Economy, Welfare and Public Services

Nadia Whittome Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty) on a fantastic maiden speech and in particular the passion with which he talks about veterans and the need for more support for veterans.

I start by thanking the people of Nottingham East for electing me once again to represent them in Parliament. It remains the honour of my life to represent my home city. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), who is a formidable champion for our city. She will be missed by the residents of Castle ward, which is now in my constituency following the boundary review.

What a contrast between this King’s Speech and the last. For the first time in 14 years we have a set of policies that prioritise people’s rights and wellbeing: policies that draw on the rich history of the Labour movement; policies to help protect the right to strike, to enhance the right to flexible working, and to end fire and rehire. We also have policies that echo some of the great achievements of previous Labour Governments, which recognise the value of owning and running services and infrastructure for the common good.

The failure of previous Conservative Governments to combat the climate crisis should terrify us all. We have so much catching up to do if we are to avert the chaos it threatens, so I welcome our Government’s plans to speed up the transition to renewables through a publicly owned clean energy company. And with a Bill to bring rail services back into public ownership, I hope to see far less regularly those chilling words: “rail replacement bus service”.

I am also relieved to see the return of some policies that successive Conservative Governments promised but never delivered: a Bill that will end no-fault evictions and improve renters’ rights; and another that will ban so-called conversion “therapy” once and for all. I have heard from survivors the horrific impact these hate-fuelled conversion practices have had on their lives. To finally end them, it is right that such a Bill is trans-inclusive and it must be loophole-free. It is time to challenge the confected moral panic that is harming LGBTQ+ people, in particular the trans community. This is not the 1980s and we are not going back there. Instead of pitting trans rights against women’s rights, our Government have an opportunity to demonstrate what improving women’s safety actually looks like through delivering on our promise to halve violence against women and girls. The constant harassment on our streets and the hidden abuse in our homes is what we need to prevent, not trans people using the bathroom they feel most comfortable in.

The Conservative party has made our society poorer, more unequal and more authoritarian. From the 4.3 million children forced to live in poverty—more than one in three in Nottingham East—to the destruction of our public services and the damage to our democratic system, our country is in crisis. The laws that allowed these things to happen in the first place belong in the dustbin of history. We should start by scrapping the two-child benefit cap, which would immediately lift 300,000 children out of poverty.

This election delivered a historic victory for our party. Our regular meetings of east midlands Labour MPs used to be quite lonely affairs; well, they are not any more! I welcome my new hon. Friends to their places—their victories are justly deserved—but this was also a historic election for other reasons that we cannot afford to overlook. Disillusionment with politics is providing fertile ground for those who wish to divide us, and if we are to keep the far right from gaining further ground, status quo politics will not be enough. Tweaks to a failed neoliberal economic system will not deliver the improvements in living standards that people need, nor will they prepare us for the challenges of the future. With a historic victory, we have a historic responsibility to redistribute wealth and power into people’s hands so that they feel the difference a Labour Government can make. The measures in the King’s Speech are important first steps in that direction, but let us turn them into bold strides in the coming months and years.

I could not finish my first speech in the new Parliament without highlighting the unbearable situation in Gaza. Palestinians need a ceasefire now; indeed, they needed one nine months ago. I welcome the shift in my party’s position over recent months, and I welcome the restoration of funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, but when British weapons are continuing to be used in contravention of international law—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Edward Leigh)]

Order. The hon. Lady’s time is up.

Oral Answers to Questions

Nadia Whittome Excerpts

Tuesday 7th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Flick Drummond (Meon Valley) (Con)]

11. What fiscal steps he is taking to support households with the cost of living.

[Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)]

18. What fiscal steps he is taking to support households with increases in the cost of living.

[The Chancellor of the Exchequer (Jeremy Hunt)]

Over the last two years, cost of living support has totalled £96 billion, or an average of £3,400 per household. As a result, living standards, which were predicted to fall 2% last year, rose by nearly 1%, and we are on track to reach pre-pandemic living standards two years early.

[Jeremy Hunt]

We can absolutely do that. I thank my hon. Friend for pointing out that the biggest single thing we can do to help people with cost of living pressures is to bring down inflation. That seems to be something that escaped the shadow Chancellor this morning, when she said it was not a big deal to get inflation down to its target. It is a very big deal for families facing a cost of living crisis, and she needs to know that inflation falls by design, not by accident.

[Nadia Whittome]

The Chancellor can talk all he wants about inflation falling, but this is little comfort to my constituents who are still struggling to make ends meet. Even with the national insurance cut, annual post-tax earnings for the average family remain on course to be £380 lower at the start of 2025 than they were in 2021—a gap not predicted to close until 2029. This means yet more years of lost wage growth, so when will the Government get serious about tackling the low-wage, insecure work that they have allowed to become the norm in this country?

