Lord Tyrie
Main Page: Lord Tyrie (Non-affiliated - Life peer)
Mr Andrew Tyrie (Chichester) (Con)
I do not think that there is a great deal of concord in the House about that speech, but I think that there is some agreement across the House about a number of things that the Chancellor said. In fact, I think that there has been a quiet consensus in this place for steady deficit reduction ever since Alistair Darling’s Budget of 2010, and I am delighted that the Chancellor is persisting with that reduction.
Before picking up on a few of the measures, particularly those that affect small businesses, I want to make one point about overall fiscal policy. The Chancellor does not have much room for manoeuvre. He is pretty heavily boxed in, and I see him nodding in agreement. On the spending side, three quarters of public spending is covered by manifesto pledges, so every round of savings has to fall on a progressively smaller area, which makes it painful for it to absorb. On the tax side, he is just as constrained. In fact, he is even more constrained, because he has inherited the tax lock—the statutory prohibition on any reduction or increase in a number of taxes—and a commitment to reduce corporation tax to 15%. That puts over 80% of revenue beyond his reach should he need to raise more money later. Of course, there is also the fuel duty freeze—I think it is a freeze—that was announced in the autumn statement. All those tax and spending pledges are the fallout of an electoral bidding war, but dealing with that is a matter for another day.
I want to pick up on a few detailed measures that we just heard about, particularly on those, as I said, that affect small businesses, because I am particularly concerned about them. I was delighted to hear some good news, but first it is worth going through the list of things that small businesses are having to deal with at the moment: the doubling of insurance premium tax that was announced last year; automatic enrolment for pensions; the extra cost of the living wage; the infrastructure levy; the revaluation of rates—I will come on to the proposals that have just been announced in a moment—and the “Making tax digital” plan. In addition, there are the proposals for class 4 national insurance contributions.
Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)
The right hon. Gentleman is providing a good analysis so far. On the increase in national insurance contributions for the self-employed, does he think that the Chancellor needs to explain why he is breaking a 2015 general election manifesto pledge?
Mr Tyrie
The Chancellor set out his reasons quite carefully. He thinks that there is a strong argument for matching what people get out of NICs on the receipt side to the contribution side. I will look carefully at the hon. Gentleman’s point about the specific manifesto pledge, about which the Chancellor and I will no doubt have a further discussion when he comes before the Treasury Committee.
The Chancellor announced some quite important changes to “Making tax digital”, and we need to be clear about the problem that he seeks to address. Until today’s statement, several million people, mostly small traders, would have been required by law from 2018 to fill in their tax returns electronically for the first time. Some of those traders will not even have a smartphone, let alone a computer. The plan’s effect would have been to impose a massive, unfair burden on small businesses and some of the smallest traders, so it is good news that the Chancellor made a concession today, one which appears to be aligned with at least one of the suggestions made in a Treasury Committee report on this subject. The most important thing that the Chancellor is doing is keeping the starting threshold for another year at the VAT threshold of £83,000. That is the good news, but the not so good news is that the relief is only for a year.
May I ask the Chancellor to consider phasing in the lower threshold over a run of three or four years? He has suggested a lower threshold of £10,000, which seems extremely low—he looks puzzled, but he will find that that is what HMRC has been talking about. Dropping the VAT threshold dramatically from £83,000, or whatever it becomes, in one year strikes me as unreasonable. Of course I understand why the Chancellor is doing that—he needs the money—and I am sure that HMRC has told him that there is a huge amount of money waiting to be collected. He is nodding in agreement with that, too.
I think that I am right to say that HMRC previously suggested that £2 billion of uncollected tax is available, but I doubt that figure, and so does the Treasury Committee. If the Chancellor is brutal about introducing the measure, he might not got very much money. Some businesses will go into the grey economy, and some will cease trading altogether, so the pot of gold might not be there at all.
Wes Streeting
I agree with the right hon. Gentleman that merely delaying by a year is insufficient. Does he agree that the Chancellor should enact the Treasury Committee’s other recommendations and that, unless he does, today’s Budget will be good news for accountants and bad news for small businesses?
Mr Tyrie
The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful point, and of course I support his support for the proposals that we worked up together on “Making tax digital”. I will continue to make those points as vigorously as I can on behalf of the Committee, and I am sure that the Chancellor is listening. We should welcome his acknowledgment that the pre-existing proposals were not workable, and we have already had a bit of adjustment. Now that the door is ajar, perhaps we could have another conversation through the gap.
Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)
Like my right hon. Friend, I welcome the easing for businesses below the VAT threshold, but does he recognise that for those businesses over the VAT threshold, and they are not necessarily enormous businesses, that are struggling with some of the additional burdens that he mentioned, not least auto-enrolment, business rates and the changes to dividend taxation, particularly for owner-managers—I declare an interest as an owner-manager—accommodating the new system within the next 12 months will be a challenge and have a significant compliance cost?
Mr Tyrie
My hon. Friend, who is also a member of the Treasury Committee, makes the point that modest or slightly larger businesses will also find the bureaucratic burden introduced by the “Making tax digital” proposals pretty tough. The Committee has taken a lot of evidence on that. In the very long run, digital returns will be the future, but the question is how we get there. This is a generational change, and it is important not to sour relations between small businesses and the Revenue, which can easily happen if we hit small businesses over the head in the hope of getting a bit of extra money in years 1 and 2, or years 2 and 3. With a little more caution, small businesses can be brought into the system and yield a higher long-term revenue because we have their co-operation.
