Finance (No. 2) Bill

Kevin Foster Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 18th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Mills]

I think I would have had to attend several of the hon. Gentleman’s lectures to understand better how the German economy works, but that is not something I have ever studied. We could probably talk about euro rates and the history of investment in skills and so on, but I suspect it is not all down to corporation tax.

[Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)]

In his consideration, will my hon. Friend, like me, bear in mind the fact that the closest and most comparable jurisdiction in the European Union is Ireland, where the headline rate is around 12.5%?

[Nigel Mills]

Yes, and Ireland has found that that corporation tax rate has been successful in helping to attract investment. I noticed that throughout all Ireland’s financial crises and its desperate need for tax revenue, that rate was one thing on which it was not prepared to move, which is a sign of how successful it thinks it has been.

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[Dr Davies]

It is true that the Health Committee—myself included—has called for additional measures, but the plan as it stands is certainly a step in the right direction. I will come to further points in due course.

One in five children starting primary school is overweight. By the end of primary school, it is one in three—quite a striking figure. The inequality between communities is also striking. Some 60% of five to 11-year-olds in the poorest neighbourhoods are obese; the figure reduces to just 16% in the most affluent areas. That translates into regional variation.

[Kevin Foster]

My hon. Friend is making an important point about the fact that there is a higher growth in obesity rates among those from the most deprived backgrounds. People who live on one side of a particular hill in Torquay live for 13 years longer on average than those who live on the other side. Does he share my concern that those sorts of stats could get worse?

[Dr Davies]

Indeed. I strongly believe that the measures outlined in the Bill go some way to tackling that situation.

Perhaps the main health effect of obesity among children is tooth decay. It is the main source of hospital admissions for five to nine-year-olds, with some 26,000 admissions, probably in England alone, and 179,000 teeth—if not more—extracted among the age group each year. Some 25% of children in the age group have tooth decay, and 90% of those cases are estimated to be preventable. Of course, sugar is a key cause of the problem. As for older children, 46% of 15-year-olds have tooth decay, and £129 million was spent on the extraction of teeth in under-18s between 2012 and 2016.

The impact of obesity on adults is even more concerning with tooth decay and, in no particular order, type 2 diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, gastro-oesophageal reflux disease, gallstones, osteoarthritis, sleep apnoea, infertility, pregnancy problems, mental health problems, liver and kidney disease, and—last but certainly not least—cancer. At least 13 types of cancer have been implicated with obesity. In fact, obesity is thought to be the biggest cause of preventable cancer after smoking. More than 18,100 cases of cancer in the UK per year are estimated to be thanks to obesity. Those types of cancer include some well-known ones such as breast, bowel, endometrial, oesophageal and pancreatic. There is an impact on the NHS of an estimated £5.1 billion per annum, and a cost to the economy in general—£27 billion a year down to lost productivity, unemployment, early retirement and welfare benefits.

It is vital that we recognise the extent of the problem posed to the health and wellbeing of ever-rising numbers of people by the obesity crisis. How should we target this? Well, it is believed that there is a genetic susceptibility to obesity. That is not to say that all obesity is down to genetics, but it is thought that the inheritance of several genes—polygenic susceptibility—leads some to an increased drive to eat. Much has been said over the past decades about personal responsibility, education and exercise. Education and exercise do have an important place, but the reality is that they have not succeeded as the main way to target the problem.

We have an issue with more sedentary lifestyles and an obesogenic environment, whereby unhealthy, high-calorie foods are so easily available around us. Calorie intake sadly overwhelms most people’s efforts to exercise those calories off. Personal responsibility certainly drives many—perhaps those with the intellectual and financial resources to follow the path to deal with the problems they face —but it is not easy. In any case, children cannot be expected to exercise personal responsibility, because they do not have their own freedom of choice. Various measures are important in tackling the crisis, including reformulation targets by Public Health England and others, which will reduce sugar, fat, calories and so on in the foods that children eat.

Advertising is also important. Advertising restrictions have recently been expanded from television to other media such as social media and advergames, but more could be done if necessary. Labelling is important, and Brexit offers an opportunity in more flexibility in labelling our products. Promotions and discounts in supermarkets and elsewhere are critical. The issue of local authorities’ planning powers for takeaways and so on has been mentioned on a number of occasions.

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[George Kerevan]

I accept what the Minister says, but the extra investment from the productivity fund that is going into the economy at the moment totals hundreds of millions, not billions, of pounds. The bulk of the spend, when it comes in 2019, will be in long lead items. A lot of it will be for housing, which is one aspect of the productivity investment fund I have never quite understood, as I do not see how investing in housing will raise industrial productivity.

Let me come back to the key point on which I want the Minister to respond. The latest data on the economy show that consumer spending is starting to slow. The first quarter retail figures, out just this month, are the worst for six years. It is clear that the reserves of spending in consumer hands are disappearing.

The previous Chancellor was very lucky in that in 2010 to 2013 windfall gains came into consumers’ hands, particularly from insurance on mis-selling. In 2015, even though wage rises were limited, there was a precipitous fall in the inflation rate. That raised real incomes. It is clear that, in 2016, because of that boost to real incomes, people started borrowing again and consumer debt started to rise. By the end of 2016, the savings ratio in the UK had fallen to historically low levels. One can sustain that amount of consumer borrowing and spending only for so long. By the end of 2016, it was beginning to fall.

