Finance (No. 2) Bill

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Monday 11th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Seema Malhotra]

I will just continue on steel, because it is important also to talk about what is missing from the Bill. This is a serious missed opportunity to provide greater support for manufacturing and steel. The collapse of the steel industry could cost the Government £4.6 billion over the next 10 years. Some 40,000 jobs could be lost, devastating steel-making communities and industries that depend on British steel.

We welcome today’s news that a buyer has been found for Tata’s Scunthorpe steel plant, and we congratulate Unite, Community, the GMB and others who played an important role in the negotiations leading to that deal. However, against that background comes the revelation of a U-turn on business rates by the Chancellor. Before the Budget, the Engineering Employers Federation made a strong case for giving companies an allowance on business rates for plant and machinery, which could have applied to assets such as the blast furnaces in the steel sector. However, we learned from The Times that although the Chancellor was planning to act, he then pulled plans to give Britain’s struggling factories tax relief on business rates.

Why did he do that? The answer, analysts suggest, is that British manufacturing has been sacrificed on the altar of the Chancellor’s obsession with getting a £10 billion Budget surplus in the final year of this Parliament. We wait to see what actually materialises from today’s statement and what actual support comes forward from the Government, particularly for Port Talbot.

The Office for Budget Responsibility revealed that the decision was taken so late that there was no time to change the calculations in its economic and fiscal forecast. That means that its forecast for the level of business investment in this Parliament could well be an overestimate.

Families in Britain are to suffer as a result of another missed opportunity—on housing. By 2025, nine out of 10 Britons under 35 on modest incomes will not be able to afford a home. Rents in the private sector are soaring. So much, again, for a Budget for the next generation.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

On that subject, the hon. Lady will be aware that the Residential Landlords Association put forward to the Government some ideas for changes, but those have not happened. One was to give people the chance to buy their houses, and the association was happy to do that, but we have not got that in the Bill. Does the hon. Lady feel that something could be done on that to help?

[Seema Malhotra]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point, and there are many measures we should explore, particularly as we go into Committee, to support house building and home ownership.

We know from the English housing survey that 201,000 fewer households own a home now than did at the start of the Chancellor’s tenure. That compares with an increase of 1 million under Labour. As of last year, the housing benefit bill is forecast to be £350 million more than the Chancellor intended. It is clear that this country needs a massive programme of capital investment in new affordable homes to rent and buy—nothing less will do if we are to tackle the growing housing crisis. That is why Labour has far more coherent plans to build homes and to make sure we tackle spiralling housing costs. That is the way to control the housing benefit bill.

Today’s report from the Women’s Budget Group shows that female lone parents and single female pensioners will, on average, have seen their living standards fall by 20% by 2020. Women are now set to bear a staggering 86% of the cost of changes and cuts to taxes, tax credits and benefits by 2020. That is worse than the figure of 81% identified last year.

The tax cuts in the Bill are likely to benefit men more than women. It is surely time that the Government conducted a full gender impact analysis of their proposals. That would give the opportunity for greater parliamentary scrutiny.

When it comes to measures on capital gains tax and corporation tax, the Bill must pass two tests: are they fair and are they effective? The Bill confirms that the main rate of corporation tax will be cut further to 17% from 1 April 2020, which will be worth £945 million. If corporation tax, which is already the lowest in the G7, can be reduced yet further, perhaps money can be found and the Government can think again about cuts to working age benefits and public services.

More importantly, a cut to corporation tax will not address the underlying weaknesses of our economy, such as the challenges in productivity, skills and the investment required in infrastructure. Businesses that talk to the Minister as well as to us say that these are the biggest issues affecting their future growth. Connectivity and new technology also require investment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Seema Malhotra]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very important point. That is one of the concerns. It is assumed that the proceeds from those tax cuts will go directly into investment, but the evidence for that does not necessarily stack up. In fact, an estimated £500 billion is not invested in this country at the moment. That is an important point, which is why greater analysis and scrutiny are required, as well as conversations with businesses about what will actually make a difference for them in the long term.

The basic rate of capital gains tax is to be reduced from 18% to 10%, and the higher rate from 28% to 20%. That is set to cost £735 million in 2020 and £2.7 billion over the forecast period. Capital gains tax was paid by only 200,000 taxpayers in 2013, which means that about 0.3% of the population will benefit from a giveaway of more than £600 million in total from the first year. That was not called for or expected. In fact, the Financial Times described it as an “unexpected gift” for wealthy investors. In 2010, the Chancellor told the House that raising capital gains tax was necessary to

“create a fairer tax system.”—[Official Report, 22 June 2010; Vol. 512, c. 178.]

It would be interesting to hear perhaps during the Exchequer Secretary’s wind-up speech what has changed.

