Finance (No. 2) Bill

Mel Stride Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 19th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Dawn Butler]

My hon. Friend is right: I will indeed come to that issue.

As we approach Christmas, I ask the Minister to consider the impact that the Government’s policies are having. More than 128,000 children will be in temporary accommodation over Christmas, women’s refuges—as my hon. Friend has just said—are in crisis, and universal credit will leave people penniless and homeless over the Christmas period.

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Mel Stride)]

Nonsense.

[Dawn Butler]

It is not nonsense. I challenge the Minister to sit in one of my surgeries and hear that it is not nonsense.

The Government have made £28 billion of cuts affecting 3.7 million disabled people, and the additional caring responsibilities have fallen on the shoulders of women. It is the same with the cuts in social services—women take up the slack—and the pay cap, which hurts women more than men. Indeed, 86% of the Government’s cuts are falling on women. Labour Members are not the only people who are saying that. In June, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights said that the Government’s changes adversely affected

“women, children, persons with disabilities, low-income families and families with two or more children.”

If the United Nations can see that, and if Labour Members can all see it, why can the Government not see it and do something about it? The best policies are evidence-based policies.

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[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I rise to make my case to the five Conservative MPs on the Government Benches today. Inequality is an incredibly expensive business for everyone. I am pleased to see five fellow feminists sitting among the many of us on these Benches—

[Mel Stride]

Eight.

[Stella Creasy]

Goodness! The Minister says eight, but I can assure him that we have a good many more than eight feminists in total on this side of the House if he would ever like to test us. Our policies and our manifesto certainly speak to that fact.

The case that I want to make to the five men on the Tory Benches, given that gender inequality and equality impact assessments can sometimes be seen as special-interest issues, is that everything we are doing today is in everyone’s interest. Inequality costs us all dear. It holds everybody back in our society. Indeed, feminism is not about women; it is about the fact that power is unequally balanced in society so that 51% of those in our communities miss out on achieving their potential. That is what is behind new clauses 6 and 7. Good data help to drive good decisions. It is also good for Governments to follow their own policies. We have a public sector equality duty in this country, but the fact that the Government are not following it themselves makes it much harder for them to force other people to do so. Ultimately, we are here today to make the case that Britain will be better when we know more about the conditions that we face and about what impact policies are having.

Let me start with that cold, hard economic argument, because I am sure that the Minister, who once proclaimed his feminist credentials, already knows this, but I am not sure whether it has yet been put on the record. Bridging the gender gap would generate £150 billion in GDP by 2025. The economy has been struggling with a productivity problem for decades, and there is nothing stronger or faster that we could do to address that than to ensure that everybody in our society is able to realise their potential, but we should do more to help women in particular. We need to tackle the barriers and the discrimination they face that means they do not have that level playing field. Indeed, studies show the strong correlation between diversity and economic growth, so those who think that this is special pleading do not understand the maths behind the case Labour is making today. I would argue that the reason why they do not understand the maths is that we do not do the calculations, which is why it is so important to get the data.

Data is a good thing. It leads to difficult conversations. It makes us ask why, after the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970, we still do not have equal pay in this country. I was born after that Act came into effect, but if the current policy continues, I will be dead before we have parity. That harms us all, because the 14% pay gap between men and women is not stagnating, but growing. There will be women in our constituencies who are missing out on equal pay because we are not acting as a country. Having this kind of data helps us to ask why that is and whether Government policy is helping to minimise the gap or exacerbate it.

This is not just about gender. The gap is much worse for women from ethic minority communities. The pay gap is 26% for Pakistani and Bangladeshi women and 24% for black African women. This is also not just about ethnicity, because the same applies for disability and age. Only 36% of women in the constituencies of the Conservative male Members here will be getting their full state pension. When those women come to see those Members about the Women Against State Pension Inequality Campaign, they are coming because they have been living with poverty for decades. They are asking for help to make things right, because they do not want to be dependent on the state. They want a level playing field, but historical inequality in our society has held them back, and it is holding us back now. Having the data helps us to understand where that is happening and why. It would show us whether Government policies—individual Budgets—are going to make it easier to tackle that inequality, so that fewer women will come to constituency surgeries asking for a referral to a food bank, or whether they will make things worse.

