Duties of Customs

Debate between Ian Murray and Stella Creasy

Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Monday 20th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Ian Murray]

I anticipated that intervention, although not quite so early in my speech. I return the hon. Gentleman’s compliments—he is one of the nicest gentlemen in this House. The Labour party’s position on the customs union is that we want the UK to have tariff-free access to the European Union throughout the transition period, with the added option of the UK staying in the customs union. That is the position of our Front-Bench team. It is perfectly clear and chimes perfectly well with amendments (e) and (f).

I am disappointed that the amendments in the name of the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) were not selected. She has done a lot of work to bring the Ways and Means motion to the House, and I think the arguments advanced reflect the fact that we both want our country to stay in the single market and the customs union, not for ideological reasons, but because we know that the businesses of Aberdeen North and Aberdeen South require us to stay. It is impossible to suggest that the United Kingdom should have exactly the same benefits of the single market and the customs union, with a frictionless border and tariff-free access, but not keep the customs union and the single market on the table. It makes no sense.

[Stella Creasy]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. Often it is said that sometimes we just need to simplify: if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it is a duck. If everything the Government are saying they want looks like and sounds like the customs union and single market, why are we wasting time debating other things?

[Ian Murray]

I am tempted to say that is because they are all quackers, but I am sure that would not go down well and I gave up on the bad jokes some time ago. My hon. Friend is right: the Government are actually arguing for the single market and the customs union, but do not want either. That is why the Bill on the customs union, which will be published tomorrow, will show clearly that the Government are hell-bent in the negotiations with the EU to take us off a cliff edge. No deal is probably their preferred option, and that is what they are promoting in the Ways and Means motion.

Public Finances: Scotland

Debate between Ian Murray and Stella Creasy

Wednesday 3rd February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Ian Murray]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Without having the Scotland Bill on the statute book and available to be used from 1 April 2017, there will be obfuscation about what can go into party manifestos come May, and we will be having a constant debate about the constitution rather than about the transformation of Scotland. He is also right to suggest that this is not just about a fiscal framework for Scotland. It is important for these negotiations to run in parallel with the Scotland Bill, but they also have significant implications for the rest of the United Kingdom. The no detriment principle for Scotland works both ways; it is also a no detriment principle for the rest of the United Kingdom. That point is often lost in these discussions.

As I was saying, I have bemoaned from the very beginning the absence of transparency. It is simply unacceptable that the process of redrawing Scotland’s fiscal terrain is taking place behind closed doors. David Bell, the respected economist, has noted the secretive nature of these discussions. He said:

“These discussions are taking place behind closed doors with little information publically available about the options being considered and the effects of these options.”

Asked to offer his thoughts on these proceedings, Professor Muscatelli said:

“I will be honest, it is difficult for anybody on the outside to see what exactly the stumbling block is”

in these negotiations. Even the Chair of the Scottish Affairs Committee—this might be the second time we have agreed—said that the negotiations and the transparency at their heart are “not good enough”. I also warmly welcome the Scottish Affairs Committee’s in-depth inquiry on this issue, which it will publish soon.

I ask why both Governments refuse to publish papers and minutes, as requested. On 9 September, I wrote to the chairs of the Joint Exchequer Committee, John Swinney and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, with the perfectly reasonable request to publish papers and minutes from the meetings, but they refused to do so. I also tabled written and oral questions to ask that we be kept updated on the progress of the negotiations and that substantial details of the discussions be placed in the public domain, but, once again, my request was rejected. Both Governments said that they would not provide a “running commentary” on the negotiations, while providing the very same running commentary through the media. Meanwhile people in Scotland are very much in the dark. That has allowed politicians on both sides to seek to exploit the secrecy, rather than getting on with finalising the deal.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does that not also trouble my hon. Friend, because it goes back to the very principles of the Smith commission, pillar one of which explicitly said that one challenge faced in this new constitutional settlement was having much stronger, transparent parliamentary scrutiny of the work? It particularly identified the JEC. If we cannot get it right now, what hope do we have for the future?

[Ian Murray]

That is a timely intervention, because when everyone talks about making sure that the Smith agreement is delivered in spirit and in substance, they tend to forget the bits of the substance that it is inconvenient for them to remember, and that is one such bit. The JEC has not been transparent. One key plank of the Smith agreement was intergovernmental relations, and without that transparency we cannot see whether intergovernmental relations are actually working. One key thing about the whole devolution project, be it in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland or in the discussions about England, is to make sure that all the components of that devolved body of the United Kingdom can work together in partnership.

