Oral Answers to Questions

Greg Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 9th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Laura Trott (Sevenoaks) (Con)]

What fiscal steps his Department is taking to support businesses affected by the covid-19 outbreak.

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

What fiscal steps his Department is taking to support businesses affected by the covid-19 outbreak.

[Mark Menzies (Fylde) (Con)]

What fiscal steps his Department is taking to support businesses affected by the covid-19 outbreak.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rishi Sunak]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that we must get support to businesses as quickly as possible. I am pleased to confirm to her that guidance will be published, hopefully by the end of this week, for local authorities, and that the restart grants, which are designed to take the place of our grant scheme that runs out at the end of April, will be distributed to local authorities in the first full week—the week commencing 5 April. I hope that is a reassurance to her and her businesses, and that local authorities can get the cash to them at this vital time.

[Greg Smith]

The scale of support for businesses has been truly outstanding, but may I draw my right hon. Friend’s attention to the coach industry? Pre-pandemic, it already found itself heavily indebted because of requirements that the state put on it, such as the Public Service Vehicles Accessibility Regulations 2000 and Euro 6 requirements, so will he look again at how the coach industry can be supported, given the level of debt it is already in?

[Rishi Sunak]

I thank my hon. Friend for shining a spotlight on this important industry; he is right to do so. I know that he will be talking to the Department for Transport about regulations for the industry, but I can tell him that we will be providing local authorities with discretionary funding of around £425 million to sit alongside the restart grants. That money, at the discretion of local areas, can be used to support businesses such as coach businesses in their areas.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rishi Sunak]

This Government are committed to record amounts of investment in infrastructure, both road and rail, as we heard from my right hon. Friend the Financial Secretary earlier. The Budget announced upgrades for several stations in and around the midlands after representations that we heard from the fantastic Mayor, Andy Street, about the needs of his area. We remain committed to publishing the integrated rail plan in due course.

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend has rightly been open with the House and the public about the scale of the challenge to the public finances, but on a point of detail, further to the assumptions in the Red Book, does his Department plan to undertake dynamic scoring of the changes to corporation akin to the previous detailed CGE—computable general equilibrium —modelling since 2010, and will this be published in full?

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Jesse Norman)]

What a fantastically niche question from my hon. Friend, and how delighted I am to be able to answer it. He will know that scoring is a matter for the OBR. As the Budget policy costings in the Budget 2021 document set out, the costing for corporation tax has been adjusted to reflect behavioural responses to an increase in the rate of corporation tax. It is important to be clear that dynamic scoring can include a number of potential behavioural responses, such as adjustments to reflect the impact on the incentive to incorporate, on profit shifting, and on investment. If he is so minded, he can find further detail on page 196 of the OBR’s “Economic and fiscal outlook”.

UK-EU Future Relationship Negotiations and Transition Period

Greg Smith Excerpts

Monday 7th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

What we need to be focusing on is how we ensure that, in every part of the UK, we can get the economic growth that we need and the infrastructure investment that we need. There will be opportunities that come from some of the investments that are being made over the transition period, and I would ask the hon. Gentleman to turn his energy and focus to those issues. We have left the EU. We will hopefully have news of a deal, but we will certainly have certainty for all our businesses and constituents in the coming days. We need to turn and look to the future and how we can help realise our constituents’ ambitions, and I encourage him to do that.

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

The 17.4 million people who gave such a clear instruction some four and a half years ago will look on with bemusement that there are still voices seeking to undermine that democratic mandate. Does my right hon. Friend agree that, in order to respect that democratic mandate, despite all the negativity and the negative voices undermining our excellent trade negotiators, the verdict must be a binary one—either we will be sovereign or we will not?

[Penny Mordaunt]

There is no question but that we will be sovereign; this is not an issue we are prepared to compromise on, but, as he has mentioned leave voters, I will stick up for remain voters. I have said this before, but I will say it again: the greatest act of patriotism in the past few years was shown by them in accepting the democratic result of the referendum. I think that everyone in this country wants us to be successful and make use of the opportunities that will be there next year as we come out of this ghastly pandemic. I hope that all Members will be working positively in the interests of all their constituents to do that.

