Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Geraint Davies(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. Sixteen people want to speak in the debate, as well as those on the Front Benches. Those who are intervening also want to speak, and they are in danger of dropping down the list. I am trying to keep the debate tight, so I hope Members will think about their interventions. It is up to Geraint Davies whether he gives way to Mr Spellar.
Cost of Living
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Geraint Davies(11 years ago)
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Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. You also want to speak, Mr Davies. You are constantly on your feet. I want to hear Mr Leslie. I also want to hear what the Government have to say. I will not hear either of them with the amount of time we have taken so far.
Finance Bill
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Geraint Davies(11 years, 5 months ago)
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Geraint Davies
I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s enormous generosity in giving way again. Is she aware—I am sure she is—that property prices in London have grown so much that some local authorities have greater asset value than the entirety of Wales? Therefore, the mansion tax is a sort of cap—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. Mr Davies, you were right when you said that you have intervened a lot. I do not mind you intervening but please do not take up so much time that you are almost making a speech.
Housing Benefit (Under-occupancy Penalty)
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Geraint Davies(11 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. I should have reduced the time limit but did not, on the off-chance that there would not be too many interventions. I warn Members that I will now have to reduce it, and if they are upset it is due to the number of interventions.
Geraint Davies
In a nutshell, the cost of reducing the tax threshold by £1,000, which gives taxpayers £6 a week, is £5 billion, 10 times what is being saved here. If someone who is very poor looses £7.50 a week through the empty bedroom tax, someone else is being given £6. Does that not illuminate the Government’s priorities: hitting the poor and letting the middle class off?
Jobs and Social Security
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Geraint Davies(12 years ago)
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Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. There is a danger that those who wish to make a speech later will not be able to do so. I am sure that the hon. Lady understands that if she does not have an opportunity to make a speech herself, it will be her own fault.
Geraint Davies
As has already been said, the tax affects those with particular problems such as disabilities. If one half of a couple is ill with flu and, because the couple are allowed only one bedroom, that person infects the other one, it will not help the other one to work. None of this has been thought through. The idea seems to be that such people live in council houses and receive benefit and that the Government will sort them out by cutting it, but what they are doing is preventing them from working and making their contribution.
The Government also say, “Let’s cut working tax credit.” Working tax credit was an ingenious device. If I were starting a small business—indeed, I have started and run small businesses—I might be able to give someone a job paying £12,000 a year because of the way in which the business worked, but that person might not be able to afford to work for less than £15,000 because of, for instance, child care costs. The Government stepped in and stumped up the difference. What did we end up with? A growing company and a job, instead of a company that was not growing and a person stuck at home. That is the economic logic of working tax credit, but it is being cut, so part-time workers are losing £3,750 a year if they do not work for 18 hours and go down to 16 hours, as there is not enough work to do. We need to evaluate keenly whether some of these nasty cuts deliver economic disincentives to working and are therefore counter-productive in getting the deficit down.
There are ways ahead, including targeted investment involving universities and various job programmes. Other Members have spoken of the effectiveness of the current scheme, but, as I mentioned earlier, the Prime Minister has confirmed the statistic in our motion, namely that only 19,000 people out of 800,000—2%—have gone into full-time work. That is in sharp contrast to what the Secretary of State said earlier, so someone must be wrong. We should refocus, by making sure that the changes do not disrupt job creation and that they are fair and put us back on track for a strong economy and a fair society.
Infrastructure (Financial Assistance) Bill
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Geraint Davies(12 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. May I make a quick point? The hon. Gentleman is making a lot of interventions and obviously wants to speak later in the debate. If he moves down the list of speakers, I presume he will understand why.
Women (Government Policies)
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Geraint Davies(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Geraint Davies
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown that something like a third of the deficit was excess investment—
Amendment of the Law
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Geraint Davies(13 years, 8 months ago)
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Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)
I am pleased to say that this morning we had a coalition ground force moving into Swansea in a dawn raid at 8.30 am, with the Business Secretary alongside the Secretary of State for Wales talking in the chamber of commerce, and they had a great deal of local resistance from people with placards and the like. In Swansea, 40% of people in public services are facing cuts and unemployment, and we have been denied electrification by the Government, which would have meant inward investment in Swansea. In addition, Tata Steel has just had a bomb dropped on it about the new carbon tax, which will focus only on its facility in the UK and not on those in any of the other 20 countries in which it makes quality steel. Obviously, it is a very valuable employer in the area.
