Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between George Osborne and Anne Main

Wednesday 25th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

Back then, the Labour party was voting for tuition fees. The difference is this: we have learnt our lesson, and Labour Members have forgotten theirs. As a result, we have a credible higher education policy that is giving us the best universities in the world, a record number of students, and, crucially, a record number of students from disadvantaged backgrounds—which the Labour party said would never happen—and, in contrast, Labour Members have a completely incredible policy to abolish the tuition fees that they themselves introduced and create a £10 billion hole in the public finances. It is time that they were straight with students and made it clear that that is completely unaffordable, and that we go on funding our higher education system and asking graduates who are going to earn more, on average, than other taxpayers to contribute to their education.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

St Albans and many other areas in the south and east value their green belt. According to figures from the Office for National Statistics, 3 million people may come into this country if we remain in the European Union. Would the Chancellor like to suggest which bits of the green belt—about a quarter of a million acres—will be needed, and where they will be? We need to provide homes and infrastructure for those people.

[Mr Osborne]

We have made a clear commitment to protecting the green belt, and the planning laws that we have introduced, and propose to introduce, meet that commitment.

My hon. Friend and I disagree on European Union membership—and I have seen no particular evidence from the leave campaigners that immigration would fall; indeed, they seem to be telling some communities that they would let more people in—but let us at least agree on this. We will have a referendum, and, in the end, it will not be up to my hon. Friend or me to decide. It will be up to the British people.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between George Osborne and Anne Main

Wednesday 9th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

Let me say something surprising: we talk to each other in this Government! The Cabinet actually gets round the table and has meetings. We discuss things, we agree, and then we move forward—the Labour party should try it.

The Office for National Statistics is independent, but Britain is doing its bit by taking 20,000 refugees from the Syrian refugee camps. We have always provided a home for genuine asylum seekers.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

Under current toy regulations, small children can be engulfed in flames by 3 cm in one second. Will the Chancellor encourage my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister to intervene to see whether the Business Secretary can introduce a statutory instrument to improve the flammability of children’s play and dress-up costumes?

[Mr Osborne]

My hon. Friend is right to raise that case. We all saw the tragedy that befell the family of the “Strictly Come Dancing” presenter and the campaign that her family have undertaken to change the regulations. It is true that we do not have the same flame-retardant regulations for children’s fancy dress costumes. That seems wrong. I know that my right hon. Friend the Business Secretary is looking at the matter and will ensure that that changes.

Greece

Debate between George Osborne and Anne Main

Monday 29th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his questions. I should say that this afternoon we have been in touch with the devolved Administrations in the United Kingdom to ensure that they are aware of the plans and to work with them on any issues faced by them and by citizens and businesses in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The Bank of England and the Prudential Regulation Authority are, of course, monitoring extremely closely the situation with the four Greek branches in the UK and the subsidiary, although, as I have said, the subsidiary is protected by our compensation scheme and supervised by the Bank of England. There is, of course, advice available to businesses with export links to Greece, but there are capital controls in place so there are restrictions on the settlement of payments being transferred out of the Greek banking system. Businesses should be aware of that. Cash flow problems can be addressed by contacting HMRC.

As for the IMF, I do not want to prejudge the decisions of the managing director or the board. We will just have to wait and see what unfolds in the coming days. It is fair to say that the space for substantive negotiations before the referendum is pretty limited. Of course, we shall see what the outcome of the referendum is. I would merely observe that many of the senior figures in the eurozone have said that if Greece were to vote yes, negotiations would begin to try to find a satisfactory outcome for the Greek financial situation.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

Greece, a small country of 5 million people, swept in with Syriza a Government promising to abolish austerity. Does my right hon. Friend think that there are any lessons to learn for a country much nearer to home with a population of about 5 million people that swept in a Government promising to abolish austerity?

[Mr Osborne]

The public will draw their own conclusions about that. Different countries are obviously different, but western democracies need to ensure that their welfare systems are affordable, their economies are competitive and their businesses can export and create jobs. That is a challenge for every single western democracy.

IMF

Debate between George Osborne and Anne Main

Monday 23rd April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

I can do that on the simple grounds that I would not be able to make a loan beyond the agreed headroom without a vote in Parliament. Perhaps by then the shadow Chancellor will have flip-flopped again and will support it. [Interruption.] I shall be very generous and congratulate the shadow Chancellor on completing the marathon and raising all that money. I advise him not to wear flip-flops when he runs.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

May I ask for clarification of the terms of the loan? The Chancellor referred in his statement to $15 billion and under £10 million, but the currency being utilised is special drawing rights at £1 to the special drawing right. Should the currency fluctuate and push the loan over £10 billion, will the Chancellor come back to Parliament and give us a vote on it?

