Geraint Davies
Main Page: Geraint Davies (Independent - Swansea West)Department Debates - View all Geraint Davies's debates with the HM Treasury
(11 years, 8 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Sajid Javid
The right hon. Gentleman asks a good question. Those are some of the details that we will flesh out. If he will allow me, I will look into the question further. I hope it is clear to him that the intention is that the mortgage guarantee scheme is a UK-wide scheme.
In the time that I have left, I shall turn to new clause 5. We have always been clear that the proposed mansion tax is an issue on which the two parties of the coalition have differing views. Our Liberal Democrat colleagues have supported the principle for some time, as we heard today so eloquently from my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol West (Stephen Williams). In contrast, Conservative Ministers have very real concerns about such a proposal.
We have concerns that a third of properties in London worth more than £2 million have been in the same ownership for 10 years, and that a mansion tax could hit asset-rich but potentially income-poor households. We have concerns that a family could live in a £2 million house, but have a very large mortgage. That would mean that their net wealth was a lot lower than the actual value of the home. We have concerns that any mansion tax would be administratively burdensome for HMRC to operate, not to mention intrusive for the person having their home inspected. But Opposition Members should be aware that we are taxing anyone purchasing a new home at this high value through the stamp duty land tax of 7% on residential properties costing £2 million or more. That is a policy that is easy to administer and it will not impact on existing home owners.
The Opposition have proposed that a mansion tax could pay for a tax cut for millions of people on low and middle incomes. The Government have already introduced tax cuts for those who need it most. We are increasing the personal allowance to £9,440 from April—the largest ever cash increase. That will be increased by a further £560 to reach £10,000 in 2014-15, meeting the Government’s commitment a whole year early. That is a tax cut for 24 million people and together takes 2.7 million people out of income taxation altogether.
Budget 2013 also announced that the fuel duty increase planned for September will be cancelled. The Finance Bill keeps fuel duty frozen at current levels, resulting in the longest freeze in fuel duty for 20 years, helping households and businesses with the cost of motoring.
Meanwhile, those with the highest incomes continue to contribute the most. This year the top 1% of taxpayers—those with an income of more than £150,000 a year—will pay approximately a quarter of all income tax. The top 5% of taxpayers—those on incomes of £68,000 or more—will pay nearly half of total income tax. As part of the Government’s commitment to create a fairer tax system, since 2010 the Government have raised taxes on the rich in every Budget. Budget 2010 introduced a higher rate of capital gains tax, Budget 2011 tackled avoidance through disguised remuneration, and Budget 2012 raised stamp duty land tax on high value homes and announced a cap on income tax reliefs. The autumn statement of 2012 took action to reduce the cost of pensions tax relief.
In Budget 2013 we announced further significant measures to tackle aggressive tax avoidance and offshore tax evasion by high earners. The richest now pay a higher percentage of income tax than they did under the previous Government. No doubt those on the Opposition Benches think a better approach would be to introduce a new starting rate of income tax, but let us not forget that the 10% rate is a policy that they introduced and then scrapped once before, to the cost of many further down the income scale—the people whom they claim they want to help. Fortunately, the Government have a more coherent income tax policy, as we heard from my hon. Friends the Members for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland) and for Bristol West. Our increases to the personal allowance have replaced the 10p rate, which Labour doubled; there have been successive increases to the tax free personal allowance. Effectively, we have introduced a 0% band.
Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)
On a point of order, Mr Amess. The Minister is not addressing new clause 5. Surely this is not in order.
The Temporary Chair (Mr David Amess)
I am sure that the Minister has heard the point of order and now perhaps will address his remarks more precisely to the new clauses that we are debating.
Chris Leslie
Why should a constraint on the bonus pool have a constraint on the lending capacity of banks? The hon. Gentleman seems to be suggesting—this is the classic Conservative attitude to banking—that the one inviolate part of a bank’s balance sheet is remuneration, or “compensation” as they sometimes like to call it: “Do what you like to the banks, but for goodness’ sake don’t affect that bonus pool and don’t change that compensation pool.” Well, I am sorry, but we take a totally different point of view. In fact, if there is one area of bank finance that needs a culture change, and which proves that stronger capital adequacy is not anathema to bank lending, it is management remuneration. It is too bloated and needs to change.
Geraint Davies
My hon. Friend has been thinking creatively about how banks can make a contribution to getting people back to work. In light of the previous debate, has any consideration been given to the idea of banks being guided into investing in social housing, which could then become part of their assets? Rather than just taking money from banks, which then complain they do not have any money left, their assets could be interwoven with job creation, asset generation and a lowering of the housing benefit bill. We all know that the 17% rise in housing benefit is due to the private sector and a lack of public housing.
