Lindsay Hoyle
Main Page: Lindsay Hoyle (Speaker - Chorley)Department Debates - View all Lindsay Hoyle's debates with the HM Treasury
Amendment of the Law
Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts(12 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Foster
I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman has looked at the detail of the OBR’s calculations, but if he does he will see that the additional money going to pensioners totals £1.75 billion and the cost of the removal of the age-related allowance is £360 million. That means a net increase to pensioners—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. The hon. Gentleman has made his speech and there are many Members who will not get in. It is fine to intervene, but I certainly do not want a second speech.
Mary Macleod (Brentford and Isleworth) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Blyth Valley (Mr Campbell), who is passionate about his enterprise zone, unlike the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), who went on a tirade of negativity about growth and business in this country. In the House hon. Members should be talking up British business to encourage people to invest in this country because it is a great country to invest in.
Even in these difficult economic times there are some great news stories in the national economy. London has retained its status in the global financial centres index as the best place to do business, ahead of New York, Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo. Business confidence has jumped to a nine-month high, according to a confidence index by BDO accountants group. This confidence index leapt 3.9 points to a score of 98 in February. Over half of members polled by the Federation of Small Businesses expect to grow in the coming 12 months.
West London is the place where I want people to invest. In my local area, Brentford and Isleworth, there are great local success stories of growth. Aker Solutions, which provides engineering and construction services to the energy, mining and power generation industries, has come back to the UK to Chiswick, and the reason is the highly skilled work force. International SOS has started up in Chiswick, helping organisations manage health and security risks. Otis, QVC and Swarovski are all moving to Chiswick. Starbucks headquarters in Chiswick has announced a major apprenticeship scheme to help young people get into work and develop skills for the future.
BSkyB, based in Osterley, has major expansion plans, with an increase in the number of jobs based there and an extensive programme of increased work in schools, developing skills and aspiration for the future. Fullers Brewery, London’s last remaining traditional family brewer, announced revenue figures up by 6% in its half-year results in November 2011 and like-for-like sales growth of 3.9%.
My hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) spoke about banking, and I agree with what she said, but Handelsbanken has already moved into my constituency and Metro Bank is about to open in my constituency. In the jobs fair that we are having on Friday in Isleworth there are hundreds of jobs available to people who are out there looking for work.
I applaud the Government for the fact that the Budget was one for business growth and exports. Corporation tax is dramatically down and is now lower than in the US, Japan, France or Germany. That is what will make us more competitive than ever before. We are backing potential winners—for example, through tax relief to the video games industry, which will help Sega in my constituency and other similar organisations. Helping companies export is key to growth in the future. Lord Green has been doing a lot of work at a local level as well to encourage businesses to expand abroad. If we exported more, more than £36 billion could be added to our UK economy.
This is also a Budget for small and medium-sized enterprises, encouraging investment and creating an enterprise-led recovery. The national loan guarantee scheme, the enterprise management initiative scheme, the enterprise investment scheme and the seed enterprise investment scheme will help small businesses, and we have helped to simplify tax for so many small businesses. I encourage the Government to do more for SMEs by simplifying employment legislation, as we are doing, helping small companies bid for Government contracts and keeping that process as simple as possible.
This is a Budget to encourage young entrepreneurs. Enterprise loans, which we heard about in the Budget, will help young people believe that they can aspire and set up a new business. It does not matter what age they are; they can do it and achieve great things in business. Linked to the work that we have been doing to try to get more women on boards in the City, we need to encourage more female entrepreneurs. If women were setting up businesses at the same rate as men, we would have 150,000 more businesses.
In conclusion, Britain is a great place to do business. The signs of change are being seen locally and nationally. Each Member can do their bit for growth by helping to build aspiration in schools and/or in businesses. This Budget will deliver real results for this country and allow British business to grow and succeed in the future.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Before I call Mr Jim Cunningham, let me say that I do not want to drop the time limit any more, but if each Member could be generous to others and shave a little bit off their speeches, we will try to make sure that we get everybody in.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
I will try to be as quick as I can, but I want to highlight some of our concerns. In response to the right hon. Member for Bath (Mr Foster), who flung out a challenge about where the economic crisis started, I am sure he knows that it started in the United States. People will remember Fannie Mae and Lehman Brothers, for a start. How he thought the then Labour Government could tell the American Government what to do beats me. He should also remember that George W. Bush, the outgoing American President, who would be a Conservative in our terms, pumped $260 billion into the American economy.
