome for many from that community, and many other communities that followed, was mixed at best. I would not do this debate justice if I did not mention and recognise the struggle to adjust and to put down roots, with many arrivals receiving a hostile reception. A well-documented phrase present outside many houses at the time was “no blacks, no Irish, no dogs”. As a white man brought up here, it is difficult for me to understand how terrible the Windrush generation would have felt as they walked the streets of London and other cities looking for accommodation. Many people have stories about that and other appalling discriminatory times in the UK. The unique challenges for acceptance, integration and recognition were most noticeable in the Notting Hill riots of 1958, the Race Relations Act 1965 and the Scarman and Macpherson reports, to name but a few, and this struggle has come to symbolise part of the story.

Oral Answers to Questions

Damien Moore Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I am very keen to accommodate Back Benchers, as always.

[Damien Moore (Southport) (Con)]

T7. Will my right hon. Friend tell the House how much additional tax revenue has been secured since 2010 by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs through tackling avoidance, evasion and non-compliance, and will he confirm that this policy will continue to exist in the Government?

[Mel Stride]

I am very pleased to inform my hon. Friend that we have raised and protected £175 billion since 2010 by clamping down on evasion, avoidance and non-compliance. That comes as a direct result of investing in HMRC to the tune of £2 billion, and has resulted in the lowest tax gap in the world.

Digital Taxation

Damien Moore Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Damien Moore (Southport) (Con)]

As a member of the Science and Technology Committee, I am delighted to contribute to this debate and champion the transition to a digital form of taxation. The issue here is not only the businesses that we will be looking to tax, but the form that our taxation regime takes. Far too often, Governments are slow to modernise and adapt to the times, and I am glad to see that my colleagues in the Treasury have chosen to focus their attention on this area. I will follow the results with great interest.

Although I would never encourage digitalisation simply for its own sake, developments over the last five years have made the creation of a workable, transitional period leading to digital taxation an absolute necessity. We live in an age when cryptocurrencies, challenger banks and blockchain technology are taking off, while e-commerce continues its shake-up of the retail sector. Furthermore, the closure of local bank branches en masse around the country has resulted in individuals having to adapt to a rapidly changing pecuniary landscape. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs can and must keep pace with the innovations of Silicon Valley and Tech City, as more and more tech companies enter the financial arena.

From a purely practical standpoint, the current annual system of tax returns is an administrative burden and an overly lengthy process for businesses. The programme of reforms will contribute to the HMRC target of reducing tax administration costs by £400 million by the year ending 2019-20. The old system was far too complex, and businesses would often only know their tax liabilities at the end of a financial year, which imposed uncertainty on them and ultimately prevented them from planning for the future.

As I understand it, by 2020, businesses, self-employed individuals and landlords will have the option of keeping track of their tax affairs digitally, updating HMRC at least quarterly via their digital account. Those quarterly updates will not amount to four separate tax returns in a year, despite a degree of uncertainty on that point. The Government have assured us that bureaucracy and constant form-filling will become a thing of the past, with the information that HMRC requires being automatically uploaded on to people’s digital accounts.

Businesses will be required to use the Making Tax Digital for Business system only from April 2019, and even then only to meet their VAT obligations. That will apply to businesses with a turnover above the VAT threshold; the smallest businesses will not be required to use the system, although they can choose to participate voluntarily. I believe that businesses with a turnover of below the £85,000 VAT threshold can also be great beneficiaries of digital taxation, and I hope the Government will give a lot of thought to the bespoke and innovative ways in which small businesses will be able to engage with these new foundations of tax.

Currently, most taxpayers cannot see a single picture of their liabilities and entitlements in one place. However, by 2020 customers will be able to see a comprehensive financial picture of their digital account, as they can with their online banking. HMRC customers and their agents will be able to interact with HMRC digitally and at their convenience. They already have access to a digital account, which will allow them to access an increasingly personalised picture of their tax affairs, along with prompts, advice and support through webchat and secure messaging. Digital record-keeping software will be synced with HMRC’s systems, allowing customers to exchange information directly from their software. I welcome these innovations and can see the utilisation of this system eventually being as natural as online banking.

The Government have said that they will not widen the scope of Making Tax Digital beyond VAT before the system has been shown to work well. I, for one, will be following the development of the programme throughout its implementation, with the expectation that this change will result in the desired outcomes. There will inevitably be some kinks in the system, and I hope that they will be ironed out. However, make no mistake: this is a progressive move that will encourage greater engagement with HMRC, save both the Government and the taxpayer money and ensure that businesses, whatever their size, are not shackled by bureaucracy and burdened by paperwork.

Oral Answers to Questions

Damien Moore Excerpts

Tuesday 27th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

I have not yet received a letter from the shadow Chancellor, but if he has written to me, I shall of course reply to him and answer his questions.

[Damien Moore (Southport) (Con)]

4. What recent assessment the Government have made of the effect of the national productivity investment fund on road and rail infrastructure in the north-west.

