Billy McNeill MBE

Douglas Chapman Excerpts

Monday 20th May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Brendan O’Hara]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. I will touch on the way in which Billy McNeill brought communities together.

[Douglas Chapman (Dunfermline and West Fife) (SNP)]

My hon. Friend knows that I am not a Celtic fan, although I am not quite in the same camp as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). Nevertheless, I have six brothers-in-law who are all mad Celtic fans. Kevin, Terence, Mark, Bernard, Micheal and Dermot Mullins have told me over the years that they were born within 30 miles of Celtic Park, and that the whole Celtic team that won the European cup final in 1967 was also born within 30 miles of Celtic Park. Does that not say an awful lot about Billy McNeill’s leadership and the way he managed to get that team to the final and win it, compared with, for example, other teams who look a bit more like the United Nations when they get to a European cup final these days? Is it not an absolutely fantastic achievement for the whole team that they managed to do that from within such a small area?

[Brendan O’Hara]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. I will come on to the nature of the team that won the European cup in 1967 and how close-knit they were, and how they represented their communities in a way that sadly today is such a rarity. One would have thought that some of his six brothers-in-law would make more of an impression on him than they clearly have.

After he hung up his boots, Billy McNeill went on to enjoy a very successful career in football management with Clyde, Aberdeen, Manchester City, Aston Villa and, very briefly, with Hibernian. Twice he managed his beloved Celtic, most notably steering them to a league and cup double in their centenary season of 1988.

Freeports

Douglas Chapman Excerpts

Thursday 11th October 2018 Westminster Hall

[Douglas Chapman (Dunfermline and West Fife) (SNP)]

Thank you, Mr Hanson, and it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I warmly thank the hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Mr Clarke) for bringing the debate to the Chamber.

The hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley) said early on that he was present to listen rather than to speak. Given some of the comments we have heard and will continue to hear about Brexit, clearly we need to start listening a lot more, because we need to learn new tricks if we want our economy to survive and to be a real success.

I do not want to detract from the cross-party consensus, but Brexit takes away the European Union customs union—or is likely to—which in effect is a huge economic free trade zone, with no costs from borders or additional taxation in each individual member state of the EU. In the absence of the customs union, therefore, we will have to invent or reinvent a freeport or free zone area in our own country to compensate.

Even so, many EU countries have freeport or free zone areas—22 countries have such arrangements, I think. In Spain, for example, elements of free trade zones are found on the Mediterranean coast in the ports of Barcelona and Cadiz; in the north, on the Atlantic coast, in Vigo; and in the airport area in Madrid, which was fairly landlocked last time I looked—though perhaps not as much as eastern Derbyshire. Closer to home, the Isle of Man has a free zone, as do other countries in the EU. From my perspective, the great bonus of freeports is the boost to economic activity in areas where trading conditions need a shot in the arm to increase jobs, economic vibrancy, trade and exports.

According to many reports, Brexit will have a more detrimental effect in Northern Ireland, north-east England, Wales and Scotland than elsewhere. In Scotland, according to a fairly recent report, we are looking at a 9% reduction in gross domestic product if we go into Brexit under World Trade Organisation rules. If there is a no-deal Brexit, the GDP of north-east England is expected to drop by some 16%, and 80,000 jobs in my country will be at risk. I hope that we do not get to that stage, but the warning signals are clearly there.

To have the most impact, free trade or freeport zones are best placed outside London and the south-east. If someone is determined—as I am sure the Minister is—to address economic inequality throughout the UK, we need to consider how to boost the economy in other parts of the UK—the parts that will be worst affected by Brexit. The British Ports Association has said that freeports would be most beneficial where a port has plenty of land so that value-adding economic activity can also take place.

