Income Tax
Debate between Kate Green and Baroness Chapman of Darlington(10 years ago)
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Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
I hope to be very brief, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am grateful to you for calling me early in the debate. I apologise for the fact that I will have to leave for some of it, but I will be back for the winding-up speeches.
I want to make a few points on behalf of my constituents. I do not know the exact numbers, but I would guess that only a handful of my constituents are going to benefit from a tax cut on the basis that they earn £150,000 a year or more. In fact, it is quite possible that nobody in Stretford and Urmston stands to benefit. Therefore, my first question to the Minister is about the geographically distributional impact of this proposal. In this House, we talk repeatedly, and rightly, about our concern to rebalance our economy, our wealth and our resources around the country, but nowhere have I seen an analysis of where, physically, the beneficiaries of the cut in the 50p tax rate are. I would very much welcome seeing that information by constituency.
Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, because she might save me the trouble of making my speech. Only 8% of taxpayers in the north-east of England pay the higher or additional rate of tax—I imagine that the situation is very similar in her part of the world—in comparison with the south, where about twice as many people pay the additional or higher rate.
Kate Green
I agree with my hon. Friend. Mine is not by any means one of the poorest constituencies in the country, yet we stand to benefit relatively little. I would therefore be grateful if the Minister said something about the geographical context.
Offender Rehabilitation Bill [Lords]
Debate between Kate Green and Baroness Chapman of Darlington(11 years ago)
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Kate Green
No, that is not my point. My point is that we are going into a wholesale rearrangement of the public probation service—a service that has existed to manage the totality of risk, and take overall responsibility for it. That is what is being broken up. It is extremely important that we do not go down that track without proper parliamentary scrutiny of the implications and consequences, and that scrutiny is what clause 1 seeks to achieve.
Jenny Chapman
The Minister was being rather cheeky, because we had a whole Act to reorganise the probation service and establish trusts. The Government are attempting to dismantle the probation service without any parliamentary scrutiny whatever.
Kate Green
I am grateful to my hon. Friend.
There are concerns about the contracting structure that will be introduced as a result of the Bill. I want to repeat some of the concerns that have been expressed about the way in which the contracts will be priced. It has been presented by the Lord Chancellor this afternoon and more generally as predominantly a payment-by-results model which will seek to introduce new private funding into a marketplace where, within the public sector, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) pointed out, it would be difficult to find those levels of additional funding, particularly in these times of public spending constraint.
The point is that a very small proportion of these contracts, it seems, will genuinely be payment-by-results contracts. Substantial elements of these contracts will be subject to meeting court requirements, which means that there will have to be enough money in those contracts to ensure that those court requirements can be adequately met by the contractors. That, for a start, will leave relatively little room for manoeuvre in pricing a more discretionary element and an element that is about payment by results.
It is also the case, as my right hon. Friend pointed out, that within the existing spending envelope not only are these providers to manage about 150,000 existing offenders subject to supervision, but to take on board a further perhaps 50,000 within the context of the same funding envelope. That is not credible. It means either that we will have a very poor quality of intervention and/or cherry-picking, with a substantial number of those offenders receiving no support of any value at all.
I am also concerned about the way in which the pricing structures will respond to what a number of hon. Members have talked about—the changing risk profiles that we see when offenders are subject to supervision. As others have said, offender risk profiles are not static. Risk profiles can vary. Offenders can be beset by a range of external pressures and circumstances—bereavement, loss of a job, ending of a relationship, becoming homeless and so on—all of which can take a relatively stable low to medium-risk offender and suddenly catapult them into being high risk. At that point, we understand that the low or medium-risk offender would switch from being supervised by a non-statutory provider into the public probation supervision system. They would be supervised within the statutory sector.
But I do not think we have been told—perhaps the Minister will intervene on me if he has information to share about this—how that would be reflected in the pricing and the reward for the private contractor, and what additional resources would be made available to the public probation service if the risk profiles that had been assumed in the initial pricing of the contract turn out not to be what is experienced in practice.
Kate Green
I am not sure that I have totally understood this. It seemed that the private provider would retain any income attached to the result—the outcome—although we do not know what proportion of that overall payment to the private provider will be for the result and what will be a fixed payment for having to carry out the basics of supervision. It is welcome that the Minister says that resources will follow the offender, and therefore that if there is extra activity to be carried out in the public sector, the public sector will receive the necessary resources to carry out that work, but I am not quite clear where that funding will come from if the private provider is also to be remunerated in full for the work that it has carried out and for any ultimate outcome that may be achieved. Perhaps the Minister will be able to provide more detail as the Bill proceeds on its parliamentary passage. It would be useful to understand the cash flow and funding models in more detail.
Concerns have been expressed about the way in which prisoner risk categorisation will be undertaken. We have quite a long established system—OASys, or the offender assesment system—for determining levels of risk. It is being suggested that one of the things that the Ministry of Justice may wish to do is to revisit that risk assessment system to try to change the profile of the offender base so that more offenders can be deemed to be low or medium risk and supervised in the private or non-profit sector rather than, as would be suggested on current risk assessment tools, within the public probation service.
Jenny Chapman
My hon. Friend is right to draw the House’s attention to this issue. As I understand it, a new risk assessment tool will be introduced at the same time as these reforms take place. Is she concerned, as I am, that this would be the worst possible time to introduce that change?
Kate Green
We have clearly heard the same rumours. It is important that we understand what the new risk assessment tool will look like, what the implications will be for the overall risk profile of this cohort of offenders, and whether we can expect to see some significant shifts in the way that the level of risk is identified and assessed.
Kate Green
Perhaps I am overcomplicating what is being proposed by the Government, but it seems to me that the whole financial structure and the way in which that relates to risk assessment is very unclear to Members—certainly to Opposition Members. It would be helpful, during the passage of the Bill, for the Government to make that clear to us so that we can understand the true financial as well as the risk consequences of what is proposed.
Jenny Chapman
My hon. Friend is very generous in giving way and I am grateful. The problem is that we will not have the opportunity to go into these issues in more detail as the Bill progresses because none of the concerns being raised is in the Bill. That is the point of our amendment.
Kate Green
It is clear that we need much more time to scrutinise these proposals properly and, sadly, that is not what we are being offered by the Government tonight.
I turn to an issue that has been raised by a number of hon. Members, mostly Government Members, about the opportunities that exist for probation trusts in some form to bid for the new contracts. It is pretty clearly understood in my area that they will not have that opportunity to bid. It is baffling to me that, when they are doing such good work already, we would not want to give them the opportunity at least to compete for those contracts. They might not be successful, but surely where we have good models of provision in the public sector, we would want to enable them to put themselves forward in competition with other potential providers.
It has been said, rightly, by a number of hon. Members that there will be the opportunity for probation trusts to set up different kinds of legal structures—co-operatives, mutuals, shadow structures and so on. I am not sure why we think there is any particular advantage to the public in forcing them to go down that route. Again, I cannot help but believe that it will create extra cost and extra complexity. Nor is it clear to me that we know what these mutuals and co-operatives will and will not be allowed to bid for.
It would be helpful if the Minister commented on that in his response and told the House how he envisages these entities coming into a system when the contracting is beginning to take place already, before many of them have had any chance to get off the ground.