Like the hon. Member for North East Somerset, I was never moved by the visions of economic Armageddon from the Bank of England and the Treasury during the Brexit discussion. However, I do think that, in the next two years, investment will be impacted upon by Brexit fears. That is not happening at the moment. Therefore, I think that there is reasonable evidence that the tapering off of consumer expenditure is not to do with the Brexit debate; that is still to come down the highway. It is to do with the fact that consumers no longer have the reserves to go on increasing their spending, in which case we are looking at an economic downturn in 2017. That is precisely the time the Chancellor should be using his economic firepower, rather than, as in the March Budget, having a fiscally neutral stance.

When questioned on the matter, the Chancellor has said that the slack would be taken up by business investment. There is no sign of that. In real terms, business fixed investment has been falling since 2015. It started to fall well before the Brexit debate. It blipped a little in the middle of 2016, but it has gone on falling. There are no organic signs anywhere that business fixed investment is increasing. Business spending is going on all sorts of things—for example, moving corporate activities to Europe to protect against Brexit—and a lot of money is being spent on buying British companies. However, we are not getting fixed investment in machinery and plant, and even if we did, it would take several years for that to feed through into productivity gains.

The latest quarterly market purchasing managers’ report suggests that growth projections from purchasing managers, who are pretty hard-headed, have halved since the last quarter of 2016. My general conclusion is that the Government are being far too optimistic about where growth is going in the UK. It is going down.

Conservative Members like to quote international comparisons. The latest OECD projections for growth in 2017—the OECD never quite got to the more insane evaluations of a collapse in growth that some other agencies did in 2016—suggest that growth in the G20 countries, in the United States, in Germany and in Canada will on average outstrip UK growth, so the situation is no longer as rosy as the Minister would have us believe. Some of the fiscal proposals in the Bill are based on a previous analysis of where the economy is. They have been overtaken by events. If we go through a general election and come to an autumn Budget and a second Finance Bill, all bets are off and we will be back to square one. That is not the way to run an economy.

Earlier, we discussed corporation tax, which is a key element. There is a long-term plan to cut it, and that hinges on what happens in the Brexit discussion. Clearly, the Government want to try, in a post-Brexit world, to make Britain a very low-tax economy, in the sense of attracting inward investment by having low levels of corporation tax. The danger of that strategy is that other countries will follow us, particularly the US; the Trump Administration have already threatened that. However, there is a stark contrast between countries such as Germany, where the headline rate of corporation tax is still 30% to 33%, and the UK, which is cutting corporation tax. Germany has much better productivity and higher industrial investment. Why is it that it can do that, and outstrip the UK economy, when we, with corporation tax that is low at the moment and going lower, cannot seem to generate the industrial investment and higher productivity?

It comes back to the issue of consumption and relying on debt-fuelled consumption to power growth. If we power our economy through consumer debt, it becomes dangerous to raise taxes on consumers, because we would immediately see a drop in consumer spending. Germany has focused on driving its economy through industrial investment and exports. Once you have that, you take the pressure off taxation on the consumer. That is the solution to the riddle and it is why the Germans seem to tax their industries more but, by running the economy at a higher level and generating more sales from exports, take the pressure off. They recycle a lot of the tax money back into industrial and infrastructure investment. They equate the basis for the industrial wealth that they tax—

[Kevin Foster]

I am listening with interest to some of the hon. Gentleman’s points. Does he agree that one of the issues that the German economy has, particularly in its industrial sector, is that many of its markets are locked into exchange rates by the euro? In more free-flowing economies and in previous exchange rates, it would have been able to devalue and so increase its competitive advantage.

[George Kerevan]

I am happy to agree with that point. The weakness of the euro is that across Europe it has locked the German supply chain into an artificially low exchange rate. On the back of that, Germany has generated a massive trade surplus, which it is not redistributing. That is undermining the whole European economy. I perfectly accept that. I was not arguing that the German economy is perfect; rather, I am suggesting that it is too simplistic to link the headline level of corporation tax with the performance of the economy, because we can find all sorts of examples that go the other way.

My real criticism, which I still direct to the Minister, is that the growth that the Conservative Government have trumpeted as their success is based on the shifting sands of consumer debt, which has now reached a level that cannot be sustained, so we need something else. We definitely do need to increase the level of industrial investment, and that requires a different set of fiscal tools in order to encourage consumer saving and recycle that consumer saving into industrial investment. That is the whole weakness that underlies the Finance Bill: it is a set of small measures based on the assumption that the economy will go on growing because consumers will go on spending. If they do not, the whole rationale of the Finance Bill falls apart.

I will now briefly move on to the second pillar, and the second strategic weakness, of the Finance Bill. In order to maintain the level of consumer spending, this Government have had to pass a series of pieces of legislation to bind their own hands when it came to raising taxes on consumers. If we do that, we then have to find money from somewhere else. Therefore, although this Bill contains a series of small tax rises here and there, in the aggregate what is happening is that this Government are being forced to start distorting the entire tax system because they have no other way to go but to invent new stealth taxes to maintain the level of income to Government.

The Clerks to the Treasury Committee came up with a rather interesting example on probate—the tax, if tax it be, on the probating of wills. The proposal for the levy on probating added to the cut in inheritance tax results in an anomaly. Where a father and mother leave a house to their children that is worth, let us say, £1 million and one penny, the inheritance tax is tiny—it works out at 40p—but the probate that has to be paid is £8,000. So in effect, cutting inheritance tax and replacing it with a probate levy gets us back to where we started. We can see that once we start down that road, we will go on increasing the levy on probate simply as a revenue earner.

That is not just happening with the tax on probate; it is happening in a whole series of small tax changes. By legislating to put a lock on income tax and other taxes, we end up having to raise revenue in a series of anomalous and distorting ways, and that makes the Finance Bill even more complicated.