Health and Social Care Levy

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

1st reading
Wednesday 8th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

Many who voted for Brexit in the hope of securing £350 million a week for the NHS, or who voted for the Conservative party in the belief that taxes would not be raised, must feel very disillusioned. Today, just nine months since leaving the EU, and after another Johnson broken promise, they are being taxed to pay for health and social care. In recent months, the Prime Minister has broken promises on the foreign aid budget, on his commitment that there would be no checks on goods moving between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and on the triple lock on pensions. We all understand the impact of the pandemic, but it should not be used as a shield to mask the Prime Minister’s broken promises. His promise to fix social care once and for all predated the pandemic. Indeed, we have waited more than two years for the plan, which the Prime Minister promised the nation in his first speech was “already prepared”, to materialise.

The 2019 manifesto also committed the Conservatives to deliver a social care plan through consensus and with cross-party support. People are asking what happened to that consensus. Instead, the Prime Minister is pushing this grossly unfair tax through Parliament, allowing as little time as possible for proper scrutiny—the kind of scrutiny that improves legislation. Because of the Government’s woeful mishandling of the pandemic, allowing the NHS and care workers to face the biggest crisis in their history, with the NHS in the depleted state to which it was reduced after successive Tory Governments stripped £8 billion from the service, much more money is now needed for health and social care.

With waiting lists predicted to reach 13 million, even with this money it will take the health service years to catch up. The working public are now expected to stump up more money for Tory mismanagement of health and social care, and working-class and middle-class workers will bear the 10% national insurance tax hike. The Prime Minister’s plan boils down to this: using the taxes of young and low-paid workers without assets to protect the assets of wealthy people. Raising regressive national insurance, which takes money from the pockets of the lowest-paid workers, many of whom have been on the frontline of the pandemic, is not the way to fix our social care system. I hope that the Prime Minister will listen to the many rational voices in business and industry, including the British Chambers of Commerce, which said that his plan will be

“a drag anchor on jobs growth”

as firms emerge from the pandemic and furlough winds down.

We need a national and fair effort to deal with the crisis in social care, and a plan that goes far wider than just looking at funding. We need to address the recruitment and retention crisis in health and social care, which is the most urgent issue at present. It is vital that any long-term plans are included alongside immediate measures. We must properly value those in our health and social care workforce, not tax them to the hilt.