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.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd June 2021 Commons Chamber

[John Glen]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Since the scheme has been up and running—as he says, it has been a matter of only a few weeks—we have seen the provision of 95% mortgages expand from just five to 192. This is a significant change, and I am grateful to the industry for the moves that it has made, with Government support.

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

What assessment he has made with the Secretary of State for Education of the (a) effectiveness, (b) value for money and (c) adequacy of the funding allocated to educational catch-up provision announced on 2 June 2021.

[The Chief Secretary to the Treasury (Steve Barclay)]

We are providing a further £1.4 billion over the next three academic years for education recovery. This is on top of the £1.7 billion provided for academic year 2020-21.

[Mohammad Yasin [V]]

It has been widely reported that it was the Chancellor who refused by a 90% margin to find the funding recommended by Sir Kevan Collins to help our nation’s children to catch up on their education after the pandemic. The Chancellor has benefited from a first-class private education, so will he take this opportunity to apologise to the generation of children he is letting down as the Tories refuse to invest in our children’s and our country’s future?

[Steve Barclay]

There was a striking omission from that question. There was no reference at all to the additional £2.2 billion of core school funding, over and above which there is the £1.4 billion announced by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor. Of course, the House would expect proposals to be evidence-led, deliverable and provide value for money, and we will work with Department for Education colleagues on that, but there was no mention in the hon. Gentleman’s question of the additional £2.2 billion of core school spending uplift this year.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Tuesday 27th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Rishi Sunak]

I thank my hon. Friend for all the advice and support he has provided for me and the team over the past year as we have sought to develop policies that will help businesses, including Leonardo in his constituency, which I know he champions. He is right to highlight the opportunities of better procurement, particularly for our defence supply chain, and I look forward to working with him and colleagues to ensure that we can support his local businesses and many others across the United Kingdom.

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

What assessment he has made of the effect on small businesses of the requirement to complete customs paperwork for export to the EU.

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Jesse Norman)]

The Government have put in place a number of measures to facilitate trade with the EU, including publishing comprehensive guidance on the new arrangements. HMRC has produced step-by-step guides, videos and webinars for small businesses that may be new to customs processes. The Government have also provided a £20 million Brexit support fund to assist small and medium-sized businesses in adjusting to new customs procedures, questions of rules of origin and VAT rules when trading with the EU.

[Mohammad Yasin [V]]

Just over a month ago, the Paymaster General told me that she would follow up on my invite to Bedfordshire chamber of commerce to hear the widespread concerns of businesses that are really struggling to overcome the new and complex operational challenges around her Government’s Brexit deal. I have heard nothing. Will the Minister attend a meeting with the chamber of commerce to hear about how customs paperwork is impacting viability, or would the Treasury also prefer to ignore the problem?

[Jesse Norman]

The Paymaster General is always happy to take inquiries from businesses, as am I, so if the hon. Member wishes to write to me, I am perfectly happy to respond to his questions.

Future Relationship with the EU

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Thursday 10th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

My hon. Friend raises two important points. I can assure him that a great deal of thought has gone into ensuring that we have the supplies and enough personnel to meet the requirements on the veterinary side of things. We have always stood by any sector or part of the UK that is facing tough times, and we will continue to do so.

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab) [V]]

England and Wales were due to qualify for BSE negligible risk status next year, but due to the diversion of Government resources and staff to work on Brexit and covid, the Government missed the OIE—the World Organisation for Animal Health—submission deadline. Will the Minister apologise to my constituent in Bedford who runs Dunbia Cardington, who, despite his attempts to send out a message in a post-Brexit world that he is open for business and has the highest food standards in the world, will have to wait at least another year for his meat to qualify for this world-class status because of her Government’s failure?

Budget Resolutions

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Monday 16th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

Last week’s Budget will double Government borrowing, and it is proof that the Government’s austerity agenda, which brought unnecessary pain and suffering to millions, was a failure. Austerity has inflicted untold damages on our public services, and most obviously on our health service, which in 2010 had the highest patient satisfaction levels on record. It is painful to see what has been done to the police service, the fire service, the welfare state, the probation service, courts, the health service, education, and libraries—I could go on. All those ideologically driven cuts to our social fabric were in response to a worldwide banking crash for which Joe Public paid the price, yet now the public are supposed to cheer when the Government try to repair some of the damage that they have done, by raising council tax precepts to replace some of the police officers we have lost. Should the public now be grateful that the NHS can have anything it wants, after nearly a decade of sustained and deliberate under-investment that has brought the service and its staff to their knees?

Every person in the UK is now counting on the NHS to be there for them when this Government were not there for it. Money cannot fill the 100,000 workforce vacancies, including 43,000 nurses and 10,000 doctors, who we need right now. Despite the big spending announcements, austerity is not over for most public services, and according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, day-to-day spending per person will remain almost a fifth lower than it was in 2010, through to the middle of the current decade.