Economy Update

Greg Smith Excerpts

Thursday 5th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Rishi Sunak]

I am glad that over 10,000 of the hon. Lady’s constituents have had their jobs supported by the furlough scheme the UK Government have provided. I am also glad that the Welsh Government will now have received £5 billion in up-front funding guarantees for Barnett—£600 million more as a result of announcements today—and I am sure she can talk to the Welsh Government about how they plan to use that money to support her constituents.

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

I warmly welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement on measures that will both protect jobs and livelihoods through this lockdown and give businesses, as they plan for 2021 and beyond, real hope and confidence that there are better days ahead. With that in mind, does he agree with me and the Bank of England, with its forecasts this morning showing that economic activity in the UK is being supported by our substantial fiscal and monetary policy action, and its assessment that the extended coronavirus job retention scheme will mitigate significantly the impact of weaker economic activity in the labour market?

[Rishi Sunak]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is important for monetary and fiscal policy to be co-ordinated well, as he says, and I am glad that we are achieving that. It is also good to see the Bank of England recognising, as the IMF and the Office for Budget Responsibility have also highlighted, that our interventions in the labour market—our furlough scheme and other measures—have succeeded in suppressing the rise of unemployment. That will remain a single overriding goal: to keep people in work.

Treasury

Greg Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 29th September 2020 Ministerial Corrections

The following is an extract from the Economic Update statement on 17 March 2020.

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

I warmly welcome the enormous package of measures outlined by the Chancellor. This morning, I spoke to Energy Generator Hire in Kimble Wick in my constituency, which has lost most of its order book and is uncertain about the future. Can he confirm whether event hire companies are included in the envelope of leisure and hospitality?

[Rishi Sunak]

Those that have business properties will be eligible both for the relief and the grant, which will cover a significant number of events companies that have premises. Obviously, if they do not have premises, they will not qualify for business rates relief, but should be eligible for some of the other measures that I have outlined today.

[Official Report, 17 March 2020, Vol. 673, c. 964.]

Letter of correction from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the right hon. Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Rishi Sunak):

An error has been identified in the answer I gave to my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith).

The correct answer should have been:

Support for Self-employed and Freelance Workers

Greg Smith Excerpts

Thursday 17th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

For the sake of transparency, I refer hon. Members to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. At the point when I was elected to this House, I was still self-employed and, with a bit of cross-over to complete a couple of projects, I remained so before I completely ceased trading much earlier this year.

As someone who was self-employed for 15 years, I come to this debate understanding what self-employed people go through and the risks they take, often putting their own homes on the line in order to build a business. Most importantly, I speak in this debate because there are some 12,000 people registered as self-employed in my constituency of Buckingham.

The self-employed and those who take the risk to start their own business will always have my absolute respect and admiration. They are the wealth creators, not just for themselves but for the supply chains and services they use to go about their trade or profession. They are the vital disrupters who propel competition and innovate. Those who take this worthy entrepreneurial path do so, as I have mentioned, at serious personal risk: their own homes are on the line. It is because of that very risk that when crisis or disaster strikes, such as we have seen with coronavirus, they are left the most vulnerable if their trade cannot continue through no fault of their own.

I want to put on record my absolute thanks and gratitude to the Government for making available a support package that has supported 4,300 self-employed people in my constituency, receiving grants worth a total of £14.5 million. It must be acknowledged that this Government’s covid support scheme for the self-employed has been among the most generous in the world. However, like so many other hon. and right hon. Members, I have heard far too many stories of those who have fallen through the gaps.

Each and every freelancer, contractor, self-employed businessman or woman who has come to my surgeries or written to me has a different story to tell, and that is important because it speaks to the diversity and vibrancy of entrepreneurialism and how it works and thrives. Not everybody fits into the sort of box that I fear HMRC officials would deeply love them to neatly sit in. Our challenge is how we make up for those losses if we are to come together as a country and bounce back.

