Amendment of the Law

Debate between John Denham and Charlie Elphicke

Wednesday 21st March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Denham]

I am happy to include that test. One of the missed opportunities will turn out to be in the low-carbon economy that will dominate the global economy in the 21st century.

Things have turned out so much worse than in the heady days of the new Chancellor’s optimism when he told us in his first speech that the economy was set to grow steadily; that unemployment would fall year on year; that the deficit would drop like a stone, yet front-line services would be protected; that the private sector would expand magically, more than filling the space left by public services; that the banks would lend; and that the whole tiresome infrastructure of regional investment, job guarantees for young people and a coherent planning system could simply be swept away. Well, the Chancellor, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Prime Minister and the whole coalition were wrong.

The spending cuts, drawing billions out of the economy, were too far and too fast. The Government’s gloomy talk first unnerved and depressed consumers; then the VAT hike took money from them when we needed them to spend. Now the cuts are really beginning to bite. The Government were so cocksure and complacent that they strung together, purely for cynical political purposes, a series of half-baked, ineffective measures that were more or less abandoned as soon as the last press release had been issued: the national insurance holiday; the regional growth fund that does not pay out any money for months or years; the business growth fund with few investments; the special support for exporters with a handful of users; the Work programme that does not work; Project Merlin; and the youth contract that has not even started two years after the future jobs fund was scrapped. Any right hon. or hon. Member who gets excited by any measures announced in a press release for this Budget should remember what happened to the last lot.

Opportunities were missed—to tax bank bonuses, to fund real jobs for young people, to cut VAT for families, to cut national insurance contributions for small businesses taking on staff, to bring forward infrastructure spending. But what did we get? Just a feasibility study on Monday of this week, two years after the need was first identified. No, the short-term measures have failed, and we have seen no change.

Fairness has been well debated today. Let us remember one point—in April, families with children, taking into account the personal allowances and all the other changes, will be £530 worse off on average. When we look at next year’s personal allowances, I am sure it will also be clear, when the dust has settled and the IFS has done the figures that take into account all the other changes, that those families will still be worse off. Hon. Members should look at the Red Book and see which families are going to pay a higher proportion of their income, and it is those on low incomes.

This Government have been mired in unfairness from the beginning. We should remember that one of their first actions was to cancel changes to pension tax relief, which would have brought in £1.6 billion from the very highest earners in this country. We did not hear the Chancellor reminding us of the things he has already done to tilt the system to those best able to get through the next few years. I believe that the Government will pay the price for that.

The truth is that it is not a matter of whether stamp duty brings in more money or whether the anti-avoidance measures—the Government should tackle avoidance in any case—bring in more money. The challenge for this Government and this Budget was to devote every single available penny to raising the incomes of hard-pressed low and middle-income families and to get the economy growing. There was no justification for singling out the highest rate of income tax on earnings over £150,000 a year. The average person in work in my constituency will have to work for seven and a half years to earn £150,000. To single out that higher-earning group and to cut their tax was wrong.

This was not the fairness in tough times that the country needed, but the other failure in the Budget was the failure to lay the foundations for the economy that we need in the future. The truth is that despite the pressure on the public finances, there is no shortage of money to rebuild the economy. UK companies are cash-rich. Sovereign wealth funds are out there. There are pension funds, closer to home, with money to invest.

[Charlie Elphicke]

rose—

[Mr Denham]

I will not give way, because I have only a few minutes left. The problem is that those bodies are not investing, or at least not investing in Britain. The reasons are clear: in the short term, Government mistakes have caused the economy to stagnate, and there is also no certainty—no “compelling vision”, as the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills rightly put it. Some of us thought it was his job to come up with a compelling vision, but he is right that it is not there. There is no predictability.

Goodness knows it took my Government long enough to take a decision on Heathrow. That decision was then cancelled, and then ruled out. Today in the Budget, we find that Heathrow is back on the agenda. Billions of pounds of business investment cannot take place because of the failure of Governments to take that decision, one way or another. That uncertainty and unpredictability runs through the Government’s business failures. Low-carbon energy manufacturing and services will dominate the 21st-century global economy, but the Chancellor says that he does not like the environmental policies, while the Deputy Prime Minister says that he does. We had illegal flip-flops on feed-in tariffs, which means that a whole group of investors will never come back and invest in green energy again. Those on the Government Benches have no idea that business needs certainty and predictability, not short-term changes.

We have today heard all that stuff about the oil industry. In last year’s Budget, the Government massively increased the risk penalties for investing in the North sea by means of a last-minute political gimmick that changed the tax regime that applied there; again, that meant uncertainty and unpredictability. Despite the Chancellor’s words, there is no serious attempt to identify the technologies and capabilities that will give us the ability to compete in future. The odd speech here and the odd announcement and press release there does not match up to the job—not when we look at what our competitors are doing.