The £76 billion rise in overall spending by 2023-24 will be paid for largely by borrowing, paving the way for soaring debt and probable tax rises, particularly if the economy takes a significant hit from coronavirus and a disorderly Brexit. The Budget revealed just how weak the UK economy was even before coronavirus. Brexit has already made the economy 2% smaller than it would otherwise have been, and we are still in the transition period, which for now is protecting us from the economic shock. After a decade of Tory-led Governments, the NHS and our social care sector are chronically under-funded, under-resourced and under-staffed, just at the moment we need them most.

The substantial additional infrastructure investment that the Chancellor announced is welcome, but there are huge question marks over the Government’s commitment to tackling climate change, and the long-promised plan to fix the crisis in social care has been ignored again. I hope that the Prime Minister’s promise from the steps of Downing Street, to

“fix the crisis in social care once and for all, and with a clear plan we have prepared to give every older person the dignity and security they deserve”

has not been forgotten. It has now been six months, and the promised plan is nowhere to be seen. It is astonishing that social care has been ignored again in this Budget, and crushing for people with dementia. Every day we hear new stories of people with dementia who are trapped in unacceptable conditions, or of families who are struggling to cover the cost of dementia care. Cross-party talks must produce a long-term, sustainable solution for social care that delivers quality care, but that must also be backed by investment to keep the system afloat.

The spending measures, alongside last week’s cuts to interest rates, may keep us out of recession for the immediate future, but it is difficult to feel reassured that our economy is strong enough to cope with the unknown impact of coronavirus, at the same time as our plans for leaving the EU are still so uncertain. Even if the economy escapes a sustained hit from coronavirus or Brexit, the Budget leaves day-to-day spending on public services other than health some 14% lower per person in 2024-25 than it was when the Conservatives kicked off their austerity programme in 2010.

The Budget continued the Tory power grab, moving control of funding from local government to central Government. It is time local government had more of a say in how funding is spent in communities, rather than locally run services such as the police, schools and transportation having to go cap in hand to central Government through a flawed bidding system. The public sector does not belong to Boris Johnson; it belongs to the public. The Government would do well to remember that.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Exploitation of Missing Looked-after Children

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Evans. I thank the hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) for securing this important debate and for the excellent inquiry that the all-party group for runaway and missing children and adults, under her chairmanship, conducted into this issue.

As the hon. Lady knows, my constituency of Bedford has been identified as a hotspot for out-of-area placements for looked-after 16 and 17-year-olds. It featured in the diligent reporting done by “Newsnight” into the crisis in care for the most vulnerable children in society. Many of us in this Chamber have repeatedly called for the regulation of semi-supported care settings. I first met the Minister in March to call for urgent action to protect those children and ensure the most basic of requirements—that all care settings for 16 and 17-year-olds are safe and of a reasonable standard. Seven months and a change of Government personnel later, I am afraid we are no further forward. I know that the hon. Member for Stockport has been asking for that for a lot longer.

It is the state’s responsibility to look after children in care, but it is clearly failing. Bedfordshire police have raised concerns about the number of teenagers reported missing from care homes. They have highlighted that vulnerable children are being placed in accommodation with known perpetrators of sexual and violent crimes, and they are at risk of becoming victims of sex trafficking, organised crime or serious violent crime, and of being lured into criminal activity.

In Bedfordshire, the number of incidents for the 12-month period ending in September involving looked-after children missing from unregulated homes was 1,333, involving 173 children. I am very worried about the fate of those missing children, who are at risk of criminal or sexual exploitation and other aspects of modem slavery.

Although Bedfordshire police are doing tremendous work in this area and have a sympathetic understanding of those who go missing, policing such settings is a significant strain on an already under-resourced force. The Centre for the Study of Missing Persons at the University of Portsmouth estimates that the average cost of investigating a missing person is £2,400. That is a financial cost to Bedfordshire police of about £1.9 million, caused by unregulated homes. It is the job of the Government, not the police, to ensure the safety of such settings. They must get a handle on the scale of the issue, and I urge them to improve the reporting systems on the number of children going missing from homes and hostels that are not subject to children’s homes regulations, to prevent more children from becoming unnecessarily and excessively criminalised or becoming victims of crime.

If there is no alternative to local authorities receiving out-of-area looked-after children, it is only right that they should be adequately funded so they can provide suitable, safe and secure accommodation. The Minister has admitted that the current system is “completely untenable”, so I hope that today we get action from the Government on the APPG inquiry’s excellent recommendations, not more excuses and delay.

Unregulated Accommodation: 16 to 17-year-olds

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Selous]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and I will go on to call for exactly what he has just highlighted to the House.

Many of these homes also have adults up to the age of 25 in them, and we know that drug taking is prevalent in many of them. We know that a young man on bail for knifepoint robbery was placed in a home with 16-year-old girls. We know that two girls were placed alongside a male sex offender, and that one 17-year-old boy was murdered by another resident. The home had not told either sending local authority about an earlier fight between the two boys.

