National Insurance Contributions (Employer Pensions Contributions) Bill

Debate between Mark Garnier and Caroline Nokes

2nd reading
Wednesday 17th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mark Garnier]

Indeed—our report, though it was published in May this year. It is a weighty tome. Even its title is pretty dry: “Understanding the attitudes and behaviours of employers towards salary sacrifice for pensions”. The Minister proudly told us that this document underscored the rationale for—[Interruption.] Oh—because it is important stuff. He told us that it underscored the rationale for capping salary sacrifice. However, having read the report, I can tell the House that it actually concludes that:

“All the hypothetical scenarios explored in this research”,

including the £2,000 cap, “were viewed negatively” by those interviewed. The changes would cause confusion, reduce benefits to employees and disincentivise pension savings. The report the Minister is using tells him not to do this.

The report also goes into why salary sacrifice for pensions is used by employers in addition to the incentive of paying into a pension, stating that extra benefits include: savings for employees, so that they have more to spend on essentials, tackling the cost of living crisis; savings for employers, which they can then invest back into their business and staff; and incentives for recruitment and retention. These are all good things—this is the stuff of delivering growth and the basis of creating a savings and investment culture. Why would this Government want to take it away?

The report came to the conclusion that of the three proposed options for change, the £2,000 cap is no more than the least terrible option. [Interruption.] The Minister talks about it being a secret plan—it is a published document. What is he talking about? It is the most extraordinary thing. He refers to it in terms that none of us recognises. But he has brought this in—this is the point. Is the Minister chuffed that his choice comes down to the least worst option for everyone? Here is the truth: it was the Chancellor’s choice to introduce this policy, and this Government are the ones implementing it—they are the ones who are in government.

Let us get to the measures and the impact of the Bill. To be fair, it is a very even Bill; there is something in it for everybody to hate. Take middle-income earners, who are typically in their 30s, and who earn on average a touch under £42,000 a year. This is the target area where the attack on savings starts. This is right at the point in life where people should be doing their very best for their future retirement. It is a perfect target market for the Government’s savings ambitions. However, it does not stop there. In total, at least 3.3 million savers will be affected, which is 44% of all people who use salary sacrifice for their pension. These are all people who work hard—people on whom the Chancellor promised not to raise taxes.

In fact, middle-income employees will be affected more than higher earners. According to the Financial Times, under the Bill, an employee who earns £50,000 and sacrifices 5% of that will pay the same amount in national insurance contributions as an employee on £80,000. If the contribution rate is doubled to 10% of their salary, the disparity grows even further, meaning that an employee earning £50,000 will pay the same amount in national insurance contributions as an employee on £140,000. How is that fair? The Government keep telling us that this policy will affect top earners, but the reality is that those on middle incomes will be disproportionately hit—the very people we should be encouraging to save more.

The Bill will also potentially hit low earners. Somebody who is lucky enough to get a Christmas bonus will not be able to add it to their salary sacrifice, taking advantage of any headroom, because the accounting looks at regular payments, not one-offs. [Interruption.] I am slightly worried, Madam Deputy Speaker, that the pairing Whip has a rather bad cough; I hope he gets better. This will potentially hit the 75% of basic rate taxpayers the cap supposedly protects.

Finally, the Bill hits employers. In the previous Budget, the Government absolutely hammered business. They increased employer national insurance contributions to 15% and, at the same time, reduced the starting threshold to £5,000. Businesses reacted and adapted. They were reassured by the Chancellor’s promise that she would not come back for more, yet here we are discussing further tax rises on businesses.

Let us look at the actual impact this raid on pensions will have on employers. According to the Government’s own impact assessment, it will hit 290,000 employers. A business highlighted in the 2025 report that

“If salary sacrifice were to go away, it would be additional cost of £600,000 to £700,000 per annum to the company in national insurance”.

While the Government are not abolishing it altogether, 44% of people currently using salary sacrifice—[Interruption.] I am worried; the pairing Whip is coughing. Anyway, there is going to be a cost, and that money will be taken away from businesses. This is going to be—[Interruption.] The Minister is chuntering from a sedentary position; he is obviously proud of what he is doing to the pensions industry.

Furthermore, the change will create administrative burdens for employers. With the current system, there are few administrative issues; the only thing that businesses have to bear in mind is ensuring that their employees’ pay does not fall below the national living wage—that is it. So what do the Government do? They go for the most complicated option that the report considered. That was explicitly stated by those involved in the research. As a pensions administration manager for a large manufacturing employer said,

“We’d have to reconfigure all our payroll systems and all our documentation. It would be a big job.”

The National Audit Office estimates that the annual cost on business just to comply with this Government’s tax system is £15.4 billion, yet the Government feel that the time is right to put more costs on businesses. I have to ask, what happened to the Chancellor’s pledge to cut red tape by a quarter?

