Margot James
Main Page: Margot James (Conservative - Stourbridge)Department Debates - View all Margot James's debates with the HM Treasury
(12 years, 6 months ago)
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Dr Whiteford
I shall not take another intervention; I am trying to conclude my remarks.
The Government had a chance to regain the confidence of pensioners after a long hiatus and much erosion of the position of pensioners over a number of decades, but they have squandered that opportunity. They are sneaking through these proposals in the fine print, claiming that they are for simplification. That undermines whatever confidence pensioners had left in them. On the streets of my constituency, people have been angry to see that what has been given with one hand as a modest increase in the state pension has been taken away from their occupational pension with the other hand.
We are leaving pensioners without any real incentive to save. We are not going to tackle the challenges of our changing demographics with that kind of attitude because people will question whether it is worth their while putting money aside for their retirement. I do not think that is a way forward, and I hope the Government will step back from this very regressive measure.
Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)
I welcome the Budget, which has been a Budget for enterprise and growth, and I would defend the reduction in the top rate of tax, which seems to be the Opposition’s main bone of contention. I think older people have a stake in the future of our economy just as great as everybody else. There is no doubt in my mind that the introduction of that 50p top rate of tax by the last Government—right in the last throes of the last Government—was extremely damaging to our country’s image as a place of business, growth and prosperity. I am glad that the Chancellor has taken the brave step of reversing it in part.
Katy Clark
The hon. Lady will be aware that the income of the very rich has increased by 20% over the last two years since her Government came to power. Politics is, of course, a question of choices. Does she not think that our choice should be to try to get money from those people rather than from pensioners on modest incomes?
Margot James
I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. I notice that she cited the last two years over which the incomes of the very wealthy have increased, but she might equally well have quoted the last 12 years of the Labour Government, during which I believe top earners did extremely well. It is a question of choices, and I feel that the Chancellor has made the right choice. In fact, it is a set of choices: it is not just a choice between one thing and another. I think it essential for this country not to be out of kilter with the rest of the world in terms of its top rate of income tax.
Margot James
I wanted to begin by setting the scene and explaining why I thought that the Budget represented a step forward, but as the debate is actually about the age-related allowance, I will make a bit of progress on that subject now.
Mark Field
I thank my hon. Friend. I entirely agree with what she said about the importance of promoting enterprise.
It was suggested earlier that 14,000 millionaires would benefit from the tax reduction. I am not sure how Labour Members arrived at that figure, but surely the notion that all our problems could somehow be solved if the rich paid their way is the nub of the issue. Given the relative scarcity of rich people in comparison with the vast majority of the electorate and as a proportion of the United Kingdom’s population of over 60 million, it is an absolute myth that we could solve all our problems by imposing heavy taxes on bankers and other rich people.
Margot James
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, which prompts me to remind the House that the top 1% of wealthy people in this country account for 30% of tax revenues. As my hon. Friend has pointed out, they constitute a very small segment of the population, and I think that if they are required to contribute any more than a third of the total, many will choose to go overseas where they will be taxed less.
Margot James
I want to make some progress on the main subject of the debate, which is the freezing of tax allowances, but first let me make a couple of other points. Labour Members did not mention that the other thing that the Budget has rightly done is take many people out of tax altogether by increasing tax allowances. I believe that that has benefited up to 24 million.
All this must be seen in the context of deficit reduction. There have been exchanges across the Chamber about parties’ manifestos. I stood on a manifesto that was all about getting some sense back into the public finances and reducing the outrageous deficit that was bequeathed to the current Government. The Chancellor’s central strategy to deal with that deficit involves 80% of spending cuts and 20% of revenue raising. Given that the Opposition oppose virtually all the spending cuts, would reduce VAT, and are proposing not to freeze older people’s allowances, we can only conclude that they are not serious about reducing the deficit, and in that regard they are grossly out of step with public opinion.
Fiona O'Donnell
Perhaps the hon. Lady will make the progress to which she referred and will begin to deal with the issue that represents the substance of today’s debate. May I ask her whether she made representations to the Chancellor before the Budget, asking him to freeze the age-related allowance?
Margot James
I did not make representations to the Chancellor on a matter as technical as the one that we are discussing. Having dealt with that point, I will now proceed to discuss the freezing of older people’s allowances.
I consider the term “granny tax”, coined by the media and exploited by the Labour party, to be very pejorative. As was pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin), it is also very inaccurate, as 60% of those who will be subject to the freeze are men. Moreover, this is not a new tax, although some sections of the media presented it as such. I do not see how the freezing of an allowance can possibly constitute a new tax.
It is unrealistic to suppose that older people should be immune from the need to contribute to reducing the deficit. My hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Ben Gummer) made that point very eloquently. Let me add a statistic of my own: the number of people aged 65 and over is expected to rise by 65% in the next 25 years to 16.4 million. Some of the measures that were introduced so many decades ago to the benefit of older people simply cannot be sustained in the current period of rapid demographic change.
Robert Flello
I would argue that pensioners are not at all immune to the effects of the Government’s policies, whether in terms of their cost of living or their access to the NHS, and almost all the pensioners I speak to also argue that. As a result of the allowance freeze, pensioners are paying more because their allowances are not increasing in line with inflation. They are being hit with a tax, therefore, and what really sticks in their craw is that they are being asked to pay this extra money at a time when it appears to them that millionaires are paying less.
