Finance (No. 2) Bill

Helen Whately Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 11th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Peter Dowd]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. The Government have reached the stage where they blame anyone they can. The gaffe-prone Chancellor has blamed disabled people for bringing down the productivity rate. He is so out of touch that such comments are water off a duck’s back to him.

As the Minister said, this is the third Finance Bill of the year. All three of them have failed to address the challenge that our economy faces.

[Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman referred to low wages, but he knows that the Finance Bill contains measures to raise the national minimum wage, so we are addressing that. He seems to be reluctant to answer people’s questions, so I want to bring him back to some that he was asked a few moments ago. My hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Leo Docherty) asked him a simple question about the shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the hon. Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) asked him a clear question about the cost of Labour’s proposals. The answer is not written down anywhere, so may I ask—this is the 24th time—about the amount and cost of borrowing that would result from Labour’s tax proposals?

[Peter Dowd]

The hon. Member for Aldershot (Leo Docherty) might not like the answer that I gave to his question, but I have referred him to the documentation. If the hon. Lady is incapable of going to the internet and looking up the facts and figures, it is not for me to do that for her. The bottom line is that there is nothing in the Bill for public sector workers, who head into the new year with their wages continuing to fall and the cap sticking.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes),although I could not help but notice that her speech was almost entirely about spending, with almost nothing about raising money for that spending. The Finance Bill is about raising revenue.

[Liz McInnes]

If the £10 billion was spent on Crossrail for the north, it would bring revenues of £85 billion. I have talked about spending and raising money.

[Helen Whately]

I appreciate the hon. Lady’s point, but I still think that she very much spoke about spending and not about the content of this Finance Bill.

Our job in this House is to make difficult decisions not just on what we spend money on but on how we raise that money—who we tax and what we tax, when we are reluctant to tax people and would much rather they had the money in their pockets to spend themselves. Our aim is to make things better for our constituents, young or old and those in between. It is not our job to make promises that cannot be kept, to write cheques that we cannot cash, and just to say things that sound nice, like massive amounts of spending, but might turn out to have nasty consequences like high unemployment. Labour Members may tell us differently, but spending that we cannot afford is not the moral high ground—it is the moral low ground.

This Finance Bill builds on the tough decisions of the Governments led by Conservative Prime Ministers over the past seven years who have reduced the deficit by 75%, while as of next year debt will fall as a share of GDP. Let us not throw that all away, as Labour Members would, with uncosted proposals and unquantified borrowing. As we heard earlier, they could not answer our questions on how much their borrowing would cost.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

Twenty-three times.

[Helen Whately]

I think it was at least 25 times that Labour Members were asked, and still no answer other than “See if you can look it up for yourself.” Why it could not be said at the Dispatch Box, I do not know, but I fear that they are inevitably planning to pile up debt for future generations.

I welcome three things in particular. First, there is the Government’s commitment to help people on low wages. The continued increase in the personal allowance is taking people out of tax and enabling them to keep more of what they earn to spend as they need to. Alongside that, the minimum wage is rising, but at a rate that is manageable for businesses so that they do not have to lay people off in order to pay it. Policies in the Budget to increase the supply of houses should bring down rents, which, we acknowledge, have been going up far too fast. In this Bill, there is a stamp duty cut for first-time buyers to bring buying a home within reach of more families—a particular challenge for my constituency in the south-east. As Shepherd Neame brewery is the largest employer in my constituency, I should mention the very welcome freeze on beer duty, which will be good for it and good for beer drinkers across the country.

Secondly, I welcome the actions on tax avoidance and evasion to make sure that we collect more, if not all, of the tax owed. That builds on the Government’s track record in this area, as the Financial Secretary to the Treasury pointed out. Particularly in the context of my constituency, I welcome plans to cut down on online VAT evasion, with the advantages that gives to online businesses in paying VAT, because I want us to achieve a more level playing field between online businesses and those with premises such as our high street shops. Regarding the policy on landfill tax, in my area we have an ongoing problem with rogue land fillers who start off in line with the law and seem to end up not in line with it.

Thirdly, I welcome the incredibly important commitment to addressing our productivity challenge. This has been acknowledged by this Government many times—it is not suddenly news. In fact, the measures in the Budget and the Finance Bill are the product of a huge amount of work looking at how we can improve productivity—a long-running problem in this country. It is vital that we raise productivity because that means that people get more money for every hour that they work. That is the key to improving living standards and funding the public services that we want, particularly with NHS costs going up as people need and want more care. There are many factors underlying our productivity challenge. Skills are a challenge for us. There is an issue with companies investing in workers, and workers investing in themselves. It is, to some extent, a cultural challenge. One venture capital investor told me that the key difference that he notices between British and American start-ups is that it is common to see in the business plan of American start-ups investment in training for themselves as the founders of the business. He rarely sees that in British start-up companies. That is, to some extent, a cultural challenge; we do not see investing in ourselves and our skills as part of life.

We know that we lag behind other countries in the use of technology and investment in automation. One specific example is our robot density. In Japan, there are 305 robots per 10,000 employees. In Germany the figure is 301 and in the Netherlands it is 120, but in the UK it is just 71. That is just one example of where we lag behind in investment in technology and automation. We have to drive up investment in those areas, as the Finance Bill does. Such investment cannot just come from Government spending more; we have to stimulate private investment in those areas, as my hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse) said eloquently. We have to mobilise private capital through incentives such as the EIS, which really works. I welcome the increases in that area, which will help to ensure that more businesses start and grow in this country, to provide the jobs and the higher wages that our constituents want.

There are no easy answers; what matters is getting the right answers. We need to help people on the lowest wages to keep more of what they earn, get a fair contribution from high earners and global businesses, build a more productive economy and invest in skills and technology. We want people to have higher wages in the jobs of the future so that they can live as they aspire to.