Chris Leslie
There is a debate to be had—possibly a separate one—about how we can make a certain kind of socially useful asset class more attractive to private investment. If we as a society want to boost housing investment, we need to attract investors to make those decisions. That would certainly be a more sophisticated way of devising public policy, instead of the dreamed-up approaches in the Help to Buy scheme and the NewBuy scheme, which, as my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) said, delivered only 1.5% of the expected additional housing.
Chris Leslie
I would like nothing more than for our banking sector to move to a more enlightened and responsible approach to remuneration. I would not want to see a bloated and unfair bonus arrangement continuing in perpetuity simply as a result of a function of the tax system. For the time being, we need to start to send a signal on behalf of public policy makers that the current arrangements, which have not changed sufficiently since before the financial crash or during it, continue to be difficult. The banks often say that they want catharsis and that they want to move on, and I do not want to spend the rest of my life in banking legislation, for goodness’ sake, but we are still not there and the bonus levy is part of that process.
I do not want to talk for much longer, but I want to challenge the Minister specifically on the bank levy arrangements as we are debating stand part for clauses 200 to 202. We have had six different bank levy rates and they have failed to raise the right amount. We have talked about this time and time again, and I do not want to keep coming back in our debates on the autumn statement next year or on the 2014 Budget to a similar discussion on retrospectively tweaking the bank levy. I want to hear from the Minister when he replies that he can guarantee that in this financial year £2.5 billion will be netted in by the bank levy. If he cannot guarantee that, he must admit that we must reconsider the policy, which is haemorrhaging money when it should be boosting the Exchequer far more significantly.
As I said before, parliamentary rules prevent the Opposition from tabling amendments that would tweak the bank levy upwards. There is a convention of the House that only Governments can table amendments to a Finance Bill that would increase a charge on individuals or companies. The process is incredibly frustrating, as we need to ensure that we get into the detail of how the bank levy should work and what the rates should be. For the time being, we feel that tabling amendment 2 so that we can consider a review of how a bank bonus tax could help the young unemployed, in particular, and of how to incorporate it into a bank levy that nets the amount it should is the right way forward. I commend the amendment to my hon. Friends.
Geraint Davies
I make my comments in light of the fact that today’s unemployment figures showed an increase of 42% in the number of people on jobseeker’s allowance in my constituency of Swansea West. That comes in the aftermath of the financial tsunami of sub-prime debt that hit our shores in 2008, which was largely a result of the banking world taking unhealthy risks in the knowledge that the state would ultimately stand behind it. On the upside, people can take enormous gambles and make tremendous bonuses in the knowledge that if it all goes wrong, the taxpayer will cough up. The net impact of all that is that we are now doddering along on the bottom of the sea of growth and people do not have opportunities.
The strategic challenges for the Government are how to ensure that money is focused on job creation and that the banking community pays its fair share. We know that from this April, the top rate of tax was reduced by 5 points—from 50p to 45p. I realise that the Prime Minister gets up on his hind legs and says, “Oh, but we will raise more from the 45p rate than was going to be raised from the 50p rate,” but we all know that the reason for that is that people with large amounts of money can move their income between tax years. Bankers and others will simply move money to a different tax year when the rate was 45p instead of 50p and avoid the tax. If the 50p rate had been sustained, we would have generated a lot more money, particularly from the banking community. My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie) did a great job of highlighting the multi-million pound giveaway to the richest in our communities from the reduction. Our modest proposal would deal with people who are being shielded by the taxpayer from proper competition.
Mark Garnier
It would have been wonderful if it had been brought it in earlier because it would have shown more resolve from the Labour party.
Will the hon. Gentleman enlighten the Committee about what is behind the proposal? Is the intention of the levy to reduce the risk of perverse incentives through what can be an obscene bonus system, or is it to generate revenue? One or the other, which is it?
Geraint Davies
I will come to that point. In his preliminary commentary, the hon. Gentleman asked why the Labour party failed to bring in the 50p tax rate, and indeed the Prime Minister boasts that he is taxing the rich more than Labour ever did, and that is great. The Labour party does not exist to introduce high taxes; it exists to give people opportunity and employment. Higher levels of employment bring prosperity and opportunity, so there is enough tax yield from a lower tax rate to fund public services. Between 1997 and 2008, the economy grew by 40%.
If one is concerned, as I am—as we all are—about the debt to GDP ratio, which is the total debt divided by the value of the economy, there are two ways to get it down. The first is to cut the debt directly, cutting most from the poorest as the Tories do. The other is to increase the size of the economy. In 2010, after we had gone through the financial tsunami, but luckily on the back of 10 years of unparalleled increase in growth under Labour, the debt to GDP ratio was 55%; now the forecast is 85%. The reason is not just that the Tories are keen on cutting money for the poorest and getting money from people who do not have it, but that they cannot get their act together strategically to generate a growth strategy that reduces the ratio so that we do not need higher tax rates. We do not want people who are making obscene bonuses to pay higher taxes for the sake of it; we want people in work.
