Hilary Benn
Main Page: Hilary Benn (Labour - Leeds South)
Andrew Stunell
The hon. Lady is well aware that there are such things as negligence and avoidance of reality. We are all aware of such cases. I see quite a few examples in the House from time to time.
New clause 10 inserts into the Bill powers allowing Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to supply information for prescribed purposes relating to council tax to billing authorities in England and Wales and to local authorities in Scotland, and provides for offences relating to the misuse of that information. It is the matching part of the preceding clause, the one that gives local authorities the power to ask bodies for information. This clause allows HMRC to supply that information.
Data sharing will be an important way of maximising convenience and reducing complexity for claimants, while also helping to reduce administrative costs. It will reduce the need for individuals to have to provide the same information repeatedly to different public bodies and produce evidence about their situation to those bodies. Section 131 of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 provides for the sharing of information relating to social security benefits and welfare services with a qualifying person for prescribed purposes relating to welfare services or council tax. The two new clauses, together with that provision, will enable data held by the Department for Work and Pensions in relation to current benefits and, in future, to universal credit, to be provided to English and Welsh billing authorities and Scottish local authorities for the administration of local council tax reduction schemes.
Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)
I understand the point that the Minister is making about requiring organisations such as DWP to offer information relating to individuals, but section 14A(1)(b) refers to
“powers to require a person to enter into arrangements under which access is permitted to the person’s electronic records.”
I find it hard to see that that is to do with the Department for Work and Pensions. Can the hon. Gentleman assure the House that this does not relate to individual council tax payers and any electronic records that they have—for example, held on personal computers?
Andrew Stunell
I may wish to return to the right hon. Gentleman’s point later in the debate, if the opportunity arises. My understanding is that there is nothing in the provision that in any way takes the powers of public bodies beyond what they are currently able to do in pursuit of council tax benefit and alleged fraud and misuse of council tax benefit. As I understand it, these powers are absolutely parallel to the existing provisions. I am sure that I will have an opportunity to return to that point later in the debate if I have in any way misguided the House.
New clause 10 inserts paragraphs 15A and 15B into schedule 2 to the Local Government Finance Act 1992. Paragraph 15A(1) and (2) will allow Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to supply information held for the purposes of its functions to billing authorities in England, as well as to a person authorised to exercise any of an authority’s functions on its behalf.
Andrew Stunell
It would be interesting to hear the right hon. Gentleman tell the House how many of those 2,000 people received an income tax rebate as a result of the decisions taken by this Government. Indeed, I suspect that many of them will have been taken out of income tax altogether.
Andrew Stunell
At least the right hon. Gentleman acknowledges that we are giving with one hand. It is right for local authorities and local communities to take account of the circumstances they face, and I hope that the council in Rotherham will do precisely that.
Hilary Benn
I know that the Minister is an enthusiast, but those watching could be forgiven for thinking that the Bill was the answer to all the nation’s ills—at one count it was, with one thing and another, solving poverty and dealing with the deficit. Also, although I have a high regard for the Secretary of State, I am surprised that he did not make that speech, because after all, this is his flagship Bill. I know that we have a part-time Chancellor; I just hope that it is not proving contagious in the Cabinet. [Interruption.] I say that genuinely, as it would have been nice to hear from the Secretary of State, who has spoken only once on the Bill—on Second Reading. The House will recall that he claimed great things for the Bill, no doubt because the coalition agreement promised
“a radical devolution of power and greater financial autonomy to local government”.
The truth is, however, that as the Bill has progressed, it has failed to live up to that promise. I shall respond directly to the Minister’s point here.
As we were reminded earlier today, it pays to try to get these things right. I say that because, with one exception, those sitting on the Government Front Bench have form. People remember that the last time wonderful words were said about a reform of local government finance, it was called the poll tax and the consequences included riots on the streets. The people would not have it and the Prime Minister lost her job. The Secretary of State argued that the current system gives central Government too much power and that he wanted to change that. We would take him at face value if that is what the Bill did, but it does not.
What the Bill does and what the Secretary of State has created is a system that gives all the power to himself—the power to determine the central top-slice; the power to set the baseline; and the power to decide the extent of the tariff for the top-up and when the safety-net should kick in. It is a whole list of powers. If this really is localism—the argument that the Minister tried to advance—why are there all these central powers? It does not sound much like localisation to me, and it does not feel much like that to local government.
That matters because when local authorities look at the way in which this Government have chosen to exercise the powers they already have, particularly in relation to spending, they have found, as we know, a pattern of cuts that is utterly unfair and the very opposite of “We are all in this together”. It also matters because, as the Minister will know, although he did not refer to it, one of the real concerns about the Bill that we have heard from colleagues in local government is that it will end up accentuating the gap between more prosperous and less well-off local authorities. That is a real concern. The Government’s only reply has been to say, “Don’t worry about it, because at least you will not be worse off in year one.”