All Members who have spoken in the debate have made a case for their own neck of the woods, and I am delighted to let everyone know a little about my constituency. Our local port, Rosyth, has all the ingredients necessary for the successful operation of a freeport: a lot of available land, much of it on brownfield sites; a rail link that is greatly underutilised but nevertheless only a mile from the main east coast line; and a motorway system that includes the new, iconic Queensferry crossing, providing a 15-minute corridor between the port of Rosyth and Edinburgh airport. We also have a talented workforce—the usual situation in Scotland, as I think every Member would accept—and the desire to become the beating heart of the Scottish economy, ready to take on opportunities wherever they may appear.

An opportunity that no one has yet mentioned is an unwanted feature of climate change: more and more sea routes are being created to the north and through the Arctic. Ships can now move along the northern coast of Norway, past Russia and to China, with a number of months in the year seeing more seaborne activity. In a northern port such as Rosyth, with easy access to those waters, we see that as a bonus.

We also have to take care. As the hon. Member for Redcar (Anna Turley) pointed out, freeports cannot be introduced to push along a low-wage economy or to act as a centre for illegal trade just because some of the rules have been softened or relaxed. They might also be disrespectful of the environment—even in a freeport, the “polluter pays” principle must still apply.

The British Ports Association briefing, which I think we all received, made for some encouraging reading: 95% of trade is carried by sea, whether imports or exports, container traffic or bulk goods; 60 million passenger journeys are made between the UK and the rest of Europe every year; and 500 million tonnes of freight pass through all ports in the UK, which employ almost 100,000 people. We have a really good ports sector on which to build, and that is a real feather in our cap, a real hand-up and a great start in developing our port facilities.

I am a member of the all-party group on freeports, under the chairmanship of the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers), and I believe that we will be able to highlight some of the pros and cons of freeports. We are all determined to grow our economy, to create jobs and to deal with some of the vagaries of Brexit in the parts of the country that will be hardest hit. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the possibility of creating a super-freeport zone. If that included a specific focus on inward investment and a wider economic corridor, we could gain different benefits from a wide range of enterprises, and perhaps bring in an innovation hub linking universities and colleges in whichever area the freeport might sit.

I look forward to hearing the Minister’s views. An early announcement on freeports and how they will be financed will be very welcome.

Oral Answers to Questions

Douglas Chapman Excerpts

Tuesday 11th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[John Glen]

Absolutely. Only two hours ago, the Department for Work and Pensions published its consultation response on pension trustees’ duties, which clearly sets out the Government’s intention to raise the profile of financially material climate change factors in investment decisions.

[Douglas Chapman (Dunfermline and West Fife) (SNP)]

19. The Minister will be more than aware of the Ernst and Young report earlier this year indicating that Scottish GDP, including Scotland’s geographical share of renewable energy, oil and gas, grew at 3.4% as opposed to the UK’s 3.1%, despite lots of inaction from the current Government. Will the Government provide Holyrood with the powers over energy revenues to ensure that Scotland can continue with this lead in economic growth and make sure that the green energies of the future are invested in properly?

[John Glen]

Absolutely. Green energy is very important to the UK economy as a whole; it is just very unfortunate that the rate of growth in the Scottish economy is half as strong as in the rest of the United Kingdom.

Taxation (Cross-border Trade) Bill (First sitting)

Douglas Chapman Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd January 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Mark Menzies]

Q But those people that it does affect, it affects in a great way. That is why it is really important to have a wide scope in the Bill, so that we can get into the detail in the fullness of time, and get it right.

Helen Dennis: I agree with you on that. There are certain products that we work with, such as bananas and sugar, that are not covered by the GSP. There may be products that we would want to include within a new preference scheme, and we would want to have the opportunity to bring those proposals forward. The Bill certainly does that, by granting the power to the Secretary of State to make those decisions.

The one thing I would want to flag up is that a decision about tariffs affecting one country impacts on other countries. It is important that when those matters are being brought forward, a thorough impact assessment is done of the impact not only directly on that economy but on neighbouring or other competitor countries. If we go back to Colombia for example, it is a big exporter of cut flowers. There is competition between east Africa and some of the Latin American countries. There is no right or wrong answer, but if we are going to make tariff changes, we need to make sure that we have thoroughly considered the potential impacts.