Mark Garnier
Is not the biggest inequity that it is not Government debt that is the real problem, but household debt? In the period from 1997 to 2008, household debt as a percentage of household income went from 80% to 140%, and the boom in the economy was paid for by a colossal bubble of household debt. That is the real problem.
Geraint Davies
That simply is not the case. I was at the Bank of England relatively recently looking at the profile of debt in the run-up to 2008 and from 2010. From 2010, the ratio of the debt between the Government and the banking community was 1:2. Two thirds of the debt was that of the banking community. Do not misunderstand me: there has been a problem with the general public ratcheting up more private debt through the availability of low interest rates, which in themselves are a good thing, thanks to the fact that my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) introduced Bank of England independence and all the rest of it, and thanks to a feeling that there would be a continuation of growth. People were investing in houses and they were growing in price and so on.
Since 2010, when the Chancellor said, “We will have half a million people unemployed in the public services” and did not say who they were or when they would lose their jobs, there has been a sharp rise in savings rates and a fall-off in consumer demand. We have seen consumer demand basically flatlining, which underlines the reason why we do not have growth, which is why we do not have a reduction in the debt to GDP ratio.
We need confidence to get back on a growth path so that people can spend in the knowledge that they will have jobs in the future. Part of that is to re-engineer the financial world in such a way that money is channelled into productive capacity. Although, allegedly, we have an extra million people in work, overall output is the same. Average production has fallen and average productivity is down, which is very worrying. So we need to think how to ensure that the banking community pays its fair share and how to direct money, in a meaningful way, into job creation and public and private assets.
I was not in the Chamber for the previous debate, but part of that thought process would be, how to encourage the banking community, not in a high-risk way, to start helping people to build desperately needed housing—to get people who have been out of work, many of them in the construction industry, back into work to provide social houses.
Geraint Davies
I will give way in a moment.
After all, one of the big issues that is waved around by the Government is, “We must get the welfare bill down and Labour will not do anything about it.” The flagship of that proposition is, “Housing benefit has doubled to £20 billion in the past 10 years. What is the Labour party going to do about that? We are going to introduce the empty bedroom tax.” In fact, 70% of that increase has come about through escalating private sector rents, and local councils being forced to use the private sector for people in need of housing, because not enough social housing is being built.
If we could somehow get the banks to build social houses, perhaps by allowing them to own partly some of those assets, and by doing so create jobs for people who would pay tax, people would have houses and the housing benefit bill per household would go down because rents would go down—housing benefit is linked to rent levels. We need to think about how to put this together, and part of that debate clearly relates to the banks. When there are obscene bonuses and the recipients are receiving tax cuts, it is not fair, certainly from where I stand, when I am seeing local unemployment up 42%.
Geraint Davies
I will give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson) first.
Bill Esterson
My hon. Friend is conducting a very thorough examination of the causes of the financial problems that we face. He mentioned housing. Does he agree that the housing bubble is part of the cause of the problem, because people borrowed against the value of their property, which is not a long-term, sustainable way of producing growth in the economy? One reason why the proposal that we are debating is so important is that we need a sustainable model of taxation to underpin the growth in the economy with the type of investment that my hon. Friend is talking about, rather than using assets as a way of investing, which is not sustainable. Actually, there is some evidence that that problem is recurring now.
Geraint Davies
I agree that part of the previous problem was the false assumption that the value of property would continue to escalate. Lenders would grant 110% mortgages on the presumption that, within a couple of years, the equity would catch up and there would not be negative equity. Therefore, borrowers would start with negative equity. The issue of sub-prime debt is a big problem.
One of the flagship proposals of the current Budget is for the state to come in and subsidise deposits by lending up to four fifths of the 25% deposit. There are people in the financial community who are thinking, quite reasonably, “Hold on; this could be the start of another sub-prime debt problem.” The problem we have is that people cannot afford to save the deposit that would enable them to become an owner-occupier. They are paying a rent that is too high because there are not enough houses, so they cannot save the deposit. There is a logic that asks, “Can we help them with that deposit?” I agree with that logic that far, but we must be very careful. People have said, “Oh well, no one is taking up the offer,” but if this suddenly becomes a very significant amount of money and it is not properly balanced as a risk, we could be going down the path that started the problem in the first place.
