Finance (No. 2) Bill

George Freeman Excerpts

Monday 11th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am glad that I gave way to the hon. Gentleman, because he makes my point. You say that you want to keep the investment going on these capital projects, but you also say that you will reduce the capital budget. How? That does not add up. You simply cannot go on saying that you will spend money here and there, not raise taxes, and carry on borrowing. The argument simply does not add up. I became confused halfway through the speech made by the hon. Member for Bassetlaw—

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

So did he.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Yes, so did he. He seemed to be saying that unless the Government employ everybody in the country, no money will ever be spent. He said, “You can’t reduce the number of people in the public sector, because they’re the people who have to go to the sandwich shop.” Of course, people in the private sector do not eat or buy anything; they have a robotic existence. I wonder what happened before there was such a large public sector. The hon. Member for Sefton went on to give examples of private industry in his constituency that have benefited from loans from the regional development agencies. That is where I think the confusion lay. He was talking about Government investment, not Government spending on public sector jobs and so on.

The hon. Gentleman talked about the regional development agencies, but there was provision for a regional growth fund in the Budget. The Government have also put measures in place in the Budget to reduce national insurance contributions for those setting up companies outside the south-east, and have reduced capital gains tax. As I pointed out in my intervention on the hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern), that helps investment from international business to come in.

Yorkshire Forward, a regional development agency, says at the bottom of its e-mails, “We have created more than 52,000 jobs.” No, it has not. Private business creates the job. If Government money is used, the job is not “created”; there was a subsidy that eventually has to be paid back.

Government money is just private money that the Government have nicked and are trying to put back. It is not our money. We do not earn it. We take it from the wealth creators. If we are not creating that wealth in the first place, how can we go on and spend it? The deficit deniers do not understand or do not accept that every one of us would like to stand here and say, “Do you know what? I’m going to replace every school in my constituency, and I want a first-class service.” Every one of us wants a first-class service—that is why we went into politics—but we must be realistic. We must be pragmatic. We must understand that we cannot go on spending money as we have been doing.

I take issue with the suggestion that the move to a 20% rate of VAT is permanent and that we have no intention of lowering it because ideologically we want to tax more. Ideologically we want to tax more? I have never heard such nonsense. We are the party of low taxation. We made it clear in every speech that at each Budget we would review and lower taxation if we could. It has never been said that VAT would remain at 20%. One would hope that we may be able to move to a lower taxation rate.

In the short time that I have left, I shall move on to a specific topic. The Bill refers to closing tax loopholes. Everybody in the Chamber wants to achieve that because there is a great deal of revenue out there that the Government are not getting. Let us look at the way money circulates in the economy. Representations have been made to me that red diesel be used in emergency service vehicles. We can see the sense in that. Emergency vehicles are paid for through Government money, VAT is paid, and money is being circulated and coming back. That is a sensible argument and would impose no cost on the Exchequer.

I make a plea to the Minister to consider something else. I am proud that we have an excellent Yorkshire air ambulance—indeed, we have two. They are on BBC 1 every day at 9.15 am, relating their exploits in rescuing people who have got into difficulties in areas such as the Yorkshire dales. That leads me to say what an excellent maiden speech my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith) made, describing that countryside, where people like to go hiking. We know that accidents can happen, so we have the air ambulance.

Yorkshire air ambulance costs £2.628 million a year to run and not one penny comes from Government. It is all raised through charitable giving. I therefore urge the Minister to consider, when the time is right, exempting from fuel duty Yorkshire air ambulance, the other air ambulances and the people who contribute to the emergency services? They would still raise their money through charitable giving, but that exemption on the 162,632 litres of fuel that the Yorkshire air ambulance used last year would help greatly to reduce overall costs.

I close with a further plea. We have had several Finance Bill debates and all we hear, all the time, is cherry-picking: “We don’t want to do this bit. We don’t want to do that bit. The Government are hitting the poorest here. They are not doing enough for the rich there.” Can we please start to look at the Finance Bill holistically? We have raised tax thresholds. We are reducing national insurance. We have raised capital gains tax. We are reducing corporation tax to bring in more businesses and create more jobs. We are putting in place regional growth funds. Can we please stop the cherry-picking, have a sensible debate and look at the arguments sensibly, holistically and in a grown-up way, and can we please stop denying that the deficit exists?

--- Later in debate ---

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith) on the magnificent maiden speech that he made earlier. If he is indeed the penultimate Conservative of the new intake to speak, it was certainly worth the wait. I am sure that the people of Skipton and Ripon can see that they have made an excellent choice. I also take a moment to congratulate the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie) on his elevation to the Labour Front Bench; like the Geoffrey Boycott of the debate, he has stood at the crease manfully as his colleagues behind have been skittled out.

In supporting this key plank of the coalition Government’s programme to tackle the deficit, I wanted to stress three key points in the time available. There is the seriousness of the crisis in our public finances that we inherited from the Opposition; I have to say that it is disappointing not to see more of the people responsible for the crisis here this evening. Secondly, there is the key role of the private sector in generating the growth that we now need to pay for the public services that we all cherish. Thirdly, there is the specific importance of the measures in clauses 10 and 12 to promote venture capital trusts and research and development relief for high-growth SMEs, which are especially important to the recovery for reasons that I will touch on in a moment. I emphasise the importance of high-growth companies as one who has come to the House after a 15-year career of supporting technology companies in the life sciences sector. I declare an interest in a number of small companies set out in the register.

In discussing the measures in the Bill, we need to remind ourselves of some hard facts. The deficit currently stands at £155 billion. It is the largest in our peacetime history. We have the largest deficit in the G20. This year alone, debt interest is set at £43 billion, and without the measures set out by the coalition Government and my right hon. Friend the Chancellor to tackle the deficit, interest payments alone would have risen to £70 billion a year.

To prevent interest rates from spiking—the true risk of that inheritance—the Government are right to commit to reducing public spending and increasing private sector growth. Labour Members talk of growth, but seem to forget that it is the private sector that is the source of all growth and that pays for any growth in the public sector that we or they may promise. It is private-sector business people up and down the country who pay for our promises, and they now need our support.

We need to think about where the growth will come from, and I should like to suggest two key sources. First, the millions of SMEs up and down the country, frankly, want us to do something simple—get off their backs, stop taxing and regulating them and allow them to grow and flourish as they will. I also want to turn to a second source of growth, which is the three key specialist sectors of which I have some experience. They are biomedicine, food science and environmental science, in which the country punches well above its weight; in many areas of those sectors it leads the world. As the world’s population rises inexorably, they will become enormous sectors of growth across the world.

High-growth companies in those sectors have the potential to lead our recovery and lead this country back into positions of world leadership, provided that we support them properly. High-growth SMEs in the sectors have very special financing needs. Unlike smaller, high-street SMEs, which are struggling so hard, they are not, typically, dependent on the banks. They tend to be dependent on entrepreneurs, on founders—often scientists or people around universities or research institutes, who are then backed up by angel investors who put their expertise and hard-earned money to good use, by venture capital trusts and by corporate venture investors. We need to recognise the importance of that very specific financing food chain and encourage it. I therefore warmly welcome the measures in clauses 10 and 12 on tax relief for research funding and SMEs and for encouraging venture capital trusts. More widely, I welcome the coalition Government’s measures to reduce corporation tax and to relieve entrepreneurs on capital gains tax.

Those are vital measures in a serious Government programme to tackle the deficit. It would be nice to hear from Labour Members what they would do to tackle the deficit were they to be in power.