When the Bill lists the things that the Secretary of State or Chancellor must have regard to, at the moment there is nothing that relates to development impact. From our perspective, we would like to see something added there, so that we are thinking about UK interests and consumers, of course, but we are also thinking about development impact when we make changes.

[Douglas Chapman (Dunfermline and West Fife) (SNP)]

Q I would like to ask an additional question. In the previous session we heard that, for example, in terms of SMEs, 130,000 small businesses would be affected by this kind of legislation for the very first time. Does the panel have a view on the particular challenges that the Bill might bring to small business and its impact, especially if Mr White’s book has to be trawled through every time some decision has to be made? What is the panel’s view on that?

Barbara Scott: I work a lot with SMEs who currently find it very hard to understand the Community legislation on customs and international trade law. It is complex and there are a lot of different strands to it. Trade is complex. Things are different depending on what you are doing, whether coffee from Colombia or bicycle parts from China. The legislation and the effect on business is very different, unlike other laws, such as VAT or corporation tax, which generally impact in the same way on most businesses.

This is a huge step change for SMEs and particularly for those who have only traded within the EU. It will be a tough challenge for HMRC to reach out to those people, get them involved and explain how the new legislation will work. There is clearly going to have to be a lot of propaganda and information out there. It is a huge challenge for the state.

Jeremy White: And there is a cost. The SMEs will have to employ agents, because they will not be able to employ in-house staff. I have been told that SMEs will sell out to someone who does have the assistance. The only frictionless trade known to man is customs union. Anything else is costly and can only be managed—just—with all the simplified procedures of the UCC in operation, plus all the information systems that are there to support them. That is big money.

Barbara Scott: When we talk to customs about this, we are constantly hearing, yes, they are being given more resources and will be employing more staff, but can business afford to do that—suddenly to employ new people and understand these new processes? It is a huge cost. People ask, “What is that cost?” It is very difficult to measure. I do not think anyone has attempted to do so yet. It will be a very difficult time for SMEs in particular.

Sue Davies: I cannot comment on SMEs but I want to make the point that if there are additional costs for businesses, they will feed through and lead to increased prices for consumers. That is why it is really important that we have as efficient a system as possible, which still maintains the right level of protection for consumers.

[Mike Hill]

Q I shall ask a question on behalf of my colleague, Grahame Morris, who has lost his voice. He has not lost his question. His voice is somewhere in Dover. Do you have any concerns that the Bill may create opportunities for tax avoidance or evasion?

Jeremy White: Uncertainty always produces that, doesn’t it? A little bit of background: all my professional life has been using EU-type rules, EU language and structure. Through all its iterations—when I was a Government lawyer working on the implementation of the Community customs code, then when we began to do work on the Union customs code, then I went back to practice—it is still very similar. It is well known that the opportunities for avoidance are few. There have been some, obviously, in terms of customs valuation. There have been customs valuation schemes in the past. Most of them have been dealt with.

This is just an example—we do not know, and it could be handled very well—but in a recast there is always an opportunity of bringing in some uncertainty. Is this exactly the same provision as we had before? Will it prevent a customs valuation scheme? The answer to that is that we do not know because all we have seen in the Bill is a very small, framework principle rule provision, but it still does not adopt exactly the language of the World Trade Organisation customs valuation agreement. That would be beneficial—that is another point in our report. The way it works is this. All the customs authorities in the world are obviously interested in preventing evasion and avoidance. They have their own legislation, they have got together for a world agreement on how customs valuation should be—taxation based on movements of goods—that is adopted generally, and their Supreme Courts have ruled on it for many years now, or at least since everyone adopted the same since 1994. We have all that body of work, help and certainty. If we then have an English law recast that abandons that language, we do not take the benefit of leveraging off of any of the international law or any of the international judgments.