If the Government want to tackle inequality, they need to know that data also tells us that this Budget, and the Budgets of previous years, are causing more problems. I do not doubt the sincerity of the five Conservative Members here or that they do want to tackle inequality in our society, but when I look at this Budget I do doubt whether they are going to be able to do that. This Budget will hit women 10 times as hard as it will hit men—13 times for women from an ethnic minority background. Going back to the equal pay issue, 43% of people in society do not earn enough to benefit from raising the personal income tax threshold, and 66% are women. We have unequal pay in our society, so 73% of the people who will benefit from changing the higher rate threshold will be male. Having the data and then looking at what is being done with tax and benefit policies will help us to understand just how much further this Budget is moving the goalposts for women and ethnic minorities. This applies to other policies, too. Corporation tax changes disproportionately benefit men, because we still do not have parity in the boardroom, in enterprise or in the number of women shareholders.

The lack of data also leads to bad decision making. As my colleagues have already set out, this Government have not done any equality impact assessments to understand just how far the goalposts are moving in getting to this House’s shared aim of an equal society. Tax information and information notes dismiss the issue and do not help Ministers to make good decisions. I am sure that the Minister, with his feminist soul, wants to make good decisions, but those assessments claim that there is little or no impact. Indeed, we do not even have TINs for all the policies that we know have a differential impact such as excise duty rates or fuel duty giveaways, because we live in an unequal society.

The lack of data also means that Ministers simply cannot come to the Dispatch Box and tell us that any concerns we may have about the differential impact of individual tax and benefit changes can be offset by the impact of other policies. If we do not know the impact of one policy, how can it be said that that can be offset by another? Even if we are concerned that men have received a windfall from Budgets for several years, it is simply not good enough for Ministers to try to tell us that women are being compensated through public services, because they cannot provide the analysis to show us that either case is true. Indeed, when we look at the impact of public service cuts—surprise, surprise—women, ethnic minorities and the disabled tend to be disproportionately hit again.

As I said at the start, it is also a matter of following our own laws. The public sector equality duty came into force in this country in 2011. It is a legal requirement, and it has driven some of these difficult conversations, whether in the Bank of England or in the BBC. It helps us to challenge everyone to do more to unlock the potential of every member of our society by reducing barriers and breaking down the discrimination that means, 40-plus years on, we still do not have equal pay.

If the Government themselves are not upholding their duties, what hope do we have in asking other organisations to do so? It is important to recognise that the legal duty is not passive. It is a duty not just to manage inequality but to do something about it. It is a duty to know the numbers before we make a decision so that we do not make things worse, as this Budget clearly does, and it is an ongoing duty that cannot be delegated. Ministers cannot leave it to a civil servant in the back office; they have to take direct responsibility. Crucially, it is a duty that, once a problem has been identified, the Government have to act, and not having the resources is no excuse for not acting.

The arguments Ministers are making against calculating the figures are not just about the practicalities, but they are completely surmountable. As the Women’s Budget Group, the Fawcett Society and the Institute for Fiscal Studies have shown, it is perfectly possible to make these calculations, and it is worth doing because it would help the Government to make better decisions. That it is possible to do it both for individuals and for households is important because, as my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) said, single parents, who tend to be women, are disproportionately hit by these changes. Even if the Minister were to quibble about calculating the figures across households, we could certainly see the impact we are having on some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

The reason why we have called it “lady data” is to try to help Ministers understand what they are missing and why it matters, but in truth this is everyone’s data. Getting this right and having that information would help us to make better decisions and would help us to understand why it will take us 100 years from today to have parity, so that women who are still struggling with unequal pay—including women in the communities of the Members to whom I have referred—can have some confidence that they may still live to see that wonderful day when everyone in this society is treated equally and so that people from ethnic minority backgrounds and disabled people living in poverty, and a poverty that is getting worse, can have some confidence that the Government are not ignoring them but understand where the challenges are and are considering a Budget that will do something about it.

Frankly, when we see the analyses that are being done, we know why the Government oppose new clauses 6 and 7. They do not want to do the maths because the figures tell the ugly truth about the inequality we have in Britain and its stubborn supporters, who unfortunately sit on the Government Benches. Jane Addams said:

“Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.”

We cannot take the journey to a more prosperous, more successful and more egalitarian Britain if we do not know the direction of travel. The numbers will give us the direction of travel, but it is the political will that will give us the way forward.

