Finance (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Julie Hilling

Tuesday 1st April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Julie Hilling]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I will come on to some of the details in just a moment.

Before they say that Labour should have done more to regulate the banks, Government Members must show some humility. The Conservatives wanted less regulation. Yes, Labour responded by boosting public spending and borrowing to offset the catastrophic collapse in private sector spending, and the £90 billion spent on the bank bailout plunged the public sector into record annual deficit, but what would they have done? Would they have allowed the banks to collapse and allowed us to go into a depression worse than that in the 1930s? Would they have allowed thousands, if not millions, to lose their houses, their pensions and their jobs? Yes, we bailed out the banks, we cut VAT and income tax and we gave 150,000 businesses more time to pay their tax bills. We put in place measures that helped 300,000 people stay in their homes and we set out how we would halve the deficit over four years once the recovery was in place.

Do Conservative Members agree with those who were on their Front Bench at that time? They opposed the fiscal stimulus and the measures to support the economy and families. They pushed for the deregulation of the mortgage market even as the crisis began and they voted against the Bill that became the Banking (Special Provisions) Act 2008, which would have let Northern Rock fail. Where would families and businesses be now if the Tories had got their way then?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

It is highly questionable that Northern Rock needed to fail if the Bank of England had been willing to act as a classic lender of last resort when there was a liquidity problem rather than a solvency problem.

[Julie Hilling]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. At that time our Government needed to act to bail out those banks. He says that the Government need not have acted if the Bank of England had, but the reality is that the Government acted and needed to do so.

It has been claimed that before the global collapse we were spending too much, so why did the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr Cameron) pledge in 2007 to match Labour’s spending plan for further three years—to match our spending on investment, jobs and growth?

The level of debt under the Labour Government before the banking crisis was lower than that we inherited from the Tories in 1997. We brought the deficit down, we brought borrowing down and, far from failing to fix the roof when the sun was shining, we invested in repairing the terrible state of our public services. People were dying on hospital trolleys before they were seen, others were waiting a year to get on the waiting list before waiting another year to have their operations, schools were crumbling, the railways were decaying and youth services were disappearing. We repaired all that, and then the bankers behaved totally irresponsibly and brought down the world economy.

Yes, there was a failure by every Government right across the world to recognise the seeds of the banking crisis, but it was not caused by Labour’s overspending, and it was not caused by Labour’s high borrowing or high debt, because none of those things was going on before the banking crisis. If we had not dealt with the crisis as we did, the whole economic and banking system in Britain would have collapsed. If our Prime Minister at the time had not worked with other world leaders to bail out banks and bring forward investment, the world would have been plunged into a depression beyond belief.

We need honesty from Government Members to acknowledge the truth. The Government should acknowledge that the national debt has doubled on their watch to £1,400 billion. They should accept that wages are down by £1,600 a year since May 2010, and that people will be worse off in 2015 than they were in 2010. The Government should acknowledge that they have introduced 24 tax rises, that energy bills are up by almost £300 since the election, and that even though they inherited a growing economy, they squashed that growth, had three years of flatlining and have overseen the slowest recovery for 100 years.

The Government like to talk proudly about the number of jobs that they claim have been created in the private sector, so I asked them some questions about those jobs. I asked how many of the new jobs created lasted more than 12 months, but they could not tell me because they do not collect those statistics. So I asked them

“how many new jobs created in the private sector in the last 12 months were (a) unpaid workfare or internships, (b) through zero-hour contracts, (c) part-time, (d) part-time working 16 hours or less per week, (e) part-time working eight hours or less per week, (g) paid at the level of the minimum wage and (h) jobs transferred from public sector organisations.”

What a surprise. I was told:

“Information regarding the number of jobs created is not available. As an alternative, estimates relating to the net change in the number of people in employment in the private sector have been provided from the Labour Force Survey (LFS).”—[Official Report, 11 November 2013; Vol. 570, c. 460-61W.]

Estimates showed that more than a third of the new jobs that have been created are part-time, and that a third of those are under 16 hours. However, the Government do not collect the figures for those people who are on unpaid Government schemes or internships, even though those are included in the number of new jobs created. They cannot tell with any accuracy the number of people on zero-hours contracts or the number on the minimum wage. They also cannot tell me how many of the jobs now designated as being in the private sector are simply jobs transferred from the public sector, even though we know there are a large number of such jobs. The proud boast that over a million new jobs have been created is based on sand. We do not know how many are really new jobs, how many are unpaid, how many are low-paid, how many are zero-hours or how many are temporary. The Government like to think that any job is better than unemployment—a job at any price—but that is causing untold misery to many.

Let me tell the House a story of a man who went to the Allerton food bank. He was absolutely made up that he had got a job in Poundland. In week one, no work was offered; in week two, still no work offered; in week three, still no work offered. At this point he and his family were existing on boiled pasta because that was all they had in their household. Fortunately, somebody directed him to the food bank. People at the food bank helped him and spoke to Poundland, who said, “Well, we can’t finish him because he may get hours next week.” In the end he had to resign from his job and take the hit from the Department for Work and Pensions because he had resigned from a job—a job in which he was never given any hours to work. He had to resign so that he could feed his family.