Today, we again heard about broadband, but what did the former chief operating officer of BT say about the Government’s broadband strategy in another place just a couple of days ago? He said that it was so weak that this country will be

“frozen out of the next industrial revolution”.

Just because there is a mention in the Red Book about the broadband strategy does not mean that there is one, or that it is good enough, so it is a no on that third test, which is probably the most crucial.

The next few weeks, months and years will be hard for everybody. People in this country are stoic. They will tolerate a lot if they think that the right things are being done to build a future for their children and families, and to give us long-term security. The Government do not have a clue how to create the conditions in which investment will take place, business will grow, and we pay our way and have the jobs and wealth that the people of this country desire. The Budget is unfair, has missed opportunities, and will fail the country.

Higher Education Fees

Debate between John Denham and Charlie Elphicke

Thursday 9th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Denham]

I want to make some progress on the issue of fairness, because I believe that it lies at the heart of many of the Government’s arguments and of questions raised by Members in all parts of the House. The Government say that their proposal is fairer, and that it is better for low-income graduates. The Deputy Prime Minister has said:

“The bottom 25% of earners will pay much less in their contributions to their university education than they do at the moment.”—[Official Report, 10 November 2010; Vol. 518, c. 281.]

The Prime Minister said yesterday:

“With our new system, the poorest quarter of graduates will pay back less overall than they do currently.”

He also said:

“The poorest will pay less, the richest will pay more.”—[Official Report, 8 December 2010; Vol. 520, c. 281.]

Over the last 24 hours, we have seen a parade of conscience-stricken Ministers saying that they just have to hang on to ministerial office—they just have to keep their red boxes and their cars—because this is really such a good deal for low-income graduates. They will all be better off, they say. When I heard the Prime Minister say yesterday that trebling fees would leave everyone better off, I thought, “I’ve heard that voice before somewhere.” I could not place it at first, but last night I remembered. He is the bloke who does those advertisements on day-time television. You know the ones: “Have you got bad debts, credit card bills, county court judgments against you? Let us wrap them all into one simple payment and reduce your monthly payments.” We all know what is wrong with those advertisements. People are charged higher rates of interest, and end up paying much more. That is exactly what the Prime Minister is proposing today.

We all know what is wrong with the Prime Minister’s claims. Let us now have a look at the Government’s claims. Labour Members do not accept the Government’s comparisons between their scheme and ours—[Interruption.] I mean their comparisons between their scheme and the current scheme. We think that they have chosen their assumptions to produce the figures that they want. Many people do not realise that the £15,000 threshold set in 2006 is the same in real terms as the £21,000 threshold that will start in 2016.

Let us look at the Government’s figures none the less. They say that a graduate in the bottom 10% will pay less, but how much less? What is the change that has led the Deputy Prime Minister, the Prime Minister and many other Ministers to say that the new system is so fair and so wonderful? According to the Government’s own dodgy figures, the poorest 10% of graduates will pay an average of just £88 a year less—£1.60 a week. As the advertisement says, every little helps; but to see Members of Parliament, including Ministers, sell their consciences for just £88 a year is a tragedy.

If the Government’s real aim were to ease the pressure on the lowest-paid graduates, I would support it. The Government would have needed to make only minor changes to the current scheme to achieve that aim. However, nothing about the tiny benefit for the lowest-income graduates justifies doubling or trebling the debt of the vast majority of graduates. The IFS yesterday said that graduates from the 30% of poorest households would pay more. The heaviest burden will fall on graduates on average earnings; they will be the hardest hit in terms of how much of their earnings they will have to pay over the coming years. They will be hit harder than the graduates who go into the highest paid jobs. That is what the House of Commons Library says. That is what London Economics says. That is also what somebody to whom the House might wish to listen has said. Many Members will remember David Rendel, who for many years was the Member for Newbury and the higher education spokesman of the Liberal Democrats. In an e-mail I have received, he says the following to a number of his colleagues:

“There are those who are claiming that the current proposals are progressive. But this is only the case if by “progressive” you mean that in any one year richer graduates will pay more than poorer graduates. For all the middle- and higher-earning graduates, over their lifetimes the more they earn the less they pay. Since a very large part of the justification of charging tuition fees is the higher lifetime earnings of graduates…a scheme in which graduates with large lifetime earnings pay less than graduates with comparatively small lifetime earnings cannot be regarded as either progressive or fair. (In this regard”—

says the former higher education spokesman for the Liberal Democrats—

“the new proposals, because they include a real-terms interest charge, are in fact more regressive than Labour’s scheme!).”

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

I pay tribute to the right hon. Gentleman for his honesty and candour in making a substantial spending commitment. Will he tell the House how much?

[Mr Denham]

The hon. Gentleman has clearly not been listening. I have been talking about the changes that were open to his party to make.

It is because the average graduates going into typical jobs will get hit hardest compared with the highest-earning graduates, that we will need a fairer system of graduate contribution in the years to come.