[Jim Shannon]

The Residential Landlords Association was keen to see the extension of the capital gains tax relief so that landlords could sell property to their tenants. That is a small thing that could incentivise the whole housing market if it was done in the right way.

[Seema Malhotra]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comments, but I think he will agree that the key issue in addressing the housing crisis is the rapid building of new homes and the strategy to deliver that effectively.

I want to make a few comments about entrepreneurs relief and the Government’s new investor relief. We welcome the endeavours to encourage investment, particularly long-term investment. The question will be whether the measures pass the test of what business is looking for: simplicity, stability and a strategic approach to fiscal policy. Our concern is that tinkering is no substitute for a clear, long-term strategy to support investment. That is why we are undertaking a review of tax reliefs to see what the evidence is for what incentivises business investment and provides real value for money. Our aim is to ensure that there is a strategic approach to supporting investment and the transparency around it. Those are questions we will pursue as we go forward into Committee.

We also welcome clauses on the reduction in oil and gas corporation tax and petroleum revenue tax. The Chancellor announced that he would reduce petroleum revenue tax from 35% to zero, and that he would reduce the corporation tax supplementary charge from 20% to 10%. There is no doubt that the struggling North sea oil and gas industry needs support. In fact, we think that the Chancellor could have gone further and announced the measures that Labour has called for. Our bold new proposal to invest in the industry is based on the creation of a new public body, which would be called UK Offshore Investment Ltd, to identify areas for temporary public investment. The purpose of that new body was spelled out last month by the Scottish Labour leader, Kezia Dugdale. It would conduct an open-book review with the Oil and Gas Authority to identify assets that have long-term viability and profitability. That, in turn, would provide the evidence to allow UK OIL to commit to public investment in strategic infrastructure and potentially profitable assets.

Clause 115 gives the Government power, through a statutory instrument, to reduce the VAT rate on women’s sanitary products from 5% to zero. That is welcome, as are the Minister’s comments. I am glad that the Chancellor has finally recognised that women’s sanitary products are not a luxury. However, it is crucial that the clause should set a firm deadline for the VAT reduction, and although the Minister’s comments signalled moves in that direction, they did not go quite far enough. I am sure that we will continue to address the point as we move forward in Committee and beyond. I congratulate Labour Members, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury (Paula Sherriff), and campaigners inside and outside Parliament on their hard work in forcing the Government’s hand on the issue. It is a sad indictment of the Government that it took a Labour amendment and an embarrassing Government defeat to achieve that result.

Where in the Finance Bill is a clause to reflect the Government’s other U-turn, which was on VAT on energy-saving materials? The Government accepted our amendment to the Budget resolution, which allowed the Government to legislate on the matter in the Finance Bill. The lack of legislation and the contradictory and noncommittal answers from Ministers are causing uncertainty in the industry. We simply call on the Government to make a commitment that they will not include a VAT rise for solar or other green energy measures in this or future Finance Bills.

On tax avoidance, the two key issues we face are structural reforms and public confidence. The rhetoric today, as in the past, has sought to be impressive—in the past, the Chancellor has said that aggressive tax avoidance is “morally repugnant”—but the reality has yet to match the rhetoric. Indeed, the tax gap has grown under this Government to £34 billion. Serious measures to tackle tax avoidance, which is estimated to account for £7 billion of the tax gap, will be even more critical.

It is two years since the Prime Minister wrote to UK overseas territories and Crown dependencies calling on them to publish a public register of firms and individuals sheltering money there, yet virtually no progress has been made so far. Today’s statement did nothing to move us forward on such a public register of firms and individuals. Fundamentally, this issue is about a rotten system that undermines the faith of ordinary families in the fairness of our tax system. Indeed, a definitive analysis by the Financial Times shows that the corporate tax avoidance measures that the Labour Government brought in will still raise 10 times as much as those introduced during the last Parliament.

While we broadly welcome the measures in the Bill, we think that they simply do not go far enough. We believe there must be far greater transparency and enforcement in relation to those who try to hide their wealth and profits in tax havens. As ever, the Chancellor and the Prime Minister give the impression of acting tough, while in reality they are proposing half-measures. Instead, as Labour have set out in our tax transparency enforcement programme, we require the introduction of a general anti-avoidance principle that proactively looks at intent and does not need the consent of the tax profession before it can be used.

Our programme includes an immediate public inquiry into the Panama papers, and more resources for HMRC. Staff numbers having been cut by 6,000 and then added to by 670, we can see that there has been a return of about 10% of those whose jobs were cut, and real concerns have been raised about the impact on tax collection as a result. We have called for a specialised enforcement unit and for greater co-operation with European partners on country-by-country reporting and protection for whistleblowers.