Ministers should not dismiss this case as special pleading but should look at the economic argument for why tackling gender inequality matters and vote accordingly today to put Britain on a better path, because everyone will be richer for it.

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[Mel Stride]

This Government are committed to equality. That is not to say that no further steps need to be taken—a situation that pertains perhaps to every Government who have ever been in office—but we have a strong record on equality. More women are in work than at any time in our history, at 70.8%. Last year, over 60% of growth in employment was through women joining the workforce. We have the lowest gender pay gap for full-time employment on record and we have taken action to ensure that companies with 250 employees or more will, from next year, be required to publish details of their gender pay gaps.

For those who are disabled, we are spending more than £50 billion a year on benefits for disabled people and those with health conditions. In the Budget, the Chancellor announced an extra £42 billion for the disabled facilities grant to encourage and assist those with disabilities into the world of work.

For ethnic minorities, when our Prime Minister assumed office last year, one of her first actions was to announce an audit into the differing impacts on ethnic minorities in terms of their use of public services. The report was published in October and will inform our policy going forward.

In the Budget, we increased the national living wage by 4.4% from April, which will disproportionately assist ethnic minority people. We are committed right across Whitehall to ensuring an increase in the uptake of apprenticeships and employment within our police forces and our armed services for ethnic minorities.

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way, but I am afraid he has to stop talking absolute guff when it comes to the national living wage. The Government continue to talk about a national living wage, but that is in fact a con trick because it does not apply to under-25s.

[Mel Stride]

It applies to a large number of people and there is the national minimum wage as well. My point is that the 4.4% increase in April will be well above inflation, and will disproportionately assist women and those from ethnic minority communities.

[Stella Creasy]

I thank the Minister for giving way and I am listening to the case he is making. If he is so confident that the Government’s policies promote equality, why is he against having an independent Office for Budget Responsibility equality impact assessment to tell us all the good news?

[Mel Stride]

I ask the hon. Lady to be a little bit patient, because I am coming to those very points shortly.

On assessments, we are required, under the Equality Act 2010, to take due regard of protected characteristics, but it is not just for that reason that we do so. It is not just for that reason that I and my fellow Ministers took those issues into account at every stage; it is because we believe it is the right thing to do and we wish so to do.

To come to the hon. Lady’s intervention, a number of reports are already out there. We have heard about tax information and impact notes. I do not think the Opposition should dismiss them. They did not mention the distributional analysis the Treasury provides and publishes at the time of the Budget, or the public expenditure statistical analysis, which looks at how expenditure affects different protected characteristics and runs to hundreds of pages in length. What the Opposition are calling for is fundamentally impractical. That is the heart of the matter and the answer to the hon. Lady’s question. Such analyses almost invariably focus on the static situation. They focus on the effect of tax and income changes on individuals without considering the behavioural changes they induce and the implications of changes in the wider economy, such as the level of employment. They are selective and tend to avoid focusing on those who benefit from public services or are affected by taxation. For example, the provision of childcare, social care and health services is normally exempt from such analyses.

The final point, which has been raised already and which the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) indeed recognised, is that where an individual’s income changes, that individual will almost invariably live within a household with other individuals. She said that the personal allowance increase for taxation disproportionately benefited men, but of course men often live in households with women, and income is distributed across the household. The same is true, of course, where a woman benefits and brings income into a household in which men are also present.

[Stella Creasy]

It is extraordinary that the Minister does not understand the concept of doing both individual and household analyses, or indeed behavioural alongside static analyses. There are many different ways the Government could be doing equality impact assessments. The problem is that they are not doing any.

[Mel Stride]

The hon. Lady is right: there are many ways it can be done, and the Government are indeed doing it in many ways. She need not only look to me for the observations I have made; the IFS has recognised my very point about household income. We will, however, continue to look at how we provide information and assess policies, and we will work with the ONS, as the Chancellor set out in the recent Budget.

In conclusion, the Government have a vision for a society that is equal, not in terms of levelling people down, but in terms of giving people the opportunity to go up. In yesterday’s debate on the Bill, the Labour party chose to vote against a measure to encourage young people to get a foot on the housing ladder. That is not acceptable, and that is an example of what we will do to promote equality of wealth and opportunity at every turn. I urge the Committee to reject new clauses 6 and 7.