That is why the arrangements surrounding the safety net are so important. As the House knows, some authorities are very heavily dependent on the business rate income they get from a particular factory or a big employer. At the moment, it does not matter because it all goes into the central pot and is then divided and comes back, but under this Bill, it really will matter, and the consequences of losing that income—if the business were to close or relocate elsewhere, for instance—would be devastating. In those circumstances, what those local authorities want to know is whether the Government will be there to help. What we find when we look at the papers published last Thursday is that the safety net will kick in only when authorities meet a threshold for the decline in their business rate income, and we are advised that the threshold will be set between 7.5% and 10%. That is hardly reassuring, because it means that local authorities could lose a lot of money under this Bill before help arrives. To put it another way, councils are going to have to fall quite a long way before they hit the net.
The Bill was also supposed to be about trying to get rid of a complex system for funding local government—we heard the argument a few moments ago. Frankly, however, all the Bill does is to replace one version of complexity with, in the words of London Councils, another “fiendishly complex system”. If anything, on the basis of the documents produced last week, the Bill has grown even more complex during its passage through the House.
As for enabling local authorities to receive the benefits of business rate income and its growth, what do we discover? We discover that the Government like the idea of business rate income growth so much that they are going to take half of it for themselves. That is what was announced last week. It is no wonder that the Local Government Association has described this as a “tax on local authorities”, which it strongly opposes. What is more, the Government seem to intend that set-aside will continue beyond 2015. Why? Because they want to be able to continue to impose cuts on local government after the end of the current spending review period. Having heard the Minister’s argument that this was the be-all and end-all of localism, the Local Government Association said that it was
“not a localising policy and goes against the Government's stated commitment to localism.”
That deals with the first part of the Bill. What about council tax benefit? Rank inconsistency is plain for all to see. Only a few weeks ago, the Secretary of State was touring the country denouncing those who were planning a modest increase in council tax, including a number of Tory-controlled authorities. He said that he was
“determined to protect hard-working families”,
but here we have a Bill that will end up doing exactly what he was denouncing. We have legislation that will, from next year, impose council tax increases on many unsuspecting people. And whom has the Secretary of State chosen as his target for those higher council tax bills? In keeping with the Government’s philosophy, he has chosen people on low incomes—people who do not have a lot of money—because that is why they get council tax benefit in the first place; and on that, he is strangely silent.
As if to flaunt just how out of touch they are, the Government had the nerve to say, in one of the documents published last week, that the aims of the council tax benefit cut included “reducing poverty”. This is a strange way of going about it. The Government are saying to people with not a lot of money, “You know what? We are going to cut your income to make you work harder”, which is the precise opposite of the policy that they have pursued when it comes to millionaires and the tax cut that was announced in the Budget. They also claim that they do not want to affect work incentives, but, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr Raynsford) pointed out, that is nonsense.
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) for the forensic analysis to which she has subjected the Bill during its passage through this House. I am sure that her cogent arguments will be considered very carefully by those in the other place. I also pay tribute to other colleagues, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich—who chairs the Select Committee—and my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey).
I am genuinely surprised that so few coalition Back Benchers have twigged what is going on in the Bill in relation to council tax. They do not seem to know what they are about to troop through the Lobbies to vote for. As we pointed out on Second Reading, and as has been said today, cutting council tax benefit by 10% while—rightly—protecting pensioners means an average 16% cut for everyone else, but the impact will not be felt evenly.
In one of the other documents that were published last week, the Government said, “We considered whether we should even things out to take account of the different proportions of pensioners in different local authority areas, but we rejected the idea.” As I have said, the impact will not be felt evenly, because some areas contain much higher percentages of pensioners than others. The list is like a roll call of seats represented by Government Members, but it seems that Government Members—with, I think, only two honourable exceptions during Second Reading and Committee—are either completely unaware that their constituents who are currently receiving council tax benefit will face higher council tax bills than elsewhere, because their areas contain a higher proportion of protected pensioners than others, or are not too bothered about it.
Let me say this, very gently, to Back-Bench members of the coalition parties. When their constituents turn up at their surgeries in a year’s time, waving a bit of paper and saying, “Why have you done this to me?”, they will be very, very bothered about what the Bill actually does. Indeed, all our constituents are likely to face additional cuts, because the forecast baseline for council tax benefit expenditure that is being used for the Bill is expected, miraculously—from my point of view and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North—to fall. Do Members really believe that demand for council tax benefit will decline in the next two years, in the light of the current state of the economy and the fact that we are now back in recession thanks to the Chancellor’s economic policy?
When we come to the default scheme to be applied if local authorities do not come up with their own scheme, what do we find? We find that the Government’s courage fails completely in following through the 10% reduction, because the default scheme in effect replicates the current scheme. Instead of Ministers having the courage of their convictions and applying the 10% cut across the board, they have ducked that, and are expecting everyone else to show the courage they themselves have refused to demonstrate.
In conclusion, whichever way we look at it, this part of the Bill is unfair and wrong, and no amount of trying to describe it as something else is going to alter what the changes in council tax benefit will do to our constituents on low incomes who need that support. We urge other Members to join us and vote against the Bill on Third Reading because it fails to meet the test on business rates that the Secretary of State set out when moving it on Second Reading and, as we have discovered in our discussions, it is even harsher in respect of cutting council tax benefit than appeared to be the case at first sight. In both those respects, the Bill reminds us of what this coalition Government are all about: they are unfair, out of touch and do not work—and nor, I fear, will the Bill.