The people resisting the Secretaries of State this morning were similar to the hundreds of thousands who marched in London on Saturday. Who were those people? They were nurses, doctors and teachers—people who keep our work force healthy and educated. They were tax collectors who face losing their jobs—people who are supposed to be collecting tax more efficiently. They were police officers, who are meant to patrol and police, as well as look after the riots and protests being incited by the cuts. They were small business people who are clearly concerned that the Government’s attitude to small business is, “If you make a loss, sell your tools,” as opposed to achieving growth through increased sales. They were service users—people who face cuts in libraries, leisure centres, pools, centres for the elderly, Sure Start and so on. The people on the march had one common cause—that there should be an alternative mix of growth, tax, cuts and timing that is optimal to confront the deficit before us.
It is worth reminding ourselves that the deficit did not come out of some sort of Labour inadequacy. It was the price paid to avoid a depression caused by the banks. Two thirds of the deficit—£84 billion—has been evaluated by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and others as being the impact of the financial disaster that we imported from sub-prime debt. The fiscal squeeze on which the Government have embarked is about £98 billion, more than the overall financial crisis. That is to take place over four years. The question is whether, if there is a massive outside impact on the country’s financial deficit, we can hope to get rid of that and more within four years without disrupting our economic capacity and social fabric. Should it be the case that three quarters of that is cuts and only one quarter is tax?
The OBR has reached its verdict. It has had to change the growth forecast from 2.6% to 1.7%, which shows that less revenue will come in from people working, and the Government will have to rely more and more on savage cuts. There is an alternative, the Labour alternative—to halve the deficit in four years rather than get rid of it completely, and to use three methods instead of just one, cuts. The three methods are to focus on growth, make the bankers pay their fair share and make savings over time. Germany, for example, is clearing its deficit through export-driven growth, rather than focusing on cuts.
I was over in Germany. I went to UK Trade & Investment, which markets Britain for inward investment. There are lots of German companies queuing up to invest in Britain. Those offers were put on a computer platform for regional development agencies to draw down, but because the RDAs have been abolished, those inward investments are not being taken up and are going to other countries. German regions, let alone the whole country, have offices in Seoul and other emerging markets and are trading and getting inward investment there, and we are not. We are undermining our ability to grow. Instead of a budget for growth, we have cuts.
Growth went negative in the last quarter of last year. Why? Because consumer confidence, the inclination to spend, and investment confidence were washed away by the talk of austerity and the reckless, breakneck speed at which the cuts were made. In addition to the 300,000 people who are to be sacked from public services, PricewaterhouseCoopers says that another million jobs will be lost in the private sector, costing around £7 billion in lost tax and benefit costs per year. Add to that the £4 billion that we have to spend on restructuring the NHS to help privatise it, and the other costs of unnecessary structural change at a time of shrinking budgets, and we can see that this is economic incompetence at its worst. It is not necessary in its current contortion, it is not fair and it is not sensible.
The key issue on banks is that they need to provide liquidity to small business as the engine for growth. We all heard about Merlin, but the question is whether that will be delivered. Sadly, a person in my constituency is on hunger strike over the issue. Finally, people may not have noticed the 3p reduction in inheritance tax given to bankers, who are now paying a smaller proportion. If they give money, for example through works of art, we can see from the fine detail—
European Union Bill
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Geraint Davies(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)
How does the hon. Gentleman reconcile his call for sovereignty of the House with the fact that, on 1 January, we saw established the European Securities and Markets Authority in Paris, the European Banking Authority in London, the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority in Frankfurt and the European Systemic Risk Board, all of which trump national organisations such as the Financial Services Authority and the Bank of England? Is this not an unreal debate? This is happening now and is constraining our action, and none of these amendments will make any difference to the fact of those constraints.
The Chairman
Order. It would help if the hon. Gentleman could try to shorten his interventions.