Rural Affairs

Debate between Louise Jones and Victoria Atkins

Monday 11th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

I will make some progress. The immediate impact of the changes, as my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) said in his intervention on the Secretary of State, is that farmers are already stopping capital investments in machinery, systems and buildings for fear that any improvements to their farms will send them over the cliff edge into this tax trap. So for a Government that claim to want to grow the economy, their choices are achieving the exact opposite. This family farm tax is a broken promise that will break family farms.

I move now to the second broken promise: the accelerated reduction in delinked payments. From next year, those vital payments will be substantially less than farms were promised. They cannot have foreseen that when they made their business plans. A tenant farmer has told me that he does not know how he is going to pay his rent next year, because the drop is worth more than £20,000. Can the Minister explain how this farmer should do more with less?

The third broken promise is the hike in national insurance for employers, of course. As the OBR has said, an increase in employer NICS will be passed “entirely” on to working people. I know that Labour does not actually know who it means by “working people” but the Conservatives are clear that it definitely includes farmers, their staff and the small businesses that support them, day in, day out.

[Louise Jones (North East Derbyshire) (Lab)]

The shadow Secretary of State says that she opposes the changes. Will she commit to reversing them, and which public services would she cut—for example, which NHS services?

[Victoria Atkins]

The hon. Lady is new to her place. As Financial Secretary to the Treasury I used to collect taxes for the United Kingdom and as the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care I used to spend pretty much all of them, so I know that the £500 million that the Government have score-carded this increase as achieving by the end of the score-card period will buy a fraction of what the NHS needs on a daily basis, let alone annually. If you believe the Whips’ handouts, the difficulty is that they sometimes get you into trouble.

For that matter, the phrase “working people” also includes our rural publicans. Labour Members are very proud of their Chancellor taking a penny off a pint. Yet any rural publican will tell you that will not even touch the sides alongside the NICs tax hike. Sadly, Labour’s jobs tax will see higher prices, fewer staff and more pub closures.

The jobs tax is also hurting our frontline services. GP surgeries, care homes, hospices, pharmacies and dental practices will all see their costs rise, and some will close. That hurts in a city centre, but it is devastating in communities who live with the impacts of rural sparsity, where it is more expensive to deliver services.