Finance (No. 2) Bill

Mike Penning Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Monday 18th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Robert Courts]

It is a great pleasure to speak in this debate. I only wish to make some very brief comments because I have already spoken this evening and I am conscious of the fact that other Members wish to speak.

I will make a few comments about the armed forces exemption that we have just been discussing, because it has particular relevance to my constituency, where a great amount of the Royal Air Force is based at Brize Norton. We are awaiting the redevelopment of the two REEMA sites, which are particularly important. Already, a great number of Royal Air Force and Army personnel live either on the base or outside it, in particular in Bampton, Witney, Carterton and Brize Norton village.

I am glad that the Government have proposed this welcome measure. It falls into a similar bracket as the Armed Forces (Flexible Working) Bill, which we have discussed in the House over the past few weeks and months. It is important that we understand that expectations are changing. The armed forces offer must be able to stand alongside what can be received in the civilian world. This measure has the potential to provide exactly that.

At the moment, there is the anomaly that if personnel live in Ministry of Defence accommodation, it is essentially provided tax free, but if an armed forces allowance is given, there is taxation on it. That is how the rules work at the moment, so clearly personnel would be disadvantaged. We have to accept that in many cases, armed forces personnel wish to live outside a base, perhaps close to where their spouse works or where their children go to school. I welcome the measure because it moves us a step along the road towards realising that.

[Sir Mike Penning (Hemel Hempstead) (Con)]

The people who serve in our armed forces today—I have some experience of this—are looking for a different model and a different way of life for their families to grow up in. In the old days, they would have been in the garrisons or the ports. My constituency is further from the sea than anywhere else in the country, yet I have Royal Marines bringing their families up in the town. They are penalised for doing that because of the way the scheme works now. The new scheme will help them and they tell me that they are looking forward to it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Jones]

My right hon. Friend is right: the taxpayer got about £1 billion and it has been a shoddy deal, because not only did it lock us into a long-term contract, but it locked us into a ludicrous situation whereby, once houses became surplus and were given back to Annington Homes, the taxpayer had to refurbish them and also in some cases—when they were having to be knocked down, for example—if they were within the wire of a base, we were still paying the rents on what were basically empty spaces. I had a look at this when I had ministerial responsibility in the Ministry of Defence, and I am sure my friend the right hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning) did as well. We must not blame Nomura; it made a great deal for itself, but it was a bad deal for the taxpayer.

The right hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Witney (Robert Courts) raised an interesting point: the way our armed forces operate these days has changed. Many more people travel long distances at weekends: it is not unusual for servicemen and women who live in the north-east to travel to the south coast at weekends and back again. When Labour was in government, we put a lot more money into single living accommodation; that was the way forward.

We have been promised the new housing model by the MOD, but it has not yet materialised. I was working on that at the time, because I, like the right hon. Gentleman and the hon. Gentleman, recognised that the fit we have at the moment does not work. The Army did not like it, because the Army—or a certain general—held the very traditional view at the time that we needed the regiment around the base.

I cannot understand why this is being done in advance of that new housing model being brought forward. The hon. Member for Witney raised a point in respect of his area that I have also looked at: if we are going to bring in this change, we will have to bring it in over a number of years and provide housing locally, to ensure there is a supply of housing locally for those who want to live locally. We were looking at working with local housing associations and others to provide that.

There is nothing wrong with the model of this housing allowance, therefore, but if it is done in the vacuum in which it is being done, it can lead to situations whereby people take their housing allowance and then find that they are at the mercy of the over-inflated local housing market in and around some of our garrison towns and ports.

[Sir Mike Penning]

The hon. Gentleman—my friend—and I agree on most things, but no one is going to force people into doing this. We must wait for the model to come forward, and I would not vote for something where we forced people into such a scheme, as the Opposition Front Bench claimed. But my friend is wrong to say we will have to address this just around the localities: we will have to do that, but these people often want to find accommodation in their own home towns, so they can be around their family structure. That is the way the armed forces are now, rather than just having the garrisons, and the super-garrisons, which are coming.

[Mr Jones]

I do not disagree with the right hon. Gentleman, but unless we do some work on where we are going to house these people and families, we will be throwing them out to the market. That is why the last Labour Government introduced the early support for members of the armed forces who wish to purchase their own property, a move that was cancelled in the first Budget in 2011. There is a mixture here: some members of the armed forces want to buy, while others will want to rent as they move around.

To do this without any thought about how we are going to provide the housing behind it is a little strange, and I cannot understand why this measure is being brought in now. The right hon. Gentleman said people are not going to be forced, and I agree, but if they think it is attractive and then suddenly realise it is not, will they be able to go back?

Instead of having a piecemeal approach like this one, or putting the cart before horse, we should have waited for the new housing model before this proposal was brought forward. As part of this mix, I would also like people to be able in some cases to opt not for rental allowance, but for support for mortgage payments; we introduced that, but it was cancelled in the first Budget in 2011.