Finance (No. 2) Bill

Mary Glindon Excerpts

Wednesday 9th April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Catherine McKinnell]

The hon. Gentleman is incredibly selective. If he genuinely believes that the policy will transform the Government’s appalling record on child poverty and the impact of their tax and benefit changes on women, he is deluded.

[Mrs Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a good case for the amendment. Only a third of families will get £200 a year extra, but the average family will be £974 a year worse off by the time of the next election, which shows the iniquitous state of affairs that the measure will create.

[Catherine McKinnell]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I would add that it is not a third of families who will gain from the policy—it is a third of married couples. Five in six households with children, whom many would consider to be families—particularly the Opposition, but perhaps not the Government—will not gain anything from the policy, which only compounds the child poverty issue about which the Government seem complacent.

--- Later in debate ---

[Cathy Jamieson]

When the last Labour Government introduced a bank bonus tax, one of the issues that we considered was behavioural change, but that behavioural change has not come about in the way that we might have expected.

Let me return to our proposal that these funds should be used to return 900,000 long-term unemployed young people to work. The rate of long-term unemployment has almost doubled since 2010. Government Members talk of the number of jobs that have been created for people in their constituencies, but the fact is that in most constituencies young people are out of work for extended periods—in some instances, for more than a year. A year in the life of a young person can make all the difference to the extent to which that young person will succeed in later life. We all know that if young people do not have an opportunity to enter education, employment or training when they leave school, that can have significant implications for their earning capacity and ability to look after themselves and their families in later years, and indeed can have a number of long-term implications for the state.

[Mrs Glindon]

The cuts in the bank levy and corporation tax over the last three years have cost the country nearly £3 billion. Given what that £3 billion could have done for the young people my hon. Friend is describing, it is a disgrace that it was not collected.

[Cathy Jamieson]

I am sure that, like me, my hon. Friend meets young people every day who are desperate to get into employment, and understands absolutely what additional funding would do to help that happen. Like many other Members, I organised a jobs and employment fair in my constituency recently, and it was humbling to see the number of young people standing outside the hall queuing up before it opened in the morning in the hope of obtaining an interview and the opportunity to put themselves forward to the employers who were there either for an apprenticeship or even for part-time work—anything to get them off the dole queues. If we look at what we could do through this bankers bonus tax to support those young people, I think it is clear that is well worth introducing.

Unlike the Government, we are not willing to sit back and do nothing while ordinary people are struggling with the cost of living crisis. That is why we are calling on the Chancellor to publish a report on the feasibility of reintroducing the bank payroll tax and using the proceeds generated to fund what we have called a compulsory jobs guarantee.

It is important to stress a point I made earlier: under the scheme we are proposing every young person out of work for more than 12 months would be guaranteed a job, and they would take that up or they would lose benefits. So there is both the carrot and the stick, because we think that is important.