[Mr Osborne]

The parliamentary authorisation is expressed in special drawing rights, and on the exchange rate at the moment the loan is just less than £9 billion.

Eurozone

Debate between George Osborne and Anne Main

Monday 10th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

Let me deal first with the right hon. Gentleman’s question about quantitative easing. I think there is general recognition that what worked was the increase in asset prices and also pushing investors up the risk chain. I defer to the right hon. Gentleman’s view on this, but what did not work so well was an increase in bank lending; that did not happen as a result of QE, although the Government at the time hoped that it would. As he knows better than anyone, the Government also created the asset purchase facility with the idea that the Bank of England might purchase some corporate paper; it ended up purchasing only around £1 billion-worth.

I thought that it was sensible, therefore, that alongside the Bank’s action on QE we separately, as a Government accountable to the House, looked at credit easing options, which directly try to address the bank lending issue and enable the Government—again, directly accountable to elected people—to look at a range of assets that one can buy, such as small business loans.

On the question of Greece, I have to be a little careful; I alluded to that in my statement when I said that the advice that we are giving on Greece is private. But our public intent is very clear: the Greek situation has to be resolved. It is very debilitating for the world that at the moment each week goes past and there is another event risk around Greece—the troika turns up, there is a parliamentary vote in Greece. Of course, a lot of the frustration of eurozone members is not so much at the impact of austerity, but at the feeling that they have that the Greeks have not done what they promised to do. But as I say, if the right hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I will continue to give my specific advice on Greece to my eurozone neighbours in private.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

I am pleased that my right hon. Friend is taking a robust approach towards our economy, but does he share my concern that the eurozone’s attempt to open up our benefits and pensions pots this September will derail his efforts to make sure that we get money back to the British taxpayer?

[Mr Osborne]

I am very clear that the resources we provide to the European Union should be well spent. Indeed, there is a whole separate agenda that we have not touched on today of getting the European Union better focused on trying to encourage growth and competitiveness across the entire continent. Like, I suspect, my hon. Friend, I also share the frustration about the application of European law that means that we have to end up paying benefits to people who are not in this country. That is one of the frustrations that Governments in the past have had to deal with, and we are looking at whether there are potential avenues around it.

Global Economy

Debate between George Osborne and Anne Main

Thursday 11th August 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

It sounds like the shadow Chancellor wrote that question. Let me repeat what I said earlier: the proposal Barack Obama put forward in his speech at the George Washington university is for a deficit reduction in the United States of the same pace and scale as the one we are pursuing in Britain. That is because in America, too, they understand that they have to deal with their budget deficit.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

Europe is making increasing demands on our pension pots and our benefit pots and, indeed, it recently made a demand on our VAT. Is it not time that we had a debate on how much we pay towards Europe? The Chancellor says it would be economically disastrous if it broke up, but there should be a debate. Some 75,000 people have signed a Daily Express petition asking for a debate on this, so surely there should be an autumn debate?

[Mr Osborne]

We do debate the European budget in this Parliament, and they are often quite lively debates. We are fighting hard for a real-terms freeze in the European budget not just for next year but for the coming new financial perspective from 2014, and we have enlisted a number of allies. There is now an understanding across Europe that, with very tough public expenditure decisions at home in every European country, we also need to get control of the European budget.

Bank Bonuses

Debate between George Osborne and Anne Main

Tuesday 11th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

The right hon. Gentleman may not know it, or perhaps he did not really believe it, but he fought the last election on a manifesto—written, incidentally, by the Leader of the Opposition—that committed the then Government to opposing a unilateral levy. We have introduced such a levy, and it will raise almost £10 billion in the current Parliament. We are extracting from the banks revenue that the last Government did not extract. Indeed, they opposed the method that we have introduced.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

In the future, will my right hon. Friend come to the House and let us know the extent to which the banks have complied with the requirement to lend more to businesses in my constituency? There was little sympathy for them under the last Government, when big bonuses were provided and they received little help from the bankers who received those bonuses.