That said, ultimately communities are desperately in need of houses. Historically, council houses were invented because the marketplace was failing to deliver affordable, quality housing for very large parts of the community, and we had Rachmanism. I fear, actually, that we are witnessing the start of its re-emergence. So investing in assets in which people can have stable family lives, as a platform to get jobs, is good. We will not solve the problem today, but part of this debate is clearly about reviewing whether we can do some extraction from the banking community. That community have just been given back a lot of money, they have been causing many of the problems and there is a risk premium. They should be paying back to the taxpayers who are covering their back. Then we can think creatively about how to engage the banking community in small business development, housing development and so on.
Huw Irranca-Davies
Conservative Members have asked whether this is a tax-raising scheme or a scheme to create jobs and homes. I put it to my hon. Friend that I am bemused as to why it cannot be both. Surely a scheme that takes from where there is disproportionate wealth and redistributes, not simply in terms of cash in pocket, but into jobs, and taxes paid by people in those jobs, has such a glorious splendour about it that I struggle to see the dilemma.
Geraint Davies
That is precisely right, because the creative challenge is how to get the banking community to invest in jobs and small business, and one way is to take some money from them and create some jobs and small businesses. If they cannot work out how to do it, that seems a reasonable thing to do.
Greg Clark
Through the hon. Gentleman, perhaps I may express the dilemma that was raised by his hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies). I fear that a cruel deception is being perpetrated on the unemployed. They feel that a sum of money will be available to them, but it simply is not possible to raise £2 billion when the total bonus pool is less than that. I think they should know that.
Geraint Davies
Yes. Well, obviously, we clearly need to look at aggregate sums, but what is being debated here is—[Interruption.] What is being debated here is, is whether it is right that a community of people—I am talking particularly about people in the upper echelons of the banking community—who are making obscene bonuses should be given more and more money for doing no more work and having the taxpayers covering their backs in terms of risk, at a time when we are seeing an escalation of unemployment in various communities, including some that I represent, and when the very poorest are being asked to deal with obscene levels of pain in order to reduce the deficit problem.
Huw Irranca-Davies
May I suggest, through my hon. Friend, by way of riposte, that the cruel deception that is being perpetrated is that there is a lack of ingenuity within the Treasury that could extricate some of the undeserved wealth and redistribute it to put people in jobs? I fail to agree that there is a lack of expertise or resourcefulness there; that is an admission of supineness, of surrender. We should be looking for imaginative ways, like the amendment before us, to get people back to work, by taxing those who are disproportionately wealthy and undeserving.
Geraint Davies
That is right, and there would be widespread support for that across our communities and probably in the banking community. People are taking home an extra £1 million and asking themselves whether they should be paying income tax at 45p or 50p, at a time when we hear cases of people earning, say, £20 a week. As I mentioned at Prime Minister’s Question Time, a constituent who recently came to me was a chronically ill man who had £20 a week after paying his utility bills and his bus fare. This month he is down to about £14 a week due to benefit cuts. If such cases were brought to the attention of some of those wondering whether to buy their second yacht, I do not think they would mind paying a little more.
It has been insinuated that a 50p rate would discourage such people and be so painful for them that they would all get in their yachts and go off and live somewhere else, but in Britain today many people already pay more than 50p. Anyone who is earning more than £32,000 and less than £42,000 is paying 40% tax plus 12% national insurance. That is 52%. The only reason that they have to pay more than 50p and the millionaires do not is that they do not have their own personal accountants. That is not fair, is it?
These are sustainable levels of marginal taxation and it is right that they should be paid. It is right that members of the banking community, who have their backs covered, should pay more than their fair share. It is also right that the Government should get their act together to stop abuse by many members of that community who are taking the mickey.
Yesterday I had a meeting with a lawyer who specialises in giving advice to people facing charges of insider dealing and the like from the Financial Services Authority, which is now the Financial Conduct Authority. We were talking enormous amounts of money that people are trying to avoid paying. The point that she made to me is that the people in the FSA, now the FCA, do not have the resources and the clout, and have to deal with dozens of cases, while the defence lawyers deal with only a few cases because the amounts of money are so great. What is more—the Minister might want to do something about this—there is no system of precedent.
If the FSA says to a bank, “You have committed this offence and we are going to charge you £1 million”, which is small change for a bank, the FSA cannot set a precedent. The banking community knows that, if they do it, they will be charged; the FSA has to rehearse the same action again and again. I hope the Minister will look into this as it comes from the horse’s mouth—from people who are giving advice to people who are being defended. They also poach staff from the FSA or the FCA to work for them. They say, “We’ll give you three times as much. You’ve been charging us and you’re very good at it. You’re not paid enough for your success. Come over to our side. Have some of our bonus and we can do some insider dealing. The people at the Exchequer are making cuts at the tax office to save money, so we can have more.”
