Finance Bill

Debate between Justine Greening and Thomas Docherty

Thursday 15th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Thomas Docherty]

I shall be relatively brief. It is perhaps worth noting that since my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) first commented on the lack of interest from those on the Government Benches, there has been a flurry of—I suspect—BlackBerry messages going out, so that we are now being treated to no fewer than five Conservative Back Benchers. They have joined us for the afternoon, yet not a single Liberal Democrat has arrived in the Chamber.

It would be wrong of me to suggest that the Liberal Democrats are simply uninterested in the Budget, so could it be that the Chancellor, having been thwarted in his plans for a millionaire’s inheritance tax break, came up with a new wheeze after the coalition deal? How could he help his friends in the City? Unsurprisingly, the Chancellor’s new wheeze is to reverse the previous Government’s policy of trying to find a more equitable approach to pensions. That, I suggest, is the reason why our Liberal Democrat colleagues have not been advised of the importance of this debate. For if they saw the skilful manoeuvre that the Economic Secretary is trying to perform on the Committee today, they would surely rush to the Chamber to show their outrage at this terrible scheme.

It is a slightly unusual situation when a Minister as artful and articulate as the Economic Secretary tells us this afternoon that the current system is terrible—that it does not work; that it is unfair and unclear—yet has not been able to articulate what would replace it. It strikes me, as a perhaps naive and innocent new Member, that the starting point for any Government—particularly a Government who are so terribly keen to reduce regulation and bureaucracy—should be as follows: rather than introducing legislation that has no purpose except to give them some wriggle room, the Government would have been better off spending their time coming up with an alternative proposal for the Committee to examine, instead of giving the Minister the opportunity to spend her summer and that of her civil servants coming up with a new scheme.

To conclude, although I look forward to the Minister’s reply, I suspect that we will hear no detail whatever about what the Government plan to replace the current system with, and that in six months’ time she will not have been able to find a suitable replacement.

[Justine Greening]

May I start by saying what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Amess?

We have had a wide-ranging debate today and I will do my best to answer a number of the issues that Opposition Members have raised. However, it would perhaps be best for me first to set out the background to this debate, as the shadow Minister did. This issue was first looked at by the previous Government, and we have returned to it as a new Government. The coalition Government inherited from their predecessor the largest budget deficit of any economy in Europe, with the single exception of Ireland. One pound in every four that we spend is borrowed. The gap stands at £149 billion for this financial year alone.

The previous Government had planned to raise extra revenue through the restriction of pensions relief for higher-rate earners. As we have heard, that approach was due to raise £4 billion to £5 billion a year by 2014-15. Given the appalling state of the public finances that we have been left as a new Government, it is something that we cannot ignore.

On Second Reading, my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary set out our commitment to fairness. This is a progressive Budget that ensures that every part of society makes a contribution to deficit reduction, while protecting the most vulnerable, especially children in poverty and pensioners. The Budget has a number of measures to support pensioners, not least the triple lock guaranteeing an annual increase in the state pension in line with earnings, prices or a 2.5% increase, whichever is the higher.

--- Later in debate ---

[Justine Greening]

It seems that I’m damned if I give information and damned if I don’t. I was asked to provide some facts, and I made sure that I gave some facts and figures. Now that I have provided some to the Committee, apparently that is a bad thing to do too. I think the problem is that the figures I have just provided are not ones that Opposition Members want to confront. They are about to go through the Lobby and vote on people who can afford to put a couple of hundred thousand pounds into their pension pot paying more tax net of pension relief than less.

[Thomas Docherty]

I am grateful to the Minister for helping us to understand how much the Chancellor can afford to put into his pension fund. How can we confront figures that we do not get to see?

[Justine Greening]

I was asked for some figures and what the impact would be on the very richest. We can probably find in Hansard tomorrow that I have just provided the Committee with that information. That is probably the way in which debates are meant to work. Ministers have questions put to them and if they can answer them in some detail, they do. That is what I have done. I have set out in some detail why we are pursuing the clause. I hope that everyone realises that it is sensible and a pragmatic way to address the industry’s concerns. The industry faced a £1 billion bill for implementing excessively complicated and unfair tax changes on pensions tax relief. We hope that we can reach a conclusion with the industry and all stakeholders, but the key issue is to address the fiscal deficit, so any solution will have to bring in no less money than the mechanism intended by the previous Government.