Public Sector Pay Policy
Debate between Luke Graham and Grahame Morris(6 years, 5 months ago)
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Grahame Morris
The hon. Gentleman is correct. I hope the Minister reflects on that and applies resources appropriately so that we can recover for the Treasury the maximum revenue from those who are avoiding paying their fair share of tax.
Grahame Morris
I will. I cannot refuse the hon. Gentleman as he gave way so many times.
Luke Graham
I thank the hon. Gentleman. I acknowledge that there is still work to be done on our tax code, but does he recognise that since 2010 a number of measures have been brought in to close tax loopholes, which have yielded some £5 billion in extra tax returns and tax revenue?
Grahame Morris
I recognise that efforts have been made to close the tax gap, but the publication of the Panama papers and various revelations indicate that it is much larger than had been previously estimated. In my humble opinion, it is counterproductive to get rid of skilled and experienced tax collectors employed at offices such as Peterlee in my constituency who have expertise in this field. We would be better off retaining that expertise and allowing those collectors to get on with the job we have trained them to do.
The imposition of pay restraint has compounded issues raised by the hon. Member for Glasgow South West and my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden) such as the generational pay gap and equal pay. The system includes discriminatory practices nearly 50 years after the Equal Pay Act 1970 and any Government should be ashamed that such problems are still evident.
It is clear from independent research undertaken by the Centre for Labour and Social Studies on behalf of the PCS that any increases in public sector pay would have to come from the resource departmental expenditure limits—the departmental budgets for current spending. It is disingenuous of Government to suggest that pay claims—even those recommended by independent pay review bodies—will be funded when the departmental expenditure limits do not reflect those awards. Departments as a whole will therefore suffer real-terms cuts to their resource departmental expenditure limits up to 2020. That falls way short of what is needed for a 5% nominal pay rise in the current year, and it fails to accommodate annual pay rises of 1%.
Given current projections of departmental expenditure, the research concludes clearly that any pay rise for public sector workers across listed Departments would have to come from cuts to jobs or to public services. It is a great deception. We must be careful with our language in terms of deliberately misleading anybody, but we should be straight about this. It is a cause of instability to promise constantly that the public sector pay cap is temporary when it is applied year on year. Eight years down the line, we still have effectively a public sector pay cap. In that time, prices have risen by 22%, but public sector pay has risen by just 4.4%. Wage freezes and the Government’s pay cap have lasted throughout that time, bringing financial misery to public service workers and their families and causing huge damage to services.