Andrew Gwynne
My hon. Friend should be a little more charitable towards the Government. There has been a thread of consistency in their approach. Had he been present for the first debate, he would have heard my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie) say from the Front Bench that the Prime Minister promised that under the Government’s New Buy scheme, 100,000 families would be helped and only 1,500 families were eventually helped through that scheme. In this debate we heard that the Prime Minister said that £2.5 billion would be raised by the bank levy, whereas we heard from my hon. Friend on the Front Bench that £1.1 billion was raised. Is there not a degree of consistency here? The Government are consistently incompetent.
Geraint Davies
That certainly would be a charitable way of putting it. If financial targets are set and are under-achieved, the Government clearly need to redouble their efforts to deliver those targets. We need to continue to focus on generating joined-up systems to ensure that the money that is available delivers economic outcomes such as opportunity and jobs. The amendment is designed to create imaginative ways of generating opportunity and jobs for the future by using the money that is recovered. We should join together to do that. It is a modest amendment that we should all agree on. We should work together to build a stronger Britain.
I fear that the Government will say, “Oh no, we can’t possibly consider that.” That, alongside their failure to raise the money, would show that they do not have the focus to ensure that those with the broadest shoulders pay their way towards a more prosperous Britain. I fear that the Government will go back to the old Tory ways and say, “Let’s use this as an opportunity to crush the so-called undeserving poor” and pretend that there are workers and shirkers, whereas people just want to get out and get a job. Let us move forward and create a united Britain—a one nation Britain, dare I say—to create a future that works and a future that cares.
Mr Newmark
I apologise, Mr Amess, for popping out. I wanted to make sure that we had the right statistics at hand. I agree with the hon. Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) that those with the broadest shoulders should pay the largest amount of taxation. After the last Budget, notwithstanding the 5% cut, the top percentage of earners are paying more because of the other tax rises that we have brought in for them.
Unemployment is a tragedy for anyone who loses their job, and I am sorry for the individuals in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency who have in the past month lost their jobs. He spoke about the productivity puzzle, and I agree that that is a challenge. What is important to each of our constituents is surely that they have a job. The facts are that, year over year, unemployment is down by 71,000. Employment nationally is up 488,000 year over year. On jobseeker’s allowance, the figure that he looked to, year over year it is down by 60 people. That is not many, but the figure is down year over year in Swansea West.
Geraint Davies
In Swansea West jobseeker’s allowance numbers have grown by 40%. We have heard of employment levels going up and we have seen that overall output has not gone up, so there is the productivity puzzle, which is a kind way of saying that productivity—production per head—has gone down. All I am saying is that we should look at ways of giving people the tools to do the job, be it skills, building houses, or super-connectivity.
In the run-up to the Budget I got the business community in Swansea together to lobby the Chancellor to invest in a wi-fi cloud and super-connectivity for Swansea. Why should an inward investor come to the congestion and cost of London when they could hook up to the worldwide web in superfast time overlooking the wonderful Gower and the sun and sands of Swansea? That was worth while doing. We were not successful, and subsequently the biggest company in Wales, Admiral, wrote to the Chancellor pointing out that it is a global company and wants super-connectivity on a global basis to its clients and suppliers. That is the sort of investment that we want to make from the extraction from the excess profiteering of certain individuals in the banking community. The modest amendment would enable us to continue that dialogue with a view to taking action to deliver positive change for people who currently do not have enough opportunity.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
Is my hon. Friend as concerned as I am—I hope that Government Members are concerned—about the increase in the number of people who have been unemployed for 12 months? In my constituency, the figures today show that the number of those unemployed for more than 12 months has gone up by 17%. Tragically, the number of young people unemployed for more than 12 months has gone up by 40%. Having talked to other hon. Members here this afternoon, I know that they have similar if not higher figures. That is the real tragedy. Here is a generation of young people who will be scarred by unemployment. We need, and we need soon, proper measures, which the amendment addresses— innovative and different measures, not the Work programme, which is not working for people. That generation will be scarred if we do not find them work soon.
Geraint Davies
That is completely right. Clearly, the economic model that must work is to have people making a contribution by being in work. There has been some debate about tax thresholds—with everyone saying how great they were—versus working families tax credit. Let us put ourselves in the position of someone starting a business who can only afford to employ someone for £10,000—£15,000 would not be viable; that is just the way that business works. Along comes working families tax credit, and a single mother, for example, can afford to work for £15,000, but not for £10,000. If the state makes up that difference, we end up with someone who can afford to work and make a contribution, and a business that is now viable. That is good. If that is simply stripped away and the tax threshold is increased to make it more worth while, it does not add up. That is one explanation for why we had such considerable job growth under the Labour party from 1997 to 2008.