The impact on police forces of the number of missing person incidents from unregulated homes is significant. Police officer availability is an extremely precious resource to local communities. Quite rightly, a missing child is always a high priority for any police force. If there is a significant increase in the episodes of missing children in a police force area, that means that other vulnerable children and adults in the population area of that police force are left much more unprotected than they should be.

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for bringing this important issue to the House for consideration. Does he agree that one of the major concerns is how 16 and 17-year-olds in care regularly go missing? Does he also agree that local authorities and the Department for Education should reform how data on the number of young children is collected, and that the figures should be made available and published on a quarterly basis?

[Andrew Selous]

More data is always good. I will come on to suggestions about what local authorities need to do.

In 2018, the top six locations for episodes of missing persons accounted for one quarter of the overall number of missing episodes in Bedfordshire. Of those 1,049 episodes, 779—three-quarters of the total—came from these unregulated settings. The Centre for the Study of Missing Persons at the University of Portsmouth estimates the average cost of investigating a missing person at £2,400. That is a financial cost to Bedfordshire police of around £1.9 million caused by these unregulated homes. It means that the officers involved cannot respond to other serious incidents. What makes the situation worse is that most of those children are being placed in this substandard provision in Bedfordshire by local authorities outside the county.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Tuesday 11th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I am perfectly open to the hon. Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin) coming in on this question if he is minded to do so, but I am not psychic, so I cannot anticipate his wishes. He needs to stand if he wishes to do so.

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

14. The Government’s Brexit shambles are making it more difficult for businesses in my constituency to function, risking jobs and livelihoods. Yesterday’s last-minute withdrawal of the meaningful vote has resulted in more uncertainty for businesses, which cannot plan for the future. How can any Chancellor justify making people worse off, not just in Bedford, but throughout the country?

2019 Loan Charge

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Tuesday 20th November 2018 Westminster Hall

[The Economic Secretary to the Treasury (John Glen)]

Thank you, Mr Walker. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) on bringing this debate to the Chamber. I acknowledge the 12 speeches from colleagues from across the House, who raised some very important issues on behalf of their constituents. Only last Friday, some of my constituents too came to raise the matter with me.

In the course of my response, I hope to address the significant issues discussed: time to pay; retrospection; whether HMRC is going after the promoters; what my hon. Friend said about the disclosure of tax avoidance schemes; the numbers involved; and the difference between retroactive and retrospective. I will also give some detail on the sums of money that we anticipate will be raised through the measure.

The responsibility of Government is to assess critically the impact of any tax reform, and to ensure that it is structured and implemented in the best possible way.

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

The Government say not only that the loan charge is designed to treat loans as income, but that if the loans—now income—are written off, they will be subject to inheritance tax because the loan will not be repaid. Numerous court and tribunal findings agree that the loans were loans, not income, yet the Government press ahead regardless. Does the Minister agree that that is completely wrong and unfair?

[John Glen]

In the course of my speech, I will address that point. I am happy for the hon. Gentleman to come back to me later if he feels that I have not done so.

To be clear, I am the Economic Secretary; the Financial Secretary wanted to be here but he is in the main Chamber for the Finance Bill, so I am here in his place.

I acknowledge the early-day motion tabled by Members. It has attracted 103 signatures, and I also acknowledge the concern throughout the House on this matter. The concerns expressed are for people who have used a disguised remuneration scheme, who expect to have outstanding loans in April 2019, and who will be subject to the charge. I recognise that the Government need to be clear about why we legislated for this charge, which received Royal Assent following a full debate during the Finance Bill process in 2016-17. I will outline the steps that the Government have taken to help those individuals who may be affected.

The Government believe that it is not fair to ordinary taxpayers, who pay their tax on time and in full, to allow people who have used tax avoidance schemes to get away with it. Disguised remuneration tax avoidance schemes are contrived arrangements that use loans, often paid through offshore trusts, to avoid paying income tax and national insurance contributions. The schemes may have involved provision of a loan with no intention whatever to repay it. I spoke to the Financial Secretary this morning, while preparing for the debate, and he said, “Earnings are earnings, and a loan is a loan,” and that is what the issue boils down to.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Tuesday 11th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

The hon. Gentleman will know that we have the start-up loan scheme, which provides support for entrepreneurs starting small businesses, and the Government will continue to encourage small businesses to be established and then to grow.

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

3. What recent discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care on NHS funding.

[The Chief Secretary to the Treasury (Elizabeth Truss)]

We have regular meetings with the Health Secretary and have recently allocated an additional fund of a 3.4% rise per year to the national health service, which will equate to £20 billion by 2023.

[Mohammad Yasin]

In Bedfordshire, children with mental health issues are travelling up to 100 miles to access services. Their recovery is hugely compromised by sending them away from their families and friends. Will the Chancellor now commit funds to local specialist facilities for young people and reinstate the mental health beds in Bedford that his Government took away?

[Elizabeth Truss]

We recognise that there is increasing demand for the NHS, which is precisely why we have allocated the additional funding, and the Health Secretary will shortly publish a 10-year plan with mental health as one strand of it.