Let me compare these negotiations with the fiscal framework negotiations that sat alongside the Scotland Act 2012. I have here the minutes of the first meeting from that process, which took place on 27 September 2011, and they are a dusty tomb of information, giving details of who attended, points that were discussed, things that were agreed and things that were to come back to be agreed. By contrast, let me give a flavour of the communiqués from this year. The one relating to the 1 February meeting states:

“The Joint Exchequer Committee met in London today, chaired by John Swinney, Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Finance, Constitution and Economy. HM Treasury was represented by…Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

This was the eighth meeting of the JEC since the publication of the Smith Commission report…The Ministers continued their discussion…

Both Ministers agreed to meet next week”.

The minutes on the 21 January meeting again introduce who was at the meeting, with their very long titles. They then state:

“This was the seventh meeting of the JEC since the publication of the Smith Commission report. The Ministers continued their discussion on the indexation methodologies for the Block Grant Adjustments and also discussed the initial transfer of funding for new welfare powers….

Both Ministers agreed to meet again shortly”.

They go on, running to less than a third of a page—a couple of paragraphs of minutes. I am not sure that having no details and no substance is acceptable.

It is not acceptable because the Scottish Government have threatened to veto the Bill if it is “not fair to Scotland.” The problem is that we do not know what, in their opinion, or in the UK Government’s opinion, is a fair deal for Scotland and what that looks like. We do not know in what way the current detail on offer from the UK Government is deficient on that test of fairness. It would appear that the main stumbling block is on the method used for the future indexation of the block grant. Of the methods being considered, the Scottish Government now favour the per capita index deduction. People can go to the Library to find out what that is—I will not explain it at this juncture. [Hon. Members: “Go on!”] I can go through the formula if Members want, and give a prize if they get the answer at the end. Less than a year ago, however, the Deputy First Minister told the Scottish Parliament’s Finance Committee that he favoured the indexed deduction, which takes into account population growth. There is clearly some confusion over which method is best for Scotland, which is why transparency of discussions is incredibly important.

Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

Debate between Ian Murray and Stella Creasy

Wednesday 17th October 2012 Commons Chamber

[Ian Murray]

Let me make some progress, and then I will give way.

To start with the positives, I welcome new clause 8, which is derived from the report by Mr Justice Underhill and his esteemed team. We have always recognised the need to review the procedures of the employment tribunal system to make it work better for employees and employers, but with these proposals we have particular concerns about the increased use of deposit orders. We support the premise of deposit orders in deterring claims which may be unmeritorious, but we fear that their increased use, combined with the introduction of the fees regime, may restrict access to justice. This has the potential not only to restrict justice but to do so for the most vulnerable employees in the employment tribunal system. Will the Minister assess the impact of the changes on deposit orders? I appreciate her giving the commitment that if there were an impact she would return to the issue, but it is strange that these proposals have been introduced. Several of my hon. Friends have been asking about the evidence for doing so. Despite repeated pleas in Committee to produce a proper impact assessment on the insertion of fees into the process, that has not happened.

I welcome the provisions to allow for costs for lay representatives. We agree with Mr Justice Underhill when he said:

“We can see no reason why the claimant should not be able to recover those charges when he would have been able to if he had instructed a legal representative.”

We will not oppose these changes in new clause 8, as they have been properly evidenced, but I could not say that about the rest of part 2, where the Government have absolutely no evidence for any of their proposed changes. Indeed, their own impact assessments, and business surveys, show that there is little appetite for them in the business community. Businesses tell me and other Members that their main concerns are not employee regulations but lack of finance and the general state of the economy.

The reality is that the previous Labour Government created nearly 2 million jobs and 1 million businesses within the current system of employment rights. Mr Beecroft himself agreed, in effect, when he said in Committee that he had no empirical evidence but was basing these recommendations on experience and from talking to people in the pub. In Committee, we had a perfect 10 from Government Members in terms of anecdotes. I am sure that at one point we even heard a direct quote from the managing director of “Anecdotes R Us”. The evidence, particularly from the OECD, shows that the United Kingdom has the third most liberal employment rights regime in the western world.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that taking advice on employment rights from somebody who profits from legal loan sharks is perhaps not the right way forward when looking for effective guidelines and regulation?

[Ian Murray]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention. I think that people can make up their own minds about the ideology and ethos of the report.

Amendment 80 deals with fees and their impact on ACAS early conciliation. In Committee we pressed amendments to assist applicants and to ensure that ACAS was properly resourced. The amendment covers a similar concern that we have about the new deposit orders. We welcome the new role for compulsory early conciliation by ACAS, but we are concerned that the insertion of the fees system after the ACAS conciliation process will dilute the effectiveness of conciliation and put employees in the untenable position of having to settle their dispute or find the necessary £1,200 to take it beyond the ACAS system.