[Dawn Butler]

The Minister referred to distributional analyses. The distributional analysis carried out by the IFS, the non-gendered and gendered analyses of the Women’s Budget Group, and others, such as those carried out using the Euromod tax-benefit model for EU countries, all share the same characteristic: they are static. The exact same method is adopted by the Treasury itself when it assesses the distributional impact of Budget measures in Budget and IFS documents. If the Treasury does not like other people using the model, perhaps it should not use it itself. The Government cannot criticise others for using the same method as them to analyse their own Budget.

The Minister said several times that the Government believed in equality, but their actions fail to carry that through. They say one thing and do another, and they are exacerbating inequality in our society. [Interruption.] The Chancellor says from a sedentary position, “Unlike the Labour party.” The Labour party is more competent than this Government have ever been in ensuring that this country is more equal. All the equalities legislation has come from a Labour Government—[Interruption.] Productivity, growth, all the equalities legislation has come under a Labour Government, not a Conservative Government. In fact, every time the Conservatives enter government, everything starts to go down. Food banks were not part of the Department for Work and Pensions scheme when Labour was in government. Period poverty was not part of everyday life for young women when Labour was in government.

I say to the Minister, “If you in any way believe in equality, you should not lead your merry men into the No Lobby. You should lead them into the Aye Lobby, and vote with us.”

Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.

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[Kirsty Blackman]

It is not actually a raft of new tax bands. As far as I know, it is one more band in the tax system with slightly different numbers for the pennies. But that is only in relation to income tax. Some 70% of people will pay less tax and 55% will pay less tax than they would in England. Does the hon. Gentleman believe, therefore, that the English system is taxing people unfairly compared to the Scottish system?

[Mel Stride]

I thank the hon. Lady for indulging me. She says that 70% of Scottish taxpayers will pay less tax, but will she accept the fact that that is largely due to the changes made by the UK Government in raising the personal allowance?

[Kirsty Blackman]

The Scottish Government’s new starter rate of 19%, rather than 20%, for the first £2,000 that people earn is really positive. It is an incredibly progressive taxation measure, and it is something that the UK Government cannot claim; it is something that the Scottish Government are doing.

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[Kirsty Blackman]

I thank my hon. Friend for his comments. I do, however, want to say one more thing on the Scottish tax system, so I hope he will indulge me.

The Scottish tax system is progressive. It is making a difference by ensuring that people who earn under £24,000 pay less tax. That is a positive measure and a good way forward. If members of the UK Government have concerns about the Scottish Parliament’s choices on tax, perhaps it would be better for them to support an increase in the block grant. They could also tell us whether they would cut the money that is going to be made up from the Scottish Government’s tax changes from education, local authorities or the health service.

I will bring the Committee back to tax avoidance. I am sorry, Sir Roger, for testing your patience slightly. The Scottish National party has been consistent in its criticism of Scottish limited partnerships. My former colleague, Roger Mullin, was like a dog with a bone; he would not let go of this matter. That was to his credit because the UK Government decided to make changes to the SLP regime as they recognised that it is massively used for tax avoidance and dodging. There was a review of SLPs, but we are yet to see changes as a result. Will the Minister let us know at least the timeline for making those changes in order to ensure that SLPs are no longer used as a tax-dodging mechanism? This is an important change that really needs to be made, preferably sooner rather than later.

Talking about the UK Government not working as they should regarding tax avoidance and evasion, the Panama papers and the Paradise papers have both been published in my time as an MP. It is very clear that the tax system—not just the global tax system, but even the system in the UK—is failing. It is allowing people and organisations to dodge tax. It is all well and good to talk about overseas trusts. In fact, this frustrates me a huge amount because the Government try to give the impression that overseas trusts are used by organisations such as rural churches in order to fix their roofs. It is not the case that they are used by organisations like that; they are used by people who are trying to dodge tax. We need the hardest possible line on that.

We cannot see the United Kingdom turn into a low-tax, deregulated tax haven. If the UK Government are deciding what kind of country they want the United Kingdom to be, they should not choose one that involves deregulation. With Brexit, they have the opportunity to put their stamp on the future, but I am incredibly concerned about the way that it will go. In bringing back control, some of the reins that have perhaps been put on the UK Government will be taken off and they will be free, for example, to take away the working time directive, and to make changes to our world-class social security system, fair society and good business practices. That is incredibly concerning.

