Finance Bill

Debate between Jonathan Edwards and Shabana Mahmood

Tuesday 1st July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood]

Let us see the report. The Minister has had many opportunities in Finance Bill debates where the Opposition have tabled amendments and new clauses calling for such a report. He has not produced one. I have no confidence that he will go away today and ask his officials at HMRC suddenly to produce a report. If he has such a report in mind, he should accept our new clause, and we can then have that debate. We have said that we will increase the rate to 50p. We believe that that can raise money and will be a good part of a much fairer deficit reduction policy.

The truth is that there was no justification for giving a huge tax cut to the richest in our country. We now know that bonuses are up by 83% for those in the financial sector, while ordinary working people are worse off now and will be worse off in 2015 compared with 2010. Wages will be 5.6% down at the end of this Parliament from what they were at the beginning.

The Government have not ruled out cutting the additional rate back down to 40p. We know that this is the ardent desire of many of their Back Benchers. Perhaps when the Minister replies he could tell the House whether the Government are planning any further cuts. They have ducked the opportunity on previous occasions to confirm that they will not go down from 45p to 40p. It will be good to hear from the Minister whether that is the case. The Government’s priorities are all wrong. Ordinary working people continue to struggle with their finances, and the link between the wealth of the nation and the money in people’s pockets and in their household budgets is broken. This Finance Bill does nothing to change the reality of the lives of millions in our country, yet Government Members want to cut taxes for the richest.

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

The Labour party now proposes a 50p rate for the additional rate. Is that a permanent measure or a temporary measure to deal with the deficit?

[Shabana Mahmood]

The hon. Gentleman has made that point in previous debates, and I repeat the answer that I gave then. We have said that we would increase the rate to 50p in the next Parliament as we get the deficit down. I could not be clearer than that.

It is the richest in our country who are benefiting the most from the recovery delivered by the Government. The return of economic growth has overwhelmingly benefited the top 1%, as shown by analysis of HMRC figures by the House of Commons Library, which covered the year when GDP growth returned and the top rate of income tax on earnings over £150,000 was reduced. The share of post-tax income of the top 1% of taxpayers—300,000 people—rose from 8.2% in 2012-13 to 9.8% in 2013-14. Yet during the same period, the bottom 90%— 27 million taxpayers—have seen their share of post-tax income fall.

This cut to the 50p rate cannot be justified when the deficit is high and will not be eliminated towards the end of the next Parliament. Labour in government will increase the rate back to 50p to help us to get the deficit down in a fairer way. Just as we have said that we want the Office for Budget Responsibility to have powers to audit manifestos ahead of the next general election, because we believe that that scrutiny will add to public understanding about the choices that are being made—a call the Government only last week rejected—so too we think that a report as envisaged by the new clause would help the public to understand the impact of the top rate of tax so that they can make up their own minds about who is standing up for them and other working people like them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Shabana Mahmood]

My hon. Friend has made his point powerfully, and in his characteristic way.

As we can see, despite the Government’s claims, their record of tackling tax avoidance is simply not good enough in a number of areas. They will say that the avoidance measures in this Bill are radical and bold, and are evidence of a commitment to tackling avoidance. We have supported the measures relating to follower notices, accelerated payment notices and the need to tackle promoters of tax avoidance schemes, although we have questioned the Minister about some of the deeply felt concerns of those who will be affected by the follower notices regime and by accelerated payment notices, which have caused a great deal of debate outside the House. However, although those measures have received the Opposition’s support, the fact is that they are not revenue raisers. They will simply bring in money that the Government were expecting to collect, but which had been clogging up the various back channels and alleyways of the legal system.

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

The hon. Lady has mentioned a number of measures, and has made some good points. Should not the Government be pursuing large multinationals such as Microsoft and Google, which are not paying a penny in corporation tax?

[Shabana Mahmood]

I think the Government should adopt an across-the-board strategy. I think they should deal with companies of all sizes, as well as individuals who engage in the various types of tax avoidance and evasion. I have mentioned a number of areas where there is concern about the Government’s action to date, and about their record of being able to narrow the tax gap.

The Government’s other flagship policy, introduced last year, is the general anti-abuse rule. Of course, it will take some time for the GAAR to settle in, as it is a new measure, and it is not yet clear how it will operate in practice, because it has not yet been the subject of a court case. It is, however, striking that no penalties regime associated with abuse falls within its remit. One would have thought that such a regime was a deterrent, and that the Government would want to make it clear that the type of abuse caught by the GAAR—abuse of the most egregious nature—would not be tolerated. However, it seems that an individual who fell foul of the GAAR, having engaged in the most egregious form of tax abuse, would incur no penalty but would merely be required to pay the amount that had been disputed. That strikes me as an interesting omission from the GAAR and the Government’s arsenal of measures to tackle tax avoidance.