Most people do not really understand working families tax credit. It is a way of integrating tax and benefits so that we cannot divide people into those in receipt of benefit and the workers, which is what Conservatives want to do for political reasons. They want to say that there are the workers and the shirkers and they are for the workers and the Labour party simply wants to support people sitting at home. That is the opposite of the truth. The Labour party is about enabling people to have pathways to prosperity through jobs. We should be using the fruits of engaging with the banking community, who make obscene amounts of money, and investing in skills and in communications, whether it be electrification of the railways or high speed rail, in wi-fi clouds, or in creating a global infrastructure in terms of R and D and our universities.
We have heard a lot of talk about the reduction in corporation tax from 21% to 20%, but that makes no difference to multinationals if the comparators are France at 33%, Germany at 29% and the USA at 40%. We are already competitive. But that 1% reduction is a 5% reduction in our tax yield from corporation tax. Would it not be better to spend that on helping universities to grow with industry? There is a good example of that in Swansea, which could be the fruits of what we are talking about today, where the second campus is being underpinned by £250 million from the European Investment Bank, and where Tata Steel, BP, other multinationals and the Welsh Government are engaged. Research shows that that sort of cluster of R and D attracts more and more big business and jobs, rather than just a marginal bit of corporation tax. We need to think cleverly about how to generate R and D engines. Brazil, for example, is spending £5.3 billion from development banks on getting into the global field of biotech. China and other countries are making similar investments. That is the way to organise ourselves in a joined-up way, rather than the laissez faire social and economic Darwinism of the Tories, where we see the weakest die and the greediest become more bloated as they exploit the world.
Mr Newmark
I am enjoying the hon. Gentleman’s fascinating speech, and a philosophical divide is clearly developing. Does he really believe that it is best for a company to pay an extra 1% to Government, because they know how best to spend that money to create jobs? Or is it best to leave it with the company? Let us leave bankers aside, because I know that one is obsessed with those. Let us talk about the Tatas of the world, the manufacturers who historically have done a great job in Wales in creating jobs. Does the hon. Gentleman believe that it is best that that 1% extra goes to Government, because they are in a better position to create those jobs, than a company such as Tata, which would take that extra 1% and use it efficiently for R and D or job creation?
Geraint Davies
You, Mr Amess, probably have one of these sophisticated iPhones. I bring it out of my pocket because all the heavy lifting of the technology in this phone, which is a multi-billion pound product in a global marketplace, has been done by the public sector. We invented the internet, but GPS, touch sensitivity, voice sensitivity and most of those things were done by the institute of technology in California, which is why the Californian government are suing Apple for £26 billion to try to recover some of the money earned. Apple did a bit of packaging and marketing, produced the goods in a lower cost place, and paid tax somewhere else. We have global companies, which we all know about, which do not pay tax where the economic activity takes place. The answer to the hon. Gentleman’s question whether it would be better to give money back to companies for R and D is that companies want to do a bit of R and D, but they want to do it on the back of the heavy lifting of the public sector. That is the reality. Part of our challenge is to attract those companies to where we have public sector activity, to engage in partnership, and to ensure that we tax where the economic activity and marketplaces are, so that we get our fair share of the added value and a return from our taxpayer investment. So the answer is yes, yes, yes.
Bill Esterson
With regard to why Government have to intervene, my hon. Friend mentioned Swansea, but around the country there are regions with big problems, particularly youth unemployment—Merseyside is a key area where that is a problem—where we need such intervention. We are talking about a levy on banks, not on Tata, and we need that money to be directed where the job shortages are for young people. A small number of my constituents who have not been able to find work locally travel to London to obtain work, with all the inherent problems of high housing costs. It is not an attractive option. It is not what they want to do, but they have no choice. However, the vast majority are not in a position to do that, and that is why youth unemployment in the regions is going up, and that is why we need the kind of intervention that my hon. Friend is talking about.
Geraint Davies
Yes, and my hon. Friend makes an important point about the growing regional imbalance in the British economy. I realise that the Government have paid lip service to that issue, but if the only place to get a good job is London, that inflates costs, and young people come to London to live in squalid conditions in the hope that they can get the experience to go home at some point. There is a brain-drain as well, so this policy does not make any sense. One of the first things the Government did was to get rid of the regional development agencies. They said that they were no use and cost too much.
Geraint Davies
I will give way in a moment.
I went to visit UK Trade & Investment, which has 83 offices around the world. Its mission is to market Britain for trade and inward investment. I was in its office in Dusseldorf and it told me that typically it would market Britain as a great place to come to—a low-tax, stable society with a platform into various markets, a skills base and great universities.
For example, a German distiller might come along and say that it wanted to set up a factory in Britain. That would go on to UKTI’s computer platform and the RDAs would then bid for it, saying, “We want that in Yorkshire” or “We want that in Lancashire” and setting out their case. Immediately after the RDAs were destroyed, there was a queue of companies looking to invest in Britain through UKTI, but there was no one to bid for that investment. It was crazy to destroy them, especially at a time when we want growth and regional balance.
