Oil and Gas Producers: Windfall Tax

Imran Hussain Excerpts

Tuesday 1st February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Imran Hussain (Bradford East) (Lab)]

Not once in the Minister’s response did he talk about those ordinary people that are having to choose between heating and eating. That is the real debate. Does the hon. Gentleman agree?

[Stephen Flynn]

Yes, absolutely I agree. Over a number of months, irrespective of the challenges that families are facing, this Conservative Government have consistently not come forward with any new support. The price cap increase is imminent, yet there is still nothing on the table for families up and down the country. That needs to end.

SNP Members do not have a monopoly of knowledge of how to solve those problems, but we have consistently put forward suggestions to the Government, some of which, I think, would gain the support of many of their own Back Benchers. The situation in relation to VAT has been talked about at great length. I see Conservative Members nodding. The deplorable decision to take £20 away from those on universal credit could be reversed—I think we would probably get significant agreement on that as well. The UK Government could match the Scottish Government by introducing a £20 child payment to assist those in the most difficult situations. We are putting forward these proposals to try to be constructive, but unfortunately the Government are not responding in any way, shape or form.

The Government will say, “How do we pay for new measures to support people?” The Labour party has come forward with its proposal, which I will come to in due course. I sometimes struggle in this place with this argument about where the money is going to come from. We have just had a debate about £4 billion that has been squaffed away to fraudsters. This afternoon we have seen a release from the Department of Health saying that there has been a loss of £8.3 billion in the value of PPE that has been purchased. There is going to be £3 billion of additional income to the Treasury, notwithstanding the windfall tax, from the North sea oil and gas sector. They can find half a million pounds to fly the Foreign Secretary to Australia. Of course—this is also true of the Labour party—they can always find tens if not hundreds of millions of pounds for nuclear weapons on the Clyde. So I will not take any lessons from them about where the money is going to come from. In relation to the specific proposal for a windfall tax put forward by the Labour party, what was missing from the contribution of the shadow Secretary of State and the Minister himself was the workers. What impact would it have on the workers?

The shadow Secretary of State rightly, as he sees it, challenged the notion that the money that oil and gas companies are receiving is going directly into investment in renewable technologies and the pathway to net zero. He made that argument with a great deal of passion, but he failed to recognise that the last time the UK Government implemented a windfall tax, 10 years or so ago, investment in the North sea oil and gas sector plummeted. It fell off a cliff; in fact, it has never got back to where it was.

If that happens again, what does it mean? It means that my constituents will lose their jobs. Some 35,000 jobs have gone in the past couple of years alone. The price of oil was barely scraping zero last year, yet the Opposition come forward to tell us that this tax is the right thing to do, notwithstanding any concerns about the impact it might have on investment in the North sea.

--- Later in debate ---

[Imran Hussain (Bradford East) (Lab)]

While the Prime Minister, the Government and Tory MPs have spent the past several months arguing among themselves about the untenable future of the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), my constituents have been on the blunt end of rising fuel prices, mounting food costs and soaring energy bills, which have pushed already struggling household finances to the brink and created a grave cost of living crisis for many families across the Bradford district. I remind the Minister that that is the central part of the debate. Let me be clear, however, that the cost of living crisis, which means that many families in Bradford need to choose between heating and eating, is no accident. It is the direct result of a decade of this Conservative Government’s incompetence and complete indifference to the lives of ordinary people in places such as Bradford, and it is the direct result of their ideologically driven austerity cuts targeted at some of society’s most vulnerable. It means that in places such as Bradford, nearly half of all children continue to live in poverty, working families continue to be forced to use food banks and destitution continues to spread like a cancer.

The cost of living crisis is not of the making of my constituents in Bradford or, indeed, of the constituents of any Member in this House, but they are the ones literally having to pay the price. Now this Government’s failures to get a grip on soaring energy bills mean a further attack on the most vulnerable, as the needs of greedy energy companies and their profits are put before the needs of our constituents. That is frankly scandalous, and people struggling to make ends meet in Bradford and across the country deserve much better. They deserve better than a Conservative Government who delay taking action on this cost of living crisis to spend time trying to save their doomed Prime Minister. We have to be clear: when people are struggling to put food on the table, to heat their homes and to keep a roof over their head, it is not the time for dithering or for political games; it is the time for leadership and immediate action—something that is lacking from those on the Government Benches.

[Jonathan Edwards]

Does the hon. Member agree that there is an incentive for the Government to act, because people living in cold homes are far more likely to get ill with respiratory diseases? That then leads to a huge hit on health budgets and social care budgets. It is a false prophecy to let market forces rip. We have to act quickly and we have to act now.

[Imran Hussain]

I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman, but the reality remains, as I stated earlier, that this tragedy has not just started now. The last decade under this Government has seen some of the biggest ideological austerity cuts in places such as my constituency in Bradford and in many other places across the country. The reality remains that it is ideological, and the Government know the impact. That is the worst thing: they know the impact of what they do.

Not once in the Minister’s speech did he talk about the impact on ordinary people up and down the country. He could not bring himself to talk about the fact that today, children in our constituencies will go hungry. He could not bring himself to discuss the fact that many people go days on end without a hot meal. He could not bring the words to his mouth to say that destitution is now rife in our country, or that we now have international reports that say that we—the fifth largest economy in the world—are not providing for the public. He does not mention any of that. I am not sure he was in the right debate. He is a new Minister, so perhaps he was in the wrong debate, and I forgive him if so.

Those things are why, as the shadow Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) stated clearly, a Labour Government would scrap VAT on domestic energy bills, expand and increase the warm home discount, and impose a windfall tax on greedy energy companies that are taking people for a ride.

The reality is that, even as people in Bradford continue to suffer and even as the plan set out by the Opposition stares them in the face, the Government have no answers, no solution and no offer for my constituents. Frankly, it seems that they could not care less if the most vulnerable places in the country, such as Bradford, are plunged into further poverty and deprivation. I assure them that the longer they take people in Bradford and across the country for fools and the longer they delay in taking the action that ordinary people need to save them from the cost of living crisis, the more that those people will repay them with interest in the ballot box at the next election.