We have called before, and we will not stop calling, for powers to deal with tax avoidance and evasion to be devolved to the Scottish Parliament. We believe that we would do a better job because we could not really do a worse one. We would put forward a fair and moral tax system and a general anti-avoidance rule in order to discourage people from dodging tax, and we would ensure that our tax gap was way smaller than the UK Government’s.

[Mel Stride]

This Government are committed to bearing down on tax avoidance, evasion and non-compliance like no other Government in history. While I have enormous respect for the hon. Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds), the shadow Minister, and I respect the spirited nature of her attack on our record, I am afraid she is misguided.

We have a strong record. We have brought in and protected £160 billion of potentially avoided tax since 2010 as a result of over 100 measures that we have brought in. We have, as we have heard in the debate, one of the lowest tax gaps in the entire world, at just 6%. Contrary to some of the suggestions from those on the Labour Benches, that is a robust and firm figure; it is described by the IMF as one of the most robust in the world. It is, indeed, produced by HMRC, but it is produced to strict guidelines set out by the Office for National Statistics.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

The Minister mentioned HMRC. One of the things the Government have done over many years now is to squeeze HMRC, which has fewer offices and not enough staff. Does he not accept that every single additional tax officer collects many times their own salary? If the Government were serious about tax collection, they would expand HMRC substantially.

[Mel Stride]

The hon. Gentleman may know that, in the last Budget, £155 million was set aside to be invested in HMRC, for exactly the activity that he has described. That is expected to bring in £4.8 billion through a further reduction in tax avoidance over the forecast period.

The other point I would make to the hon. Gentleman is that HMRC’s effectiveness is not all about having lots of regional offices staffed with tax inspectors. Tax is collected today using sophisticated intelligence-led and data-led techniques. We need to invest in that if we are to continue to achieve the outstanding results we are achieving at the moment.

We have borne down with penalties for developers and enablers of tax avoidance schemes. On the international side, our country has been in the vanguard of the base erosion and profit shifting project. We now have over 100 countries involved in common reporting standards, so HMRC can access information in real time to bear down on non-compliance in those jurisdictions. We have introduced new measures in this Budget in relation to clamping down on the abuse of overseas trusts. Since 2010, we have brought in £2.8 billion in additional revenues as a consequence of clamping down on the activities of UK residents hiding their wealth inappropriately in overseas trusts.

We have, of course, been the Government that abolished permanent non-dom status. I have to disagree, I am afraid, with the hon. Member for Oxford East, who suggested that if someone’s parents were non-domiciled, that in some way suggests that that person would not be subject to the rules we have brought in. That is simply not the case. If someone has been resident for 15 of the previous 20 years, they will be deemed domiciled, irrespective of who their parents happen to be.

New clause 8 suggests we should have yet another assessment. We have heard consistently in all the debates we have had on the Floor of the House on this Bill about having more and more assessments, but I would say to Opposition Members that we already have a robust figure for the tax gap. As I have said, it has been described by the IMF as one of the most robust in the world, and we certainly do not need even more information out there to prove just how successful this Government have been in bearing down on avoidance, evasion and non-compliance.

However, as a consequence of this Bill, we will go even further than we have to date. Clause 38 relates to online VAT fraud, and we will make online platforms jointly and severally liable where VAT avoidance occurs, extending that approach from overseas sellers to domestic sellers, and ensuring that they are responsible for supplying accurate and appropriate VAT information on their sites. That will raise £1 billion by 2023.

Clauses 11 and 12 will complete our work on disguised remuneration, and bearing down on that will have brought in £3.6 billion by 2019, when we will be closing down on those schemes.

Clause 42 ensures that where there is illegal landfill activity, we apply the tax that would have been in place had those activities been legal, bringing in a further £145 million. There are also the changes brought in by clauses 20 and 21 to address avoidance involving intellectual property within companies.

This Government have a record that is second to none when it comes to clamping down on avoidance, evasion and non-compliance. Labour had 13 years in which to implement such measures, and did very little. In fact, the tax gap under the previous Labour Government was such that if we had it today, we would be over £12 billion short every single year—enough to fund every policeman and woman in England and Wales. We will continue to bear down, as appropriate and with vigour, on tax evasion and avoidance to ensure a fair and civilised society where those who are due to pay their fair share do so, to support our public services. I urge the Committee to reject new clause 8.