The Government said the RDAs were too expensive, but now they ask why we have growing unemployment, zero growth and increased housing benefit costs in London. It is because rents are going up, we are not building houses and we do not have regional balance. Therefore, the amendment is partly about thinking of creative ways to move forward and engage the banking community in a sustainable growth plan that has a regional dimension.
Huw Irranca-Davies
Does my hon. Friend agree that the life sciences cluster at Swansea university, which brings together the best of the private sector, with micro-businesses, small and medium-sized enterprises and technological innovation, is working also because the project is supported by local and national Government in Wales? It is not about one or the other; it is about both. I have visited a company in Maesteg, at the top of the Llynfi valley, a former coal mining area, which is investing in life sciences. Does he also agree that the sort of intervention that that company would love to see is in a jobs guarantee to help it increase its manufacturing base? That is the sort of clever intervention the state can make to grow SMEs and micro-businesses, not just the Tatas of this world.
Geraint Davies
I completely agree. There are clearly certain growth markets within the global market environment, and life sciences is one that is of great interest in Swansea, as are biotech and green technologies and all the rest of it. What the public sector can allow is a critical mass of research that benefits from economies of scale and a shared risk that would not be taken by individual operators, and that can attract inward investors. What we want is a benign partnership, as we have in Wales, with a Labour Government and local authorities working with universities, perhaps on a city-region basis, which is the future, to deliver benefits for all. That is what we want, rather than the laissez-faire approach.
I will have to bring my comments to a close in a moment, because obviously other Members wish to speak, but I promised first to give way to the hon. Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael).
Neil Carmichael
I have listened carefully to the hon. Gentleman. Does he welcome the fact that in the long term Hitachi has invested £6 billion in some of the regions he has referred to, such as the north-east, where trains will be made, and in my area, where nuclear power stations will be built? He refers to “heavy lifting”. Does he not agree that through his industrial strategy the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills has introduced the aerospace centre, which will be a massive investment, essentially in the public sector, to promote the development of aviation? That will also be repeated for the automotive sector. That is precisely what he is talking about, so the Government are doing that already.
Geraint Davies
I certainly welcome those things. The trouble is that it is very much a U-turn—although that is fine. One moment the Government were withdrawing and saying, “We don’t have to do anything, because the market will spontaneously grow.” Then nothing was growing in the garden, so they go and put in some pot plants and that sort of thing, which is great. Hitachi is very welcome, and Tata has been mentioned. Some of those big companies, such as Tata, will make strategic investments, particularly because of the quality of the coal and the history of skills and the innovation, such as the partnership with Swansea university, where they are developing a new type of steel that has six layers, generates its own electricity and, when used to clad buildings, lowers the carbon footprint. It is the future.
With regard to aerospace, we of course have Airbus in Wales and, again, a supportive Welsh Government. Any support from the UK Government for strategic investment to boost our export and manufacturing base in modern and growing markets is very welcome. That is something we can certainly support. The more active the intervention from the Government with regard to an industrial strategy, the better. We want to see jobs, rather than people sitting on their hands—that is how the Government see it—and rather than watching bankers take loads of money for doing very little while people in Swansea and elsewhere who want to work are blamed for being unemployed but are not given a hand-up.
Geraint Davies
I will take one final intervention before bringing my remarks to a close, because I know that other Members wish to speak.
Richard Graham
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way at this stage in his long and fascinating peroration. He made several references to the fact that bankers are obscenely overpaid and that they should pay more tax. Does he think that people who earn up to £250,000 a week are underpaid, reasonably paid or significantly overpaid, and should they be making a greater contribution to the sort of problem he has been discussing? I am talking, of course, about premier league footballers. I look forward to his comments.
Geraint Davies
I do not want to be drawn into talking about football, because there is a rivalry between Swansea and Cardiff, and Cardiff, to be fair to them, have just been promoted. I feel that people who earn more should pay more towards the public good. Whether or not the cut-off point is £250,000, we all have a contribution to make and those with the widest shoulders should pay more and at a greater rate. There is a debate about what that rate should be, but certainly those people who advocate a poll tax that would mean the poor paying the same as the richest for local services are at the far extreme of reasonableness. Most of us, I would like to think, want the rich to pay more.
Sadly, what we saw in the Budget was the poorest paying most to pay for the bankers’ recklessness, so that a certain amount of money could be thrown to the squeezed middle in order to buy votes. That is not the way forward. We need a unity of purpose to grow in prosperity for a future that cares and a future that works. On that point, I must sit down, because I know that colleagues and others want to speak. Thank you, Mr Amess, for indulging me.