I have argued in the past and written to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and my other hon. and right hon. Friends in the Treasury calling for a support package. However, if such a retrospective package cannot be delivered, I urge my hon. Friend the Exchequer Secretary and the whole Treasury team, as they look to the upcoming Budget, to look at ways in which we can stimulate the self-employed sector and ensure that we are recognising them in the tax system, including the risks they take and the costs they incur. For example, the value of every invoice is not necessarily profit—there is cost in there that needs to be taken into account—and dividends are a legal and legitimate way in which people have paid themselves, on the advice of their accountants, for many decades.

Let us find a way to support all our self-employed, freelancers and owner directors of limited companies, and give them the stimulus to grow our economy.

Stamp Duty Land Tax (Temporary Relief) Bill

Greg Smith Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 13th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

It is always a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley South (Mike Wood). I fully agree with his comments.

This House has in recent months been required very necessarily to pass legislation to restrict our freedoms in order to defeat the virus, so it is an absolute pleasure to speak in support of an emergency measure that expands freedom. There is no more important asset to any individual or family in this country than the roof over their heads. The ability, under the provisions of the Bill, to purchase a home worth up to £500,000 without the burden of any stamp duty at all will not only support our economic bounce-back but, more importantly, bring the dream of home ownership a step closer for thousands of first-time buyers, give those who may be downsizing the confidence that they will not unnecessarily lose thousands of their precious savings, and enable growing families to move up the ladder.

This morning, I spoke to estate agents in my constituency —including Brian Russell of Russell & Butler in the town of Buckingham—and the news of the temporary stamp duty cut has been warmly received, with massive interest from buyers and sellers over the past few days. With 75% of the properties currently on that particular estate agent’s books being under £500,000, it goes without saying just how significant this tax cut is locally in Buckinghamshire.

Last Friday, I was pleased to visit Barratt Homes and David Wilson Homes at their development at Kingsbrook near Broughton in my constituency to see the measures that they have put into place to ensure that house building continues at pace in a covid-secure way. Their sales team reported that they are seeing people coming back through the doors again, enthused by the stamp duty holiday.

House of Commons Library data shows that across my constituency the median value of house prices last September was £395,000, albeit with some significant variance in different parts of the constituency, with homes around Worminghall, Long Crendon and Cuddington having the highest median value of £575,000 and the median in Buckingham north at £287,500. That says to me that no matter where people want to live and move across the 335 square miles of the beautiful Buckingham constituency, the Bill is worth many thousands of pounds, if not tens of thousands of pounds, to potential buyers. As many Members have said, if people are buying homes and keeping that market buoyant, that can only be good news for the economy as a whole—for the three quarters of a million jobs supported by the house building sector alone, not to mention our estate agents, removal firms, decorators, plumbers, kitchen fitters, landscapers and the wide array of retailers and suppliers that benefit most from people moving home, from furniture makers such as Ercol and Hypnos beds in Princes Risborough in the south of my constituency, to interior companies such as Secret Messages Interiors in Buckingham or Mood Home and Lifestyle in Winslow, which I visited recently. Even the lawyers—even the lawyers, Madam Deputy Speaker—benefit.

The economic chain set off by house building cannot be stated often enough. However, stamp duty changes alone may not complete the picture. The estate agents I have spoken to over the past few days have advised me that there are other factors hampering the full recovery of the housing market, particularly for first-time buyers, the most significant of those being a banking sector that is making it harder to borrow. While mortgage lending clearly falls outside the scope of the Bill, in order to achieve the aim of the Bill, it is vital that the banking sector and lenders are listening and that they get behind what the Government are trying to do—a point that my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) made in his intervention.