The answer to your question—that was really all background—is that we do not know until we see what the statutory instrument looks like, if we still go down this road. It would be better not to, but if we do still go down the road of the recast for all purposes, we will see what the statutory instrument says. I would have thought that the advice will be that the statutory instrument has to adhere to the WTO customs valuation agreement.

draft Scotland Act 1998 (Specification of Devolved Tax) (Wild fisheries) Order 2017

Douglas Chapman Excerpts

Tuesday 12th December 2017 General Committees

[Douglas Chapman (Dunfermline and West Fife) (SNP)]

Scottish National party Members certainly welcome the changes and the return of powers to the Scottish Parliament. I know that this matter has been negotiated and long discussed between the various Governments.

Stewardship of all resources is taken very seriously by the Scottish Government, and in no area more so than fisheries. As other talks continue, we obviously also want to see the repatriation of, for example, North sea fishing stocks and the Seafish levy, and we want a phased discard scheme to be introduced. However, those issues are for another day. Will the Minister comment on when he thinks the powers will in fact be transferred?

Iraq Inquiry Report

Douglas Chapman Excerpts

Thursday 14th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Douglas Chapman (Dunfermline and West Fife) (SNP)]

I thank the Members who managed to secure this important debate. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. and gallant Member for Gravesham (Mr Holloway). If he had had the opportunity to give evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, I am sure that the final read might have been much more interesting than the one that we are anticipating.

There is a completely understandable sense of anger and frustration, some of which we have seen in the Chamber today and in the wider public over recent years, at the Chilcot report not yet being published. My constituents share that anger and frustration and find the situation totally unacceptable—six years on and still no report. I want to focus on the entirely predictable “keep calm and carry on” British attitude. I am sure that the Government see that as a virtue, but to heap unacceptable delay on unacceptable delay is not the way forward. Informing us that the final report may be heavily redacted only adds insult to injury, particularly for the families who lost loved ones in Iraq. It is a dreadful situation to endure.

The conclusion of the Chilcot inquiry should be a chance for the Government to draw a line under the Iraq adventure—perhaps I should say “misadventure”. It is an opportunity to understand where it went wrong, why we fell down this particular rabbit hole and why the UK’s strategy in the middle east was so feckless that the Blair-Brown Government felt that they had no choice but to follow the United States down that rabbit hole. Instead, we have this situation. Chilcot has become something of a “corpse in a cupboard” as the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) so memorably put it in the House this time last year. We must face up to Chilcot and learn the lessons that it may offer. We need to get on with understanding what the UK wants and what our strategic aims are. Otherwise, we will be condemned to continue living with that corpse in the cupboard and, worse still, an ineffective foreign policy.

It is that reality that led the great journal Foreign Affairs to write that Britain

“is at risk of slipping into irrelevance…its foreign policy is widely derided for both its passivity and short-term outlook”

and has led American commentators to talk about the UK resigning as a global power. Last month, when we were discussing the Syrian ceasefire, the Foreign Secretary was asked whether he had contacted his counterpart in Russia to find out more about the ceasefire’s implications. He replied that no contact had been made. We criticise Russia for being isolationist, but we should not fall into that same trap ourselves and become equally afflicted.

The Defence Committee recently undertook an investigation into Russia, and it has become increasingly clear over the course of the inquiry that the symptoms of British strategic impotence exist there, too. It is almost as if the end of the cold war made us stop thinking about Russia, just as we stopped thinking about the middle east. Instead of thinking seriously about the role that we can play in the world, a series of Governments have decided to sub-contract that role to a host of allies, who do not always share our values or have our best interests at heart. Let us break the habit of a lifetime. British make do and mend will not do any longer. I ask the Prime Minister to release the Chilcot report now and bury the corpse that is in the cupboard. Let us learn the lessons of Iraq and get serious about Britain’s role in the world.