Zero-hours contracts are a scourge on the unemployed, but instead of cracking down on them, the Government fail to collect statistics. Other sources estimate that a million people are on zero-hours contracts; a million people who do not know whether they can feed their families or pay their rents each week; a million people who cannot get a mortgage or a loan to buy a car; a million people who can make no plans for their future. It is like the bad old days when people had to queue up at the dock gates just to be picked for a day’s work. These workers are paid 40% less than those on permanent contracts, and 20% of them have said that they have had money docked or been penalised in some other way if they were unable to work when they were called for at a moment’s notice. Half the people have said that they have had shifts cancelled at the last minute. The Government should take Labour’s lead and regulate zero-hours contracts, not allow the exponential growth that has occurred under their watch.

Finance (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Julie Hilling

Thursday 18th April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

The coalition is, I am sure, united at the highest level, but that does not mean that Back Benchers do not sometimes disagree. My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol West (Stephen Williams) and I often discuss these matters, and we do not invariably agree on every aspect of them. The Lib Dems have their own particular policies, which they will no doubt put forward in an election campaign, but the coalition at large is committed to a single policy.

I want to come back to the amendment, which is about getting back to the 50p rate. We already have a situation in which the top 1% of taxpayers pay nearly 28% of the total income tax receipts—that is, £50 billion. If the rate of tax is put up to too high a level, people will change their behaviour to alter the amount of tax they pay. That is very straightforward, and they can do a number of things. Some people leave the country, so that their tax is paid overseas. Some work less hard, reducing their earnings to reduce their tax payments. Some use pension funds or legitimate forms of tax avoidance to minimise their income. That is all perfectly well known by those on the Opposition Front Bench, who are a fine and intelligent group of people, yet they try to make political points on the argument about fairness. Fairness seems to me to be about doing what is right.

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

It seems to me that the argument is not that we should reduce tax so that people will be kind enough to pay it; rather, we should be looking into closing down tax avoidance schemes. We should be presenting the moral case that everyone should be paying in according to their ability to pay, particularly in these difficult times.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

However much we tackle tax avoidance, if we set tax rates at so high a level that people decide not to work, no legislation can force them to work to earn more. Unless we want to be like the Russia of the 1980s, we cannot pass a law to prevent people from leaving the country to work elsewhere if the taxes are too high here.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

The hon. Lady almost makes my argument for me. In 1979, that hallowed year in which the great lady to whom she referred came to office, the highest rate of income tax was 98%, and the proportion of income tax revenues paid by the top 1% was about 10%. When the rate fell, the proportion paid by the top 1% went up, so more money came from the richest in society when rates were lower. Lower rates of taxation therefore resulted in the advantage of an increase in revenue for the Government and the ability to spend more on the services deemed necessary.

This argument was proved in 1979 when the rate went down from 98% to about 60% and again in 1988 when it went down from 60% to 40%. On both occasions, the amount of tax revenue increased because people were willing to work harder and people were attracted to work in this country—so the burden was, indeed, put on to the shoulders of those best able to bear it.

An argument is made about fairness. We say it is fairer to have a high rate of tax. We say that that is symbolically right—that we should have it so that people know they are doing something difficult and we are all in this together—but what is the symbolism of saying to people we will take less tax from them, and what is the symbolism of having lower revenue for the Government?

[Julie Hilling]

Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs says that in the one year when the 50% tax rate applied, revenues went up—the figure it is currently giving is £1 billion. It is therefore difficult to argue that we should get rid of this tax rate, especially as we do not yet have all the evidence. We are only beginning to get the evidence now, because people are paying that rate now.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

In fact, HMRC came out with figures showing the tax paid by the highest taxpayers declined; there was a loss in revenue of £6 billion, I think. I would prefer to take the actual figures that come in. I may be disloyal on this point—for which I hope those on the Treasury Bench will forgive me—but I think that forecasts from Her Majesty’s Treasury are absolutely useless. We do not want to go on economic forecasts; we want to follow facts, and the facts on the revenue that has historically come in make it clear that lower rates increase the tax take.

[Julie Hilling]

It is my understanding that, although tax takes went down in the first year when people could pre-pay and will definitely go down in this year when people will post-pay, they rose in the middle year, which is the one full year when the rate has applied, and for which people are now paying their taxes.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

The problem with that argument is that we have facts that show that the amount of revenue has gone down. Over a three-year period it has gone down very substantially, because the rate was high. The hon. Lady’s comments also serve to illustrate the following point on my behalf, for which I am grateful: when tax rates are raised, people change their behaviour so that the tax they pay is reduced. That is where the Laffer curve comes in. Income is reduced when tax rates are too high.