The second change—I will not linger too long on this because I lingered on “Making tax digital”—is to business rates. The Chancellor has announced a welcome relief for those businesses hit by revaluation. He has announced three concessions, which will cost quite a bit of money taken collectively. The concessions are not only important but essential. The small businesses that are being hit by the business rate changes are the lifeblood of the local economy in all our constituencies, and the measures will give them some relief from the pressure.
The Red Book suggests that the Chancellor might consider proposals for more frequent revaluation of business rates. I am pleased about that, because the big problem is the cliff edge created by revaluations every five or seven years. In a nutshell, we require both more frequent revaluation and quicker appeals. We need both. It cannot be beyond the wit of man to devise a reform that can deliver them.
While I am thanking the Chancellor, I thank him for agreeing, as he did when he came before the Treasury Committee recently, to publish the distributional analysis of the Budget measures on a basis comparable to that published in the last Parliament. The Committee will look carefully at the distributional analysis and other tax measures, and it will do so in a slightly more considered and less rushed way than we have in the past.
Mr David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate) (Con)
In the spirit of thanking the Chancellor, will my right hon. Friend join me in thanking him for saying on page 35 of the Red Book that he wants to consult on introducing a new duty band for still cider just below the 7.5% band that targets white ciders? Many Members on both sides of the House will know that white cider is particularly damaging to young people and homeless people, and the consultation is a great signal of intent that we will get to grips with the issue, so that we do not have this harmful, damaging and too-cheap white cider on our high streets and particularly in our off-licences.
Mr Tyrie
My hon. Friend has made his point, and he may well be right. I never talk about cider for long in the House of Commons because, whatever I say, I have always found that it results in a great deal of correspondence. I will avoid cider altogether.
I end on a couple of larger points about the backdrop to the Budget. The Chancellor is having to deal with two big risks. First among those, and by far the biggest, is the risk to the economic prosperity of our constituents and the stability of the west from the resurgence of economic nationalism. There is a bit of that in Britain and a great deal more elsewhere in the world. Protectionism has been on the rise for some time, and it is already affecting global growth. It is worth bearing in mind that global growth has been anaemic over the past five years compared with the average of the past 30 years, and that includes the effects of the financial crash. There is a big difference between those two numbers.
Global trade growth has been even weaker. Global trade is now declining as a share of world economic activity, and we should all be concerned about that. The link between prosperity and trade does not seem to have registered with President Trump, at least not yet. He has withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership looks to be in trouble. He has called the World Trade Organisation “a disaster,” and he is threatening to withdraw from that, too. But not the Prime Minister. She has made it clear that Britain should be the firmest advocate for free trade anywhere in the world, and she is right. If it were all to go wrong and we were to return to full-blooded protectionism, we would not have to look into a crystal ball; we could read the book of the 1930s.
Geraint Davies
Is the right hon. Gentleman disappointed, as I am, that the Chancellor did not mention that real wages and asset values were reduced at a stroke by 15% through devaluation? Although devaluation secures more exports in the short term, it will be offset by tariffs in the future. What are the prospects for trade when the single market hits us over the head with tariffs?
Mr Tyrie
I will end with a word or two about Brexit, but I will not comment on the exchange rate except to say that devaluation makes the country poorer, but devaluations can come and go. We need to look at it as a shock absorber that the market has put in place as a consequence of the Brexit decision and in a much more long-term framework rather than judging it, as we are now, so soon after the event. Brexit does pose the risk of a trade shock.
Mr Tyrie
If the hon. Lady will forgive me, I would rather wind up. I am sure she will want to make her own speech in a moment.
There certainly will be a trade shock if we revert to WTO rules, so I am pleased that the Prime Minister has made it clear that she is working for what she calls a “bold and ambitious” deal with the EU. Deep engagement, political and economic, from outside the EU almost certainly commands a majority in the House and in the country; cutting off Britain almost certainly does not. Hopefully all parties to the negotiations grasp the importance of securing a deal, but wanting a comprehensive deal and getting one in what will amount to 18 months of negotiations are not the same thing. Getting one will be a massive undertaking. Businesses know that, which is why many of them will not wait around to find out whether there will be a deal; they will protect themselves. They will start to move economic activity out before 2019 and the supply chains will start to adjust, too—to the UK’s detriment.
I shall make one further point. There is a straightforward way to safeguard the UK from the risk I have just described, and the UK must ask for it in the negotiations. It almost certainly requires only qualified majority voting, and it is available under article 50 of the treaty. The UK should make it clear, now, that after leaving the EU—that is, having repealed the European Communities Act 1972 —the UK’s first requirement is that a standstill on the implementation of the detailed terms of any deal should be put in place. That is a crucial ingredient to bring stability and certainty during the negotiations.
When the Conservatives first came into power in 2010, there was a 10% budget deficit, ballooning public debt and the second-lowest growth in the G7. That all amounted to a massive challenge. Now, the public finances are stronger—only after six years of hard work—but the two risks to which I have alluded could amount to a cocktail scarcely less difficult to handle, particularly if mistakes are made. The Chancellor has told us that he has taken a cautious approach by steadily reducing borrowing; I strongly support him in that, and he has my strong support to persist, even if he hits heavy weather.
Several hon. Members rose—