Hospitality Sector
Debate between Jamie Stone and Tim Farron(5 days, 12 hours ago)
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Tim Farron
I totally agree that we need to be really careful about piling extra costs, including the apprenticeship levy, on to businesses. I understand why the Government felt that they needed to make the national insurance rise, to increase the tax take to plug the hole that they inherited, whatever size it may be. But if economic activity is reduced, that reduces the tax yield. It is basic economics. Not only have the Government harmed our businesses in the lakes and the dales, and I am sure in Northern Ireland as well, but they have harmed the Exchequer’s take and damaged the economy in the process. The increased costs on our businesses are undoubtedly a major issue, as is the impact of a workforce that is too small for the job it needs to do in the lakes and the dales. Some 34% of Cumbrian tourism businesses say that their inability to recruit staff is undermining their viability.
Jamie Stone
My hon. Friend has an honourable and proud record of talking about affordable housing in his part of the United Kingdom. Without housing for workers, hospitality businesses are in real trouble. That must be taken very seriously indeed, and not just in the rural parts of the highlands. It is extremely difficult in many parts of the UK, including perhaps in the west country. Without housing, people will not come or, like the barman I spoke about in Achiltibuie, they will leave and not come back.
Tim Farron
I completely agree. Given that time is running out, I will restrict my remaining remarks to the topic that my hon. Friend referred to. I have one last stat: 66% of hospitality tourism businesses in the Lake district are operating below capacity because they cannot find enough staff. The demand is there, but they are not meeting it. What a waste of potential growth.
The staff are not available for a number of reasons. The first is that it is just not a very populated part of the world: 80% of the working-age population who live in the Lake district are already working in hospitality and tourism, so there is no great reservoir of staff. A lot of that is down to the collapse of the long-term private rented sector into Airbnbs and the absolute scourge of excessive second home ownership that runs through our communities. The Government have failed to tackle that issue. They had the opportunity to bring in a change of use for short-term lets and for second homes; they failed to do either, and that is shameful. They should do that right now. They should provide more affordable housing backed with more housing grant in communities such as ours and provide socially rented homes for local people, helping them to work in all the parts of our local industries, including hospitality and tourism.
The other thing that the Government ought to do is to recognise that communities such as mine need migrant labour. They should get on with agreeing and delivering the youth mobility scheme visa, to help our young people to travel and to bring in the people who underpin our tourism economy. My final ask is simply this: the Minister should listen to the British tourism and hospitality industry. It has so much to contribute, yet it seems so rarely to be listened to.
Sewage
Debate between Jamie Stone and Tim Farron(2 months, 1 week ago)
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Tim Farron
The hon. Member would, of course, be enormously welcome to visit the lakes and the dales. He makes a key point, which I will seek to address, about the injustice of people being paid huge bonuses for failure at the top of these organisations. That is also money leaving the system and the industry that could have been invested in putting some of this right.
I have talked about my patch, but colleagues across the House, from every party and from every corner of the United Kingdom, will have seen the data for their communities too, and they should rightly be outraged.
Jamie Stone
My hon. Friend talks, quite correctly, about a beautiful part of England. I, too, represent a very beautiful part of the world. Here is an unbelievable fact for him—I have written it on my hand: in 2023, there were no fewer than 1,439 sewage spills in the highlands. What a disgrace that none of the Scottish nationalists, the governing party of Scotland, are here today.
Tim Farron
My hon. Friend makes an important observation from a constituency vast and rural—my constituency is the second largest in England, but it is bijou and compact compared with his. He makes a good point about the Administration in Scotland.
As the hon. Member for Harlow (Chris Vince) alluded to, sewage spills are not the only things that have increased; so too has the money leaking out of the system. Water company bosses received a total combined pay last year of £20 million and more, and the water companies responsible for these failures paid out £1.2 billion in dividends. Surfers Against Sewage, which was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Steve Darling), has led the way on this issue for many years, since before many others were even talking about it.
Farming and Inheritance Tax
Debate between Jamie Stone and Tim Farron(7 months ago)
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Tim Farron
I am going to get to that, but the right hon. Gentleman will have to tolerate me accurately pinning blame on his side before I do so.
We were told by the last Government that they would maintain the amount of funding that we used to spend when we were in the European Union. In England, that was £2.4 billion. In one sense, and one sense only, they kind of kept that promise because it was £2.4 billion throughout that five years. However, they did not spend it, because they phased out the old scheme very rapidly, causing a great hardship, particularly to small family farms, and they brought in the new schemes far too slowly and made it very difficult for people to get into them. By the way, the people who were able to get into the new schemes were the big farmers. They were the landowners who had land agents to help them get into the schemes. So the large landowners with the bigger estates managed to get into those schemes. They are all right, broadly speaking. It is the smaller family farms—the farmers who own their own farms and the tenants—who have struggled.
It is also worth bearing in mind that there has been a little bit of inflation since 2019. The cost of running a farm has gone through the roof when it comes to feed, energy, fuel and all sorts of input costs. So the fact that we are at just £2.4 billion now, as we were five and a bit years ago, is absolute nonsense. It is important also to recognise that the grants that were available under the last Government, and now, are in reality often only available to those who have the cash flow to be able to get them in the first place.
Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)
If land prices were to go down, as has been described by the Minister—I am not sure I believe that—and a farmer had borrowed heavily from the bank, the bank might look at the value of their asset and could possibly call in the loan, which would put the farmer out of business right away.