National Insurance Contributions (Rate Ceilings) Bill

Jonathan Edwards Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Kelvin Hopkins]

I can only refer the hon. Gentleman to the excellent article by the economist Ben Chu, which goes into detail showing why Labour was not to blame and was not responsible. The crisis caused the deficits, but if we had not recapitalised the banks, where would we be now?

Let me go back to the instability mentioned by the hon. Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse), who is no longer in his place. He talked about businesses wanting stability. Instability arises because of the globalisation of financial markets. Before 1979, we managed financial markets with exchange controls. The breakdown of the Bretton Woods agreement is what caused the problems.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

The hon. Gentleman is completely right to say that this is purely a gimmick by the Government. There is no need for a legislative vehicle to enact this policy; the announcement could be made in a Budget statement or an autumn statement, as appropriate. Does he agree that, if the Government were serious about helping working people, and people on low incomes in particular, they would increase the threshold at which national insurance contributions kick in to the level of personal allowances for income tax, rather than implementing the pure gimmick of this Bill?

[Kelvin Hopkins]

That would certainly be one way of dealing with it, but I think that not cutting tax credits, which are coming up for debate this afternoon, would be a much more important way of helping people on low incomes. We should certainly do that.