Margot James
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comments, but I should not take any more interventions as other Members wish to speak.
Mark Field
It cannot be bad that a U-turn should come so quickly. Seriously, however, I wanted to make the point that there are some very poor pensioners in my constituency—it is more socially mixed than many colleagues might imagine—and they are suffering greatly. However, the message I get from many of my pensioner constituents is that they worry for their grandchildren. They worry about their opportunities and about the difficulties they will face in getting on the housing ladder and in having the quality of life that their grandparents perhaps took for granted. Many of my pensioner constituents understand my hon. Friend’s point that the burden of getting the deficit down must be shared across the generations.
Margot James
My hon. Friend has, in part, responded to the point made by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Robert Flello), and I was going to say that some 5 million older people will not be affected by this measure. We can split hairs on this issue, but I accept that the measure does amount to an additional payment. However, although the allowance freeze results in an increase in tax payable, it does so only by an average of £84 a year. I accept that that is not nothing, but it is a relatively small sum. The measure is raising so much money for the Exchequer by dint of the fact that so many people are in receipt of state pensions. The pain, as it were, can therefore be shared by many, and the resulting amount per person is very small. I apologise for the fact that I shall not take any more interventions, but so many other Members still want to speak.
To address the other point made by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South, the Government have a good record in protecting people on pensions. We have restored the earnings link. The Labour party had 13 years in which to restore the link, and Barbara Castle called for that every year until her death. We have done it. We have also secured it with the triple lock.
The hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) was ungenerous in arguing that we appeared to be proud of the inflation rate. If she had remained in the Chamber, I would have told her that that inflation has largely been driven by increased oil and commodity prices, which Governments have no control over. It is to the credit of this Government that they were brave enough to say, “We will increase the state pension by either 2.5%, the rate of inflation or the rate of earnings, whichever is the greater.”
Margot James
I am sorry, but I will not take any more interventions.
As a result of that Government pledge, there will be no cash losers from this allowance freeze. We have protected universal benefits, with the single exception of not renewing the temporary increase of £100 in the winter fuel payments. We have protected all the other universal benefits, however, as we promised to do. Some 600,000 of the poorest pensioners have received a warm home discount of £120 extra to help with their fuel bills. We have also frozen council tax for two years running. Council tax has been a bone of contention among older people, many of whom have been hit hard by increases in it over the past decade. We have also protected, and increased slightly, the budget for the NHS. As we all know, older people account for more of that expenditure than any other group and they will benefit disproportionately from the NHS budget increase.
I have already made the point that freezing this allowance will entail a cost of, on average, £84 a year. I accept that that is not a derisory amount for someone living on an income of just over £10,000 a year. However, 5 million pensioners will not be affected by this measure. In fact, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, an organisation that Labour Members sometimes cite, has said that the media coverage has lost all perspective on this matter, stating that
“you would think it’s doomsday for older people…I’m not sure. I think we’re losing perspective on phasing out the Age-Related Allowances”.
It makes a number of good arguments as to why it takes that view.
In conclusion, I must say that I have received very few critical letters on this subject from pensioners. The vast majority of older people in my constituency are more concerned with the prospects for their grandchildren; the average age of a new home buyer is now 38. They might not have read “The Pinch” by my right hon. Friend the Minister for Universities and Science, which was published two years ago, but he pointed out, among many other things, that those in the generation born after 1970 are the first not to be able to look forward to a better standard of living than their parents. That point is felt keenly by many older people in my constituency. Although they cannot easily increase their income, they accept that their grandchildren are facing a different future from the one they faced. Unlike the Labour party, they know that the alternative to facing down this deficit, with everyone making a contribution to that strategy, is the further impoverishment of their grandchildren, and that is not a price that they are willing to pay.
Graeme Morrice
I am conscious of the time, Mr Bone, so I will keep my speech short. May I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) on her excellent introductory speech? What she said clearly reflects the views of Labour Members.
The Chancellor’s granny tax is certainly the aspect of the Budget that has caused the most anger among my constituents. As we now know, the Chancellor’s plans, which were buried in the Budget smallprint and described as a “tax simplification”, will mean that 4.4 million pensioners who pay income tax will lose an average of £83 per year next April, with people who turn 65 next year set to lose the most, at up to £322. This measure will affect pensioners on modest incomes of between £10,500 and nearly £30,000, with pensioners on incomes above the higher threshold being unaffected by the change. The pensioners in my constituency I have spoken to about the granny tax are really angry about the Chancellor’s decision to hit them in this way. It seems obvious to them that it cannot be right that while putting up taxes for pensioners, the Government are giving the rich a tax cut. My constituents simply cannot understand why, after they have worked hard all their lives, the Chancellor is now targeting those on low and middle incomes in retirement in order to fund a tax cut for millionaires. As one constituent put it to me recently,
“I sincerely hope you and your colleagues do not support this granny tax and you fight for all our pensioners who worked all our lives to help this country. I am 71 years old and thought I had seen it all, but this is the pits, so do your job and kick this out.”