I remind the right hon. Gentleman of that, but more important to me is the effect of this Budget and previous Budgets on the west midlands, where one in 10 people are unemployed. There has not been any coherent effort or real strategy from the Government to do anything about the restoration of manufacturing. If the Government point to what is happening at Jaguar, let me make it clear that that was well and truly under way under the Labour Government. At that time, we had a stimulus and we also had a scrappage scheme. That set Jaguar on the road and enabled it to recover. Incidentally, Jaguar is not doing very well in this country, but its exports are doing very well, as are those of other motor car companies. That is not a result of anything that the Government are doing here.
The Government’s new idea of driving down regional pay is a concern to many west midlands colleagues. I always thought it was a good thing to lift people up, not to take people down. The measure reflects the Government’s thinking on economic policy and the regions. At the same time, they are cutting public sector salaries and they are cutting pensions. Salaries have already been cut by inflation and workers will be hit very hard. The Government are also reducing the money going to local businesses, which rely on pay increases to revamp the local economy. From the perspective of Coventry and the west midlands, there is no change in the policies of this Government. The policies pursued by their predecessors in the 1980s have been dressed up with a different veneer, but it is the same old approach.
Police and fire services in the west midlands have been cut. It is difficult to get information about what the police and the Government mean by outsourcing. As I have always understood it, outsourcing means buying in goods and services. Leaving the police aside, does that mean that other services are to be privatised? We cannot get a clear answer on that. Over the next four or five years we are going to have a 25% cut in the fire brigade. That raises questions about the quality of services that will be delivered.
A large number of families in my constituency will be hit hard. More than 12,000 families claiming child benefit will either lose it or be affected by the freeze. There are 360 families who will lose their tax credits. Tax credits cut, child benefit taken away, and fuel duty rising—before the general election, this was the Government who were going to do something about fuel duty. Instead, they have started to increase it, which may affect the purchasing power of pensioners and families up and down the land. That means, in effect, that their standard of living will be drastically cut as the increase feeds through to food prices. The latest gimmick is VAT on hot food. Will that be extended in next year’s Budget to VAT on clothes and other goods that people buy? I am worried and chary when the Government start to go down that road.
In Coventry, we saw an 87% increase in long-term youth unemployment last year, and slapping VAT on regular purchases sends out a very sinister signal indeed. I have tried to cut my speech down as much as I can, so there are some issues that I shall not raise. The granny tax has been well documented, and I shall not go into it again tonight. In the west midlands, there are 390,000 income tax payers over the age of 65. Whatever did the pensioners do to the Tory party—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. The hon. Gentleman cannot be made to give way, so the hon. Lady must resume her seat. It is up to him.
Paul Uppal (Wolverhampton South West) (Con)
The Budget and the coalition Government will ultimately be judged on how well we recover from the economic mess left to us by the last Labour Government, many of whose Ministers occupy senior positions in the shadow Cabinet. To quote the Prime Minister, the coalition will
“give our country the strong, stable and determined leadership that we need for the long term.”
That is something that I often argue about in this Chamber. There are many ways in which this Chamber divides. In essence, I am a passionate believer in the long-term view, as opposed to the short-term view. There is more to do and more that we can do, but the Budget continues the work that the Government have done in their first two years and shows that we are building the long-term foundations that the economy needs.
That was demonstrated by the World Economic Forum’s most recent competitiveness report, which returned Britain to the top 10. It cites the lack of access to finance as one of the top factors that discourages business. I will make two points about that. I am pleased to see the extension of the enterprise finance guarantee, which will ensure that we get finance for the small and medium-sized businesses that need it the most. Secondly, it is good to see the details of the business finance partnership, which involves co-operation between the public and private sectors in lending directly to mid-sized businesses.
