Budget Resolutions

Michael Fallon Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sir Michael Fallon (Sevenoaks) (Con)]

I hope to find an early opportunity to speak out on what is the right level of defence spending to meet the threats that our country faces, and to do so more freely than the constraints of government allowed, but today I want to focus on the Budget before us. It is the first Budget of this Brexit Parliament, and I warmly welcome it.

It is extraordinary that we still have no answers from Labour Front Benchers on the amount of additional borrowing they would undergo, or indeed, 24 hours later, on the amount of additional interest that they are prepared to rack up. Those are legitimate questions. This is not trite journalism. A shadow Chancellor should be able to tell the House exactly how much more he would be spending and borrowing.

I particularly welcome the additional money for the national health service and the measures for long-term investment in our infrastructure, but that long-term investment will need to be accompanied by other and deeper structural reforms. How can we be encouraged to save again rather than to spend on credit? How can we reverse some of the more pernicious side-effects of quantitative easing, which seem to benefit those who already hold significant assets?

The fall in unemployment has probably been the greatest single achievement since 2010. Unemployment has fallen not because of one single policy, but because of the cumulative reductions in taxation and regulation that have taken place over the last seven years, almost every one of which was opposed by Labour Members. The 5 million small businesses and nearly 5 million self-employed people are the real wealth creators. They are the people who work every hour that God sends, and who invest—and risk—their own money to create, in turn, the tax revenue that funds our public services. I hope that, over the current Parliament, we will continue to cut the form-filling and let them keep more of what they earn.

There are four areas in which I hope we can make even more progress. The first is low-paid work. No Government have done more for the low-paid than this Government, who have introduced the national living wage and taken so many more people out of tax altogether, but we need to keep going. Is it logical to go on raising the personal allowance but not the national insurance threshold? A full-time worker on the national living wage pays almost as much in national insurance as in income tax. Those who are working part-time—for example, 25 hours a week—and earning between £8,000 and £11,000 a year miss out as we raise the thresholds. I hope that Ministers will look at that again.

Secondly, I particularly welcome the steps to tax the global digital companies more effectively.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend acknowledge the leadership of the Government of which he was a part in driving that particular agenda internationally?

[Sir Michael Fallon]

I certainly recognise that, and it is important for these matters to be approached internationally.

Our constituents do, of course, benefit from the greater convenience and efficiency that digital retailers provide, but it cannot be right for our high streets, small shops and local businesses to bear all the pain of local rates while giants such as Amazon pay rates on a handful of warehouses. Their staff, too—Amazon staff, Google staff and Facebook staff—need well-funded schools, good local services and a proper NHS. It is right that they should pay their proper share of local and national taxes, and I applaud the steps that the Chancellor is taking down that path. One nation should mean one economy, for large and small businesses alike.

Thirdly, if we want to be one economy, more of our people should have a stake in it. In the year when Margaret Thatcher left office, 11 million adults in our country held shares. Today, although the population is significantly larger, only 8 million do so: a quarter fewer. When I privatised Royal Mail, I offered free shares to each of its 150,000 employees. Despite union advice—or possibly because of union advice—99% of the employees took up the offer. We deliberately skewed it towards small investors, and, as a result, 20% of Royal Mail is now owned by its staff and by small investors.

That is what we should be doing with all our remaining shareholdings, including the banks and the new social enterprises, and we should go further. Employee-owned companies are more productive and more profitable. Is not higher productivity the golden fleece for which Ministers keep searching? We need not just one John Lewis Partnership, but 1,000 John Lewis Partnerships across our economy. Existing schemes such as Sharesave and share incentive plans are not increasing the number of share ownership companies.

[Scott Mann (North Cornwall) (Con)]

I speak with a bit of personal experience, having been a Royal Mail employee and having benefited down the line. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right: apart from the trade unionists who drive the Royal Mail train, a huge number of workers have benefited greatly from having that share option. I pay tribute to those workers, who are doing a good job and who will be delivering our post during the Christmas period.

[Hon. Members]

Hear, hear.

[Sir Michael Fallon]

I echo that tribute. I should like that example of share options to be followed much more widely. Let us incentivise our companies, with a lower tax rate, to offer free shares to all their employees.

Finally, let me say something about exports. Our constituents benefit, of course, from cheap imported goods, but we are now importing far more than we export. We have run deficits of more than £30 billion in goods and services in each of the past five years, and a deficit of more than £43 billion in the last year alone—and this on an island of entrepreneurs, of engineering excellence, of innovation and of ingenuity. It is good that, according to the CBI, a quarter of manufacturers now expect an increasing order book, but the cheaper pound should not obscure the reality that outside the single market we will live or die by what we can sell to the world in goods and services.

It is not just down to this Government. There were serious deficits in the Labour years as well. Too many medium-sized companies do not bother to export at all, but, post-Brexit, we must clearly put exports at the front and centre of our economic policies. Campaigns such as GREAT and Global Britain are important, but they are just campaigns. We now need to hard-wire exporting into every British business: exporting should be a condition of all our major Government support schemes, our grants and our loans. In return, the Chancellor is beefing up our export finance, making it easier for first-time exporters to take the plunge, and I fully support that.

A fairer economy, much wider employee share ownership, putting exporting at the heart of every Government industrial programme: those are some of the necessary steps towards our new economic future. Let us agree across the House, Brexiteers and Europhiles alike, that muddling along—mere managerialism—is not going to be enough. Brexit Britain demands a bigger vision: more confident, outward-looking, self-rewarding. Let us build on this successful, sensible Budget to enable Britain to be bolder still.