There are no 95% loan-to-value mortgages available for first-time buyers today. Only three lenders even offer 90% loan-to-value mortgages, so the majority of first-time buyers face the daunting prospect of raising at least a 15% deposit. That is £75,000 for a £500,000 four-bedroom home in Steeple Claydon or £52,500 on a £350,000 three-bedroom cottage in Tingewick. The stamp duty reduction on those two examples for first-time buyers is a massive boost, saving £10,000 in the case of the £500,000 home and £2,500 in the case of the £350,000 home. It undoubtedly closes the gap, but the wider point is that we are still talking about enormous sums of money—years and years of savings and sacrifice. To boost the market further, the banks must start to be more realistic about permitting 90% and 95% loan-to-value mortgages once more, to truly open up the market.

Most property transactions currently take an average of 16 weeks, which is much longer than it needs to be. We are only 38 weeks from the end of this temporary stamp duty cut, so time is of the essence to make the most of it. If any accompanying deregulation to speed up transactions can be brought forward, that will only help many more thousands of aspiring homeowners and movers.

In conclusion, this Bill is enormously welcome. It is bold in its aim of boosting our housing market and supporting people to achieve home ownership. I will be voting for it with great enthusiasm, but at the same time, I encourage my right hon. Friends on the Treasury Bench to seriously consider other measures that we could bring forward to make it even stronger. Who knows? Perhaps this tax-cutting pilot, once proved so successful, could become a more permanent feature of the housing market.

The Economy

Greg Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper).  It is rare for a Conservative to agree with a Liberal Democrat on much, but I agree with her on pubs. Even before covid, too many of our pubs were shutting down, particularly in village communities and small towns, with the Bell at Bierton and the George and Dragon in Princes Risborough in my constituency being two examples. I hope that all our local pubs will take part in the “eat out to help out scheme” and that we will all encourage our constituents to use village pubs and town pubs, as well as local shops and businesses. Now that they have reopened, it is crunch time, and if we want them to have a prosperous future, it is vital that we all support them.

I very much welcome the announcements made by the Chancellor today. This is yet another set of unprecedented measures to support our economy, retaining jobs and creating new ones, while ensuring that there are opportunities for young people in particular to enter the workplace and learn the skills they need. It is vital that we get our economy moving again at speed and, as the Chancellor said, return our public finances to a sustainable footing. Jobs are critical to both those outcomes, for the financial security of individuals and families and the flow of revenue into the Treasury. As the Chancellor prepares for the autumn Budget, I urge him to ensure that we keep taxes low on both individuals and businesses, because no high-tax economy has ever successfully come out of a financial crisis.

I have one particular ask for my constituency. We are lucky to have two key hubs of technological innovators that are already creating the jobs of the future. They are part of the Aylesbury Vale enterprise zone, and the sites at Westcott and Silverstone Park are critical for our continued economic growth. It is because of their enterprise zone status that they have been so successful and instrumental in attracting inward investment, but that status is due to expire in March 2021. As businesses consider whether to invest, it would be life-changing for that enterprise zone status and tax relief period to be extended by at least a year, or perhaps through to 2024, to ensure that they can be part of the future prosperity of Buckinghamshire and the wider UK economy.

Economic Update

Greg Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Rishi Sunak]

I believe our approach represents a sensible, coherent, co-ordinated and comprehensive way to tackle the problem. We have a range of targeted measures, each of which will make a significant difference to those on the ground, but as I said, we stand ready to do more and are indeed actively doing extra things.

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

I warmly welcome the enormous package of measures outlined by the Chancellor. This morning, I spoke to Energy Generator Hire in Kimble Wick in my constituency, which has lost most of its order book and is uncertain about the future. Can he confirm whether event hire companies are included in the envelope of leisure and hospitality?

[Rishi Sunak]

Those that have business properties will be eligible both for the relief and the grant, which will cover a significant number of events companies that have premises. Obviously, if they do not have premises, they will not qualify for business rates relief, but should be eligible for some of the other measures that I have outlined today.[Official Report, 29 September 2020, Vol. 681, c. 4MC.]