The Budget gives our economy a strong and stable long-term future by addressing the factors that are contrary to growth and that are thus making Britain uncompetitive in an increasingly crowded global marketplace. By reducing the complexity of our tax code and the rates at which businesses are taxed, we are signalling that we are again in a position to build on what Britain does best: creating innovative products that are attractive to consumers on the world stage. The Chancellor has shown the leadership that we need for the long term by aiming to double exports to £l trillion by the end of the decade. We have demonstrated that we are not only rebalancing the economy from public sector growth to private sector growth, but rebalancing our trading position to one that is led by exports rather than imports.
The Government are expanding UK export finance and setting out new plans to help smaller firms in new markets. We are right to concentrate on the BRICs—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—because they account for more than 40% of the world’s consumers and because, in recent decades, rising incomes in those countries have created a growing aspirational middle class. It will not be an easy task to get British products into the homes of those people. A recent letter to the Financial Times illustrates the problems that we face in exporting British products to those developing and expanding markets:
“Last month we had an opportunity to export some of our UK-manufactured products as we were more competitive than a Chinese competitor, only to find that there was a 22 per cent import duty to add to our cost, taking away our advantage. Yet when Chinese goods are brought into the UK there is no duty to pay.”
We are right never to allow protectionist rhetoric to creep into our political system, but we must also continue to challenge protectionism abroad. We must continue to work with our trading partners to negotiate fairer treaties and, where necessary, submit complaints to the World Trade Organisation and similar institutions.
By pushing for the abolition of import duties and the liberation of foreign markets, we are again building the foundations of an export-led recovery, with job creation, sustainable investment and economic growth. It is right that the Budget focuses not just on short-term gains through artificial stimuli, but on proper policy planning to assess the barriers to growth and tackle them head-on.
Many Members have said that there are winners and losers from the Budget. They are right. The winners are common sense, long-termism and opportunity. The losers are those who try to make political capital and who always take the short-term view.
Jim Shannon
I thank the hon. Gentleman. Does he feel, as I and many people outside the House do, that as the threshold for a single person will be approximately £50,000, which will affect their tax credit, but for two people earning £40,000 each there will be no cut to their—
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. If you want to put your name on the speaking list, do so by all means, but interventions have to be short.
Graeme Morrice
I agree with the hon. Gentleman.
The aspect of the Budget that has undoubtedly caused the most anger among my constituents is the decision to freeze the personal allowance of pensioners, which will help subsidise the Chancellor’s bumper tax cut for the rich. Buried in the Budget’s small print, the Government tried to make out that that was a tidying-up exercise, but nobody is fooled by that. The public are clear that it is actually a £3 billion tax raid on pensioners. No wonder it was the only aspect of the Budget that was not leaked in advance. In Scotland, there is a song that goes:
“Yi canny shove yer grannie aff a bus”—
the reason being, the song explains, that “she’s yer mammy’s mammy”. It seems to me that the Tories are quite happy to forgo a compassionate approach to our collective grandparents by shoving them all off the nation’s bus.
How will the Chancellor’s tough talk about cracking down on tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance, which he says is morally repugnant, be put into action if the resources provided to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs continue to be cut, including 240 processing jobs at Pentland House in my constituency?
Finally, on growth and jobs, it has become increasingly clear that the Government are failing to deliver for business and drive forward growth. The reality simply has not matched up to the rhetoric, with record unemployment and flatlining growth. When even the Business Secretary describes Government initiatives to drive forward growth in key technologies as “rather piecemeal”, we know that they are in deep trouble.
My constituency has an excellent track record of attracting and sustaining innovative high-tech employers, but I know from speaking to some of those companies that they are frustrated by the lack of Government support and strategy. Many of them are doing well overseas and would like to expand and recruit new employees, but the toxic mix of a UK Government who are failing to create a supportive environment for sustained growth and a Scottish Government stoking up economic uncertainty with their obsession with breaking up the UK is making many firms think twice. Labour’s five-point plan for growth offers an alternative vision, and if the Government followed our advice and implemented a £2 billion tax on bank bonuses to fund 100,000 jobs for young people, we would begin to see some progress in tackling the scourge of youth unemployment.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. I am going to drop the time limit to four minutes, because we have 30 speakers to get in. If some Members wish to withdraw I will leave it at five minutes, but that does not seem to be the case. I am trying to be fair by everybody, and I say to Members who keep intervening that trying to be fair to each other would be very helpful.