Alison Seabeck
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies), who gave an absolute tour de force. I rise to support amendment 2. We have heard it said repeatedly, both in interventions and in my hon. Friend’s speech, that bankers who earn large sums of money in this country continue to receive huge bonuses, irrespective of whether the institutions they work for have improved their performance, and meanwhile unemployment persists and the Government attempt to create full-time jobs. It has failed.
Indeed, in a week when we saw low-paid working families affected by the bedroom tax—or spare room subsidy—we also saw large numbers of top bankers awarded obscenely large bonus payments and, in some cases, benefiting from the tax cut for millionaires. Some have deferred paying income tax until this financial year to avoid paying at the 50% rate, thereby making additional gains on the back of the poor, a point that was terribly well made by my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West.
That is yet another Government economic plan that has been poorly evidenced. It is part of an endless package of ill-thought-through policies. The Government had 13 years to work up those policies. We expected them to have worked up deliverable policies, but clearly they have failed miserably. They do not even have a plan B for the economy—the one that the International Monetary Fund now suggests they switch to—which is shocking.
In the financial year 2010-11, the bankers’ bonus tax introduced by the Labour Government raised around £3.5 billion. It was a sensible tax on the country’s top earners. It was scrapped within weeks of the coalition Government taking office and replaced by a bank levy, which the Prime Minister has consistently claimed would raise £2.5 billion a year. The simple truth is that it has not done that, so one could say that the Prime Minister’s accuracy at the Dispatch Box has been found wanting. Members should not take my word for it—the Office for Budget Responsibility evidence, published alongside the Budget, confirmed the figures. The OBR has said that the coalition’s bank levy will bring in just £1.6 billion from the last financial year—almost £1 billion less than the Prime Minister said it would, and less than half that raised under Labour’s bank bonus.
Alison Seabeck
That is an interesting question and I am delighted that the hon. Gentleman is so well informed about his constituents. However, he seems conveniently to forget that my constituents, like his, are also being hit by increases to VAT, which takes a significant chunk out of their incomes. Furthermore, particularly if they are low-paid workers, they are being hit by a flat-rate pay freeze and in turn by housing benefit changes. I am talking about working members of my constituency. If someone was to knock on the doors of Plymouth, Moor View, that person would find that people said they were significantly worse off and finding life very hard indeed.
Geraint Davies
I had better intervene, because the rendition given by the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) of what I was meant to have said was completely inaccurate. I did not say that tax had increased for people but that the working families tax credit had been massively cut, as well as other opportunities.
The average person would lose £14 a week under the bedroom tax because their children had grown up and they had an empty bedroom. That is the same as the £13.50 that somebody might get from the raising of the tax threshold to £10,000. There are swings and roundabouts. Only £400 million will be saved from crushing the poor but it will cost £12 billion to put up the tax threshold. The judgments are difficult, but the Tory instinct is to crush the poor and help the squeezed middle, while ours is to help everybody. However, I made no insinuation that tax was being increased.
Alison Seabeck
My hon. Friend has put his position on the record, so I will not take further interventions on that point.
I come back to the amendment and its call for a review.
Sammy Wilson
I agree that a general proposition that every specific tax raised should be hypothecated for a certain purpose would be very dangerous, but this is not a general proposition; it relates to one specific case and that case has to be made.
Geraint Davies
In following the logic of the hon. Gentleman’s eloquent argument, am I right in saying that he agrees that what banks should really be doing is supporting small businesses that have large order books and successful products and that want to upsize and build their business, but that do not have a lot of collateral and houses? That is what the banks should be focusing on in our local communities and economies, not on massive bets against share price changes and derivative bundles, which will develop multi-billion pound bonuses in an almost virtual world. What we want is a real economy supported by banks, not a bonus culture backed up by the state.
Sammy Wilson
That is one of the arguments for separating retail banking from the riskier banking activities described by the hon. Gentleman.
The fourth argument is totally different from the others, but I think that Government Members were getting increasingly desperate as they clawed for arguments against what is a reasonable proposition. One Member asked several times whether the amendment was designed to change behaviour, to act against perverse incentives or to raise revenue. All taxes tend to have behavioural consequences anyway; it is in their nature to change behaviour. Some are specifically designed to do so, while some are more genuinely revenue-raising because they do not affect behaviour as much. If the revenue from the tax goes down because fewer bonuses are paid, that does not necessarily mean that it is bad for the economy. For example, if banks decide not to pay bonuses and to keep the money as profits, corporation tax revenue will go up; or if they decide to put the money back into the bank and thereby increase liquidity, that will have a beneficial effect on the economy, because banks will be able to make more loans to businesses. Just because it may change behaviour does not necessarily make it a bad proposition. In fact, the proposition stands, as it could have other tax revenue-raising consequences or induce changes in bank behaviour that mean they have more money to do what the public expect them to do, rather than simply giving huge bonuses to their top-ranking employees.