Ed Sweeney, the chair of ACAS—I have mentioned this already—said during his evidence to the Committee that

“we do not know whether charging for tribunals would have an adverse effect on either employers or employees…Will there be less, from an employer’s point of view, of engaging in conciliation”?––[Official Report, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Public Bill Committee, 19 June 2012; c. 68, Q146.]

The Minister herself has admitted that there could be an issue and will deal with that after the system is up and running. Despite being pressed time and again on this issue in Committee, no Minister has produced an impact assessment on the impact of ACAS conciliation when low-paid and vulnerable workers will have to find a fee to enter the employment tribunal system.

National Insurance Contributions Bill

Debate between Ian Murray and Stella Creasy

Thursday 13th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Ian Murray (Edinburgh South) (Lab)]

As was pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore), my constituency is at the top of the league in terms of public sector jobs, yet unemployment is less than half that in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Dr Creasy). Does that not highlight the discriminatory nature of the Government’s policy?

[Dr Creasy]

That is a very good point. I am talking about the public sector workers who are most at risk of redundancy. The people who live in my constituency may not do the same jobs as those who work in the public sector in Edinburgh. They are teaching assistants, nurses, and people working in inclusion units and Sure Start. They are losing their jobs because of the cuts that are being made in local and national Government. People such as civil servants—who knows, perhaps they include the admin assistants in the Minister’s offices—fear for their jobs. They are looking to the Government, who say that the private sector will pick up the pieces following the cuts in the public sector, and they are asking how that will happen. In my region, the answer is very unclear.

This policy could be part of the remedy, and that is the aim of the amendment. It asks, “How can we generate jobs? What are the motives that lead people to set up businesses and industries that generate jobs in the private sector?” Many of us share an interest in whether the private sector could generate jobs as part of the recovery. We think that the policy has failed that test, and needs to be amended. Excluding London and the south-east means excluding a key wealth-creating element of our national economy, and we feel that that is remiss.

I also think that the Government have been remiss in excluding the voluntary sector and charities, and in Committee I supported amendments seeking their inclusion. According to the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, if the voluntary sector could benefit from the change of policy on national insurance holidays, an extra 2,500 charities could be created. Perhaps even more could be created through the big society, given the interest in how the voluntary sector could work in public sector commissioning. Cruelly, however, they have been excluded. The questions “Who are the people who are generating jobs?” and “Where are the places where people who are losing their jobs in the public sector can best find employment in future years?” have not been answered; the test has not been passed.

I ask the Minister to consider amending the policy in the way we have suggested, not least on the basis of his own evidence. He will recall that, in Committee, I was particularly concerned about the way in which the Government had constructed the policy, and the evidence on which it was based. He himself has described it as an uncertain benefit, and his officials have admitted that they did not have much evidence on which to assess whether they could reach all the people whom they wanted to reach, or involve all the businesses that the Minister had hoped to involve. In the impact assessment, the Minister said that he hoped that the policy would help 400,000 businesses, but he has admitted today that only 1,500 have applied so far. In Committee, one of the officials suggested that the number of applications would increase at the remittance stage, but that is not job creation. The jobs would have already been created, and people would be applying retrospectively for remittances. That suggests a challenge to the status of the policy as a job creation measure.

According to the Minister’s own analysis, the inclusion of London and the south-east might well make possible the creation of an extra 300,000 businesses. Before he says that there is no extra money, let me suggest to him that the creation of those extra businesses might enable him to meet his target of 400,000 over the three years. He could then return to the House and reassure all of us who are concerned about the efficacy of the policy that it had succeeded in generating new business in the United Kingdom and forming a key part of our recovery. Let me also encourage him to consider the extra tax take that the Treasury would gain as a result of the creation of all those new businesses, as well as the fact that all the extra national insurance funds could be spent on the national health service or on pensions, as he desired. There are many benefits in considering how the Bill could be amended to include London and the south-east. Let us think about all the people who would be affected by the jobs that this would create, the money it would bring into our national Exchequer and, above all, the economic recovery it could help drive.

I therefore hope the Minister will accept the amendments and acknowledge that they have been tabled in good faith. They are motivated by a genuine desire to make sure this policy is effective. Whether or not we agree with the Government—and we certainly disagree with many of the changes they want to make—I hope the Minister will understand and share our concern that jobs must be the first priority of any British Government in the current economic climate.