[The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (Robert Jenrick)]

This Government have put raising our national productivity at the heart of our mission. From the national productivity investment fund, we have already announced over £50 million of investment in road and rail in the north-west, and this is in addition to the transforming cities allocations to Manchester of £243 million and to Liverpool of £135 million.

[Damien Moore]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the £31 billion national productivity investment fund, targeted at transport, digital communications, research and development and housing, will boost the infrastructure of the UK economy?

Taxation: Beer and Pubs

Damien Moore Excerpts

Tuesday 31st October 2017 Westminster Hall

[Mike Wood]

I thank my hon. Friend, who represents our oldest brewery. It is important that we support established breweries as well as more recent entries into the market. The beer and pub sector adds more than £23 billion to the UK economy, and I know that the Minister will be very grateful for the £13 billion of taxes that it contributes to the Treasury.

There has been a suggestion that duty changes have little or no impact on beer sales in pubs. That is simply not true and is not consistent with the available evidence. The last Labour Government introduced the hated beer duty escalator in 2008. It was hated because the escalator saw beer duty increase by a staggering 42%, hitting beer sales, making pints less affordable and closing pubs at a faster rate than ever. Beer sales have been falling for many years. However, we saw that trend accelerate sharply under the escalator. In the six years before the duty escalator, on-trade beer sales fell by about 3% a year. During the escalator years, on-trade sales fell by more than a quarter, which was about 5.4% a year on average. Almost 7,000 pubs called time for good, and more than 58,000 beer-dependent jobs were lost. However, although beer duty increased by 42%, beer duty revenues rose by only 12%. It was a very expensive failure of a policy and one that I hope the Labour party has put firmly in the past.

Beer duty is now 20% lower than it would have been with tax rises previously planned under the escalator. In the years between 2013 and 2016, when duty was cut or frozen, the annual decline in on-trade beer sales was not 5.4%, but 2%, which year on year makes a significant difference to the number of jobs and the size of the industry. However, the return to a retail prices index-linked rise in this March’s Budget was disappointing. Announcing a second duty rise in the same calendar year would in effect take us back to the days of the beer duty escalator through the back door.

As the price difference between sales in pubs and supermarkets has widened, consumers have become increasingly price sensitive, especially pub-goers. A respected consultancy, Oxford Economics, which has consistently and accurately forecast the impact of duty changes in recent years, calculates that even a freeze in beer duty in next month’s Budget, rather than the planned increase, would boost pub sales by about 33 million pints per year against the current baseline and that that would mean more than 2,000 additional jobs.

The Exchequer Secretary will remember the front-page headlines praising the previous Chancellor for cutting beer duty. I cannot promise the Exchequer Secretary the front page of the Evening Standard—maybe he knows a man who can—but I have no doubt that if the current Chancellor freezes beer duty, the whole Treasury team would be carried shoulder high across Whitehall.

The financial benefits of the beer and brewing industry are clear, but just as great is the social impact of pubs and the detrimental effect that pub closures have on the fabric of our society, because pubs are a great addition to the social make-up of our country, at the heart of our local communities. They offer a safe environment in which drinking can be supervised and highly regulated, which is in stark contrast to much street drinking.

[Damien Moore (Southport) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that at a time when we are becoming more digitised and people are spending more time alone, the social interaction that pubs create is really important, particularly when loneliness is a major problem, not just for older people, but for younger people as well?

[Mike Wood]

My hon. Friend goes right to the heart of this issue. Friends are made and communities come together in pubs. Research at Oxford University by Professor Robin Dunbar concluded that pubs play exactly that kind of vital role in tackling social isolation and contributing to wellbeing. People with a local are likely to be better off financially, physically and socially. They are likely to have a wider circle of friends. In a week when researchers have shown again the clear link between strength of social networks and resilience to conditions such as dementia, the social value to which my hon. Friend refers could not be more important.

People who drink in moderation in a pub are more likely to be healthier and register higher levels of happiness than people who do not drink at all. They are also likely to be better fed, with almost 1 billion pub meals sold annually.

We should not forget that pubs play a key role in tourism, being one of the attractions that tourists most want to visit when they are in the UK. Last year there were 600 million day visits to pubs by tourists, and more than half of all holiday visits to Britain included at least one visit to a pub.

Oral Answers to Questions

Damien Moore Excerpts

Tuesday 24th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

The right hon. Gentleman is correct to say that this matter is urgent and pressing, which is why we were so pleased that last week at the European Council the 27 agreed to start internal preparatory discussions for an implementation period. I am confident that we will be able to give businesses the confidence and certainty they need.

[Damien Moore (Southport) (Con)]

T4. What estimate has been made of the effect on unemployment of the reduction in the corporation tax rate?

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Mel Stride)]

As I said earlier, we have cut corporation tax dramatically and as a consequence we raise 50% more in corporation tax today than we did in 2010.