National Insurance Contributions Bill

Debate between Jonathan Edwards and Shabana Mahmood

Monday 4th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood]

I do not think that an economy that was growing was a bad legacy to leave. The legacy of three wasted years, caused by the Government pursuing a failed economic plan that has delivered a cost-of-living crisis for millions of people, is not one to write home about.

[Jonathan Edwards]

The key point about the national insurance measure in the emergency Budget was that it was a statement of intent that the UK Government wanted to rebalance the economy geographically. Under the last Labour Government, wealth polarised geographically at an incredible rate. If the hon. Lady is in the Treasury after the next election, what will she and her colleagues do to rebalance the UK economy geographically?

[Shabana Mahmood]

We have been speaking a great deal about rebalancing the economy and our proposals on regional banking, for example, are proof that we take the issue seriously. The hon. Gentleman described this Government’s policy as a statement of intent, but it was an absolute failure, and that is the subject of the debate today.

The national insurance holiday was a flagship policy of the Government’s first Budget, which is why they are so desperate to forget that it happened. They created a scheme that ran from 6 September 2010 until 5 September 2013 and applied to new businesses only. They were eligible only if they were created after 22 June 2010. Under that scheme, new businesses would not have to pay the first £5,000 in national insurance for each of their first 10 employees during the first year of the business. Greater London, the south-east and the eastern region were all excluded from the scheme. The Government said that 400,000 businesses and some 800,000 employees would benefit from the national insurance holiday, at a cost of £940 million over the three years of the scheme. In their impact assessment, the Government confidently predicted that the average benefit per business would be about £2,000, but by the end of the three years of the national insurance holiday in September this year, the scheme was shown to have been a comprehensive failure.

In the end, only 25,000 businesses received NICS relief—that is 375,000 fewer businesses being helped than the Government originally claimed. It was always highly unlikely to have ever been worth the maximum £50,000 to a new start-up business. To get the maximum relief available, the new businesses would have had to take on 10 people with salaries of up to £40,000, which does not exactly fit the pattern of how new start-ups behave and the sorts of choices that they make in their first year of business.

Of the £940 million set aside to pay for the scheme, only £60 million was ultimately paid out, a paltry 6% of the amount originally intended. To put that in context, the Government spent £12 million on the administration of the scheme. We repeatedly warned that the scheme was not working, that it was not helping businesses as intended and that the Government should reform it, expand it, review it or bring forward a new one, but they refused to listen.

It is not as though the Minister could not see the failure unfolding before his eyes. Take-up of the national insurance holiday was never anything other than dismal. In the first year of the scheme, there was not one month in which HMRC received more than 850 applications. In 2012, there was only one month when the total number of successful applications was more than 1,000—that was in May 2012, when there were 1,130 successful applications. For the Government’s scheme to succeed, they would have needed to hit that number every month for three years, and they got nowhere near that.

When the Treasury Committee conducted its inquiry into the June 2010 Budget, the Chair of the Committee said:

“For those of us who have been on the circuit a while it sounds like another case of the triumph of hope over experience.”

How right he was.

Higher and Further Education

Debate between Jonathan Edwards and Shabana Mahmood

Tuesday 11th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood]

If the hon. Gentleman had not decided to patronise me at the beginning of his intervention, he might have had enough time to complete his mini-speech. I will move on later to the record drops we have seen in the number of applications, including from mature students, and the increase in the withdrawal rate for students who have been offered university places but decided not to take them, which stands in direct contrast to the rather more rosy picture he is trying to paint.

As I was saying, the Liberal Democrats went into the 2010 general election promising to scrap tuition fees altogether—we all remember that famous pledge—but they broke their promise, and the trust of those who voted for them, and betrayed the students whose votes they courted so assiduously ahead of the election. I wonder how many of them will rediscover their pre-election principles in the Lobbies tonight. Although the Conservatives are no doubt pleased that most of the anger surrounding the betrayal on tuition fees has focused on the Liberal Democrats, they too have form, having previously voted against a rise in tuition fees to £3,000.

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

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way and congratulate her on her appointment. The motion

“calls on the Government to change course and, as a first step, reduce tuition fees to £6,000”.

As she knows, in Wales fees are substantially lower, and in Scotland there are no fees at all, so if right hon. and hon. Members from Wales and Scotland support the motion, are they in effect advocating an increase in fees to £6,000 in their respective countries?

[Shabana Mahmood]

Both the motion and our alternative proposal for the Government of a £6,000 cap on fees reflect our position as it relates to England, not the devolved Administrations. The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have played politics with tuition fees in the past, and it is students today who are paying the price.