I was in Baghdad several weeks ago and Iraq is in a complete mess—it is a shambles. I assure the House that it is far from being mission accomplished—if anything, it is quite the opposite.

After 134,000 Iraqi civilians deaths and 179 UK soldiers killed in action, with another 6,000 seriously wounded, who every day have to live with the consequences of their injuries, we see that we took part in a war that destabilised that country, that caused ongoing civil war in neighbouring states and that paved the way for brutal terrorist attacks across Europe. It was a war with no real endgame in sight and no endgame planned for. All those actions have huge repercussions for our foreign policy, national security and the way in which decisions to go to war are taken. This has eroded public trust in democracy itself. We all remember the demonstrations that took place against the war in Iraq—some of us took part in them. The people knew that our involvement in Iraq was wrong, but the Government of the day failed to listen to those protests and to how the people of this country wanted us to proceed. The current Prime Minister can take a different route—he can listen. I say to him again: this report does not have to be written on vellum and it does not have to wait for the EU referendum, so publish the Chilcot findings in full and publish them now.

Draft Scottish Rate of Income Tax (Consequential amendments) Order 2015

Douglas Chapman Excerpts

Wednesday 16th September 2015 General Committees

[Mr Gauke]

On the process for pension funds, we are mindful of the specific challenges. The hon. Lady asks for the cost of administration for pension providers, but we do not have a specific number. We are happy to confirm that HMRC continues to work extremely closely with the pensions industry and is extremely mindful of minimising the burden. There are technical groups involving the industry, which continue. End-of-year adjustments for pension taxation often occur for changes of circumstances in-year. Any required adjustment that relates to the interim treatment of Scottish taxpayers will occur in the same manner, usually through coding adjustments.

To finish the point I was making on guidance being published to identify taxpayers, which the hon. Lady raised, HMRC received 20 responses to its consultation on the guidance and is amending it to reflect that. Final technical guidance and supporting information for taxpayers will be published later this year.

Picking up on the point that the hon. Member for Midlothian made about the powers being devolved to Scotland, the Smith commission—it is important to remember that all parties present in the Scottish Parliament signed up to it—specifically decided after careful consideration not to devolve income tax fully but to leave it as a shared UK tax, albeit with significant powers to set rates and thresholds being made available to the Scottish Parliament. That is why the whole of income tax has not been devolved. The UK Government will continue to set the personal allowance, other allowances, income tax on savings and dividend income, and reliefs. Going further than the powers set out in the Scotland Bill would break the concept of a shared tax and would be complicated for individuals and employers with activity on both sides of the border, who would have to understand and comply with two potentially entirely different systems.

As the Prime Minister pointed out today, we can keep on debating the processes, but very substantial powers have been devolved to the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament. Perhaps debate should now focus on how those powers are used rather than necessarily continuing to be about which additional powers should be provided, given where we got to with the Smith commission.

[Douglas Chapman (Dunfermline and West Fife) (SNP)]

Although I recognise that more powers are coming our way through the Scotland Bill, does the Minister agree that there has been grudging movement in the pace of change on the income tax powers? These are matters that affect Scotland’s future financial wellbeing, and I think the powers that we are discussing today were first raised in the Calman commission in 2009. They will not be implemented until the Scottish Government bring forward a Budget in 2016-17, and it is unlikely that full powers will be in place until 2019. The hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South mentioned pension arrangements. At this pace of change, I will probably be collecting my pension by the time some of these changes are implemented.

[Mr Gauke]

I do not accept that point. In the course of a year, the establishment of the Smith commission and the bringing forward of legislation to devolve income tax much more fully to Scotland has been remarkably fast-paced. Indeed, the point that the hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South raised was that it involves, in some cases, really quite complicated changes. Institutions such as insurance companies need to be able to make changes to ensure that it works effectively. Yes, there are times when we need a run-in period to introduce measures, but in reaching a consensus and making progress towards a very substantial transfer of power, I am pleased to say that the Government are delivering on the promises made before the Scottish referendum.