Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Mary Glindon and David Gauke

Tuesday 12th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gauke]

The hon. Gentleman takes a somewhat simplistic view. His approach appears to be that he wants all probation services to be nationalised and every offender intervention to be done by the public sector. I think there is an opportunity to make use of both the private sector and the voluntary sector. If he takes the approach he appears to advocate of closing off any activity performed by anybody other than the public sector, we will not get the best probation service we could have.

[Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)]

3. If he will take steps to accelerate the roll-out of PAVA pepper spray to prison officers.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Mary Glindon and David Gauke

Tuesday 10th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gauke]

The decision about the magistrates court in Cambridge will be for me to make. I want to look at all the evidence and the representations that have been made, and I will make a decision in due course.

[Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)]

According to the Public and Commercial Services Union, there are almost 1,200 staff at the Ministry of Justice on poverty pay. Will the Minister support the union’s 5% pay claim for all public sector workers?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Mary Glindon and David Gauke

Tuesday 10th March 2015 Commons Chamber

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

4. What recent estimate Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has made of the amount of uncollected tax in the UK.

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Mr David Gauke)]

HMRC published its latest tax gap estimates on 16 October 2014. In 2012-13, the tax gap was estimated at £34 billion, 6.8% of total tax due.

[Mr Gauke]

The number I quoted a moment ago, 6.8%, is a lower percentage of tax due than was achieved in any year under the previous Government.

[Mrs Glindon]

There has been speculation that the Chancellor’s Budget next week will deal with tax avoidance and evasion, but there has also been speculation that by 2016 the number of staff working in HMRC will drop from 50,000 to just over 40,000. How do the Government expect to deal with evasion and avoidance if they are unwilling to properly resource HMRC?

[Mr Gauke]

Over the course of this Parliament, HMRC has brought in more yield year after year. If the measure is just on the number of staff, the hon. Lady will be aware that, when HMRC was formed in 2005, it had something like 92,000 members of staff and that by the end of the previous Parliament it had below 70,000. It is not about the number of staff. We are seeing a huge improvement in HMRC’s performance.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Mary Glindon and David Gauke

Tuesday 5th November 2013 Commons Chamber

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

T10. Will the Chancellor make a statement on why the decision has been taken to extend HMRC’s pilot of the new customer service model in the north-east by two months until the end of December?

[The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (Mr David Gauke)]

We want to look at the evidence further, so that seems to be a sensible approach; we want to see whether the model is working. The final decision has not been taken on whether to extend it. This is about improving the service for the people who need it most. We believe that that is an important objective.

Finance (No. 3) Bill

Debate between Mary Glindon and David Gauke

Monday 4th July 2011 Commons Chamber

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

My own Tory council totally ignored the Chancellor’s directive to give that money, and in the debate on the budget refused to give the £250 to our low-paid workers and said it had put in place a balanced budget that was in line with the Chancellor’s requests. What does the Minister think of that?

[Mr Gauke]

It is for local authorities to determine what they pay their employees, but we have given them the extra money to fund this, and we would like local authorities to fulfil the objective that we are achieving at national level. We do not control local authorities, but we can provide them with the funding, and we did that. Our intention was that all low-paid workers would receive the £250, but we do not—and should not—have the ability to mandate local authorities to pay their workers, and that is currently up to them.