I think I will move on to my conclusion in order to save people. [Laughter.] There was some great stuff in this speech, but I understand that people want to get away and wrap their Christmas stockings—particularly the Pensions Minister who, like the Grinch, is taking a lot of money away. To conclude, the Government should think again on this policy. People are simply not saving enough for their retirement. We need to do more to encourage them to save for their retirement. I know that the Minister would agree with that, so I hope that he hears the genuine concerns I have raised on behalf of a lot of people. Many people and businesses and are very worried about this policy, and he needs to take it away and think carefully about it.

Fundamentally, we are taking away something that is beneficial to the individual while also being tax efficient for business. Instead of encouraging the creation of incentives such as salary sacrifice or pensions, we are reducing the number. It is the wrong policy, and it sends the wrong message at the wrong time. All it does is add to the ongoing narrative that, “If you work hard to make a decent income, you will lose out. If you work hard as an employer to grow your business, you will lose out. If you try to save towards dignity and retirement, you will lose out.” It is the wrong policy to pursue and we will definitely vote against it tonight.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I remind Members that the knife will fall at 7 o’clock.

Domestic Abuse Bill

Debate between Mark Garnier and Caroline Nokes

Wednesday 2nd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire), chair of the all-party group on perpetrators of domestic abuse. I am sure that her work is extraordinary and really important.

I also follow the speech a little earlier of the Mother of the House, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), who talked about my constituent Natalie Connolly. Natalie Connolly, as she so rightly said, would be 28 years old now. She has a young daughter and she comes from a family of loving parents, loving grandparents, a loving sister and, of course, a loving daughter.

Natalie Connolly fell into a relationship with John Broadhurst in 2016. She was, I guess, impressed with him. He was a millionaire and she came from a relatively normal background. One Saturday afternoon, they went off to a rather extensive party. That evening, they were driven home by his driver. They went back to their house, which they were renting while their main one was being renovated, and indulged in intimate activities of an aggressive nature, which were allegedly consensual—I believe were consensual.

When John Broadhurst went to bed that night, he stepped over the bleeding, unconscious body of Natalie Connolly on the steps of their house and went upstairs, leaving her there. He came down the next morning, stepped across her now lifeless body, went and had breakfast, washed the car and called the emergency services, telling the police and paramedics that she was “dead as a doughnut”—which seems extraordinary.

Broadhurst was obviously charged with murder—the Crown Prosecution Service was going to maintain a murder case. The trial happened at the end of last year and was quite high profile at the time. The injuries that Natalie suffered were unbelievably extensive, extraordinarily intimate and, frankly, utterly, utterly brutal. She had lost a lot of blood from her injuries. But the problem was—this is where the law comes in—she bled into a carpet, so it was impossible to measure the extent of her blood loss. As a result, whether she died as a direct result of the injuries, or as a result of overuse of alcohol and possibly narcotics, could not be absolutely confirmed. The charges were therefore dropped from murder to manslaughter by neglect, owing to the fact that Broadhurst had left her behind to bleed to death overnight.

The problem was that to get this change of charge, someone had to sit down and talk to the family. I have met the family—an immensely kind and loving group of people. I sat down with them and we had a conversation about their daughter, who had been besmirched by this vile man. Their last memories of her will be of the court case—people discussing what he alleged about her and her hideous, unbelievable injuries. As I sat with this family, I looked at a group of people whose memories of Natalie should be of buying her first Snow White costume or Barbie doll when she was a child—all the stuff we want to do as parents who love our families. Being asked to understand the risk-balances of complicated legal issues put this family in an intolerable position, as they had to work out the right way forward to get a prosecution.

One of the unbelievably brilliant things about this House is that we are actually not divided when it comes to this sort of thing. The Mother of the House, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham, reached out to me before Christmas and said, “Are you aware of this case?”, so the two of us worked together. I am not a lawyer, so I do not particularly understand these legal issues, but she does; this illustrates how good we can be as a House. We visited the Attorney General to see whether there could be a retrial, but he said, “Actually, no. In this particular case, the sentence was right because of the reduction of the charge.” So together—actually, me being led by her and learning from her—we want to table a couple of amendments.

[Caroline Nokes]

My hon. Friend is making an incredibly important point, and I think it is imperative that he is allowed the time in which to achieve that.

[Mark Garnier]

I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend.

There are two points. The first is that “she was asking for it” cannot possibly be a defence when somebody dies. Apart from anything else, the individual does not have the ability to defend themselves, and their reputation is being destroyed in front of the people they loved, the people who care for them and their friends. That is absolutely wrong. The “Fifty Shades of Grey” defence cannot be allowed.

The second point is that victims’ families are not qualified to make the decision about changing the charge so that there can be a better chance of a conviction. We need people who are brilliantly clever at this—brilliant barristers who are brave enough to fight these cases on behalf of the victims. But what we can do is ensure that the decision is made by somebody who really understands the process, so that the Director of Public Prosecutions is the one who is consulted if a change is going to be made in a case pertaining to this type of injury and homicide in a domestic abuse setting. In that way, these families will get the support they need.

Natalie Connolly would have been 28 now, with a young daughter growing up in a warm family, but she is no longer with us. If there is any way in which we can remember her, we have to do something to make sure that this can never happen to anybody ever again.