[Mr Osborne]

An absolute central part of any settlement we might reach with the banks will be a material and verifiable increase in the amount of lending to British businesses, especially medium and small businesses. [Interruption.] Labour Members mutter, but they secured absolutely nothing for British business when they bailed out the banks. They had the money in their hands to give to the banks, and they secured absolutely nothing in return.

Loans to Ireland Bill

Debate between George Osborne and Anne Main

Wednesday 15th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

Obviously we are not going to prejudge the outcome of any Irish general election. Of course we—not just us, but the IMF and others—negotiate with the Government of the day. Although the principal Opposition parties in Ireland have concerns about the Irish budget and the like, I understand that they have accepted the principle of international assistance, and the IMF has been in direct contact, and has engaged in discussions with them. The international community, including the UK, is satisfied that we are in a position to make this offer to the Irish Government, which is why I am bringing the Bill to the House today.

As I was saying, Ireland agreed to seek IMF and other support worth €85 billion, and the money will be used as follows: €35 billion will be used to support Ireland’s banking sector, with €10 billion going towards immediate bank recapitalisation; and the remaining €50 billion will be used for sovereign debt support. In terms of contributions to the cost of the package, Ireland itself will provide €17.5 billion towards the total. The remaining €67.5 billion will be split, with one third coming from the IMF, one third from the European financial stability mechanism, and one third from the eurozone facility and bilateral loans from the UK, Sweden and Denmark. I have agreed that our contribution should amount to €3.8 billion, or £3.25 billion at today’s exchange rate.

This significant package will help Ireland to deal decisively with its problems. It will help it to recapitalise its banks and set up a contingency reserve for future problems. It will also help the Irish authorities to cover the shortfall in their budget, which was passed by the Irish Parliament earlier this month. Their budget will see a fiscal consolidation of €15 billion by 2014, of which €6 billion will be implemented next year, as part of their strategy leading to a target budget deficit of 3% of gross domestic product in four years’ time.

Of course people ask why we are extending the loan to Ireland. We are doing so because it is overwhelmingly in our national interest to have a strong Irish economy and a stable banking system. This is not just about the Irish economy and Irish jobs; it is about the British economy and British jobs. A loan does not add to our deficit, and any increase in borrowing is matched, of course, by the commitment of the Irish to repay with interest. The answer to the question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon earlier is that if Ireland takes out all the loan that is being made available to it and pays it back with the interest that has been forecast, it would pay us £440 million in fees and interest over this period.

Let us remember that Ireland is the fifth largest market for British exporters and accounts for 5% of our total exports abroad. An interesting way for the House to think about it is that every man, woman and child in Ireland spends an average of £3,600 per year on British goods—that is how connected our economies are. Indeed, as has often been pointed out, we export more to Ireland than to Brazil, Russia, India and China put together, although we are trying to increase our exports to those four very large emerging markets. For some of our industrial sectors, such as food and drink or clothing and footwear, Ireland is our top export market. Ireland is also the only country with which we share a land border, and in Northern Ireland our economies are particularly linked, with two-fifths of exports going to the Republic.

I wish to reassure Members representing Northern Ireland that I am very aware of their constituents’ worries and the difficulty they face as a result of the problems in Ireland. That is why my hon. Friend the Financial Secretary recently visited Belfast to discuss these issues directly. I am open to any discussions that Members from Northern Ireland wish to have with me or the Treasury about the economic situation and indeed the banking situation in Northern Ireland. Just as our two economies are linked, our businesses and banking sectors are also interconnected. More Irish companies are listed on London exchanges than companies from any other foreign country. The two main Irish-owned banks have an important presence in the UK, holding between them about £30 billion of customer deposits. In Northern Ireland, two of the four largest high street banks are Irish-owned, accounting for almost a quarter of personal accounts.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend has stressed the importance of the export market and our strong links with Ireland. So why did he find it necessary for paragraph 6(h), under the heading “Events of default”, in the summary document to set out that

“the Borrower not being or ceasing to be a member of the European Union”

would constitute a default? I would hope that we would support Ireland if we chose to do so, and not bind it into necessarily having to stay in the European Union, given the length and operation of the loan.

[Mr Osborne]

It is merely an observation that the fact that Ireland is a member of the European Union is not why we are making this loan; it has nothing to do with that. It has to do with the fact that Ireland is deeply connected to us. Indeed, we have just made a loan agreement with Iceland, which of course is not a member of the European Union, in order to seek to recover moneys that were spent on savers in Icelandic banks here in the UK.