[Jeremy Hunt]

Could I suggest, if the hon. Member really thinks that inflation falling from 11% to 3.2% is little comfort to her constituents, that she might want to talk to a few more of them, because actually it is the biggest single thing that we can do to deal with cost of living pressures. If she says, “What are we doing to tackle the scourge of low pay?” we have abolished it by raising the national living wage to £11.44 this year alone. For someone working full-time, that will mean an increase in their pay of £1,800.

Oral Answers to Questions

Nadia Whittome Excerpts

Tuesday 5th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[John Glen]

I recognise that the hon. Gentleman has strong views on this, and I know that he has been personally affected by it in the past. The project, although it has been rephased, will continue. There are a number of issues involved in ensuring tight management of that budget, and I am working closely with the Department for Transport to see that that happens.

[Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)]

2. What assessment he has made with Cabinet colleagues of the potential impact of climate change on the economy.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

16. What assessment he has made of the potential impact of climate change on the economy.

[The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (Gareth Davies)]

The Treasury’s 2021 net zero review noted that unmitigated climate change damage has been estimated to be the equivalent of losing between 5% and 20% of global GDP each year. The costs of global inaction significantly outweigh the costs of action, and McKinsey estimates that there is a global market opportunity for British businesses worth £1 trillion.

[Nadia Whittome]

A recent report from Carbon Tracker found a huge disconnect between what scientists expect from climate change and what our financial system is prepared for, with flawed economic modelling leading pension funds and others to seriously underestimate the risks. Meanwhile, Energy UK warns that we are lagging behind on green energy investments. Surely the Minister agrees that to revive our economy and avert climate catastrophe we must rapidly phase out fossil fuels and invest in a green new deal to reach net zero.

[Gareth Davies]

It is important to point out that we are the fastest decarbonising economy in the G7. Since 1990, we have decarbonised by 48% while growing our economy by 65%, but the hon. Lady is right: this will take a balanced approach involving both public spending and private investment, including pension fund investment. The recent pension fund reforms, for example, should unlock some new assets for green infrastructure.

Corporate Profit and Inflation

Nadia Whittome Excerpts

Tuesday 16th May 2023 Westminster Hall

[Richard Burgon]

As always, my hon. Friend makes an important point. I will come on to that in the remaining passages of my speech, because people out there are really feeling in their day-to-day lives the consequences of this greedflation and the opportunistic pushing up of prices by so many companies.

In the United States, an Economic Policy Institute study found:

“Corporate profits have contributed disproportionately to inflation”,

and that

“over half of this increase…can be attributed to fatter profit margins, with labor costs contributing less than 8% of this increase. This is not normal.”

Let us take a moment to note that a broad range of officials at UBS, Unite the union, Goldman Sachs, the ECB and the US Economic Policy Institute are all suggesting that over half of the current price mark-up is to do with profiteering.

[Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making some excellent points. Is he aware of comments made last month by the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas? He said that he remains “unconvinced” that we should be worried about the risk of a wage-price spiral, highlighting that wage inflation continues to lag far behind price inflation, while profit margins have “surged”. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government should be exploring all avenues to boost wages, including a £15 an hour minimum wage, above inflation public sector pay rises and, of course, scrapping anti-union laws?

[Richard Burgon]

I have to say—and this will come as no surprise—that I agree with my hon. Friend’s three policy demands. A £15 an hour minimum wage is more necessary now than ever before. When people first started talking about it, we of course supported it then. Fewer and fewer people can argue against that policy now. Of course, the anti-trade union laws need scrapping. It is wrong to suggest that it is workers’ wages that have been driving inflation. I hope this debate gets people in this place talking about what a lot of economists, who are certainly not on the left, have been talking about—namely, greedflation.

I will move on to some solutions. While workers’ real wages continue to fall, the Financial Times recently noted that across western economies, profit margins reached record highs during 2022 and remain historically high. It is increasingly clear that some corporations are hiking prices to gain those profits, and it is that, not wages, that is a major cause of the inflation crisis. What should be done about that? In the words of Robert Reich, the prominent economist and former US Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton:

“To control inflation, we must take aim at corporate profits, not working people.”

I have three proposals. First, there should be an excess profits tax. The kind of tax we have seen on the super-profits of oil and gas firms should now be extended to all the other sectors of the economy making excess profits from this crisis at the expense of ordinary people. That would send a clear message to those companies that their profiteering must stop. There has rightly been a huge focus on the eye-watering profits of energy firms, though the Government’s windfall tax has failed to deal with that properly and should be amended to close all the loopholes.

Excess profits are in evidence in other sectors, too. The five big banks have reported soaring profits, as they take advantage of high interest rates. Supermarkets, food manufacturers and agribusinesses have benefited from profit spikes recently. The Treasury should set up a special unit for this excess profits tax that could go after all those companies that are blatantly profiteering, ripping off customers, fuelling inflation and deepening the cost of living crisis.

New Wealth Taxes

Nadia Whittome Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2022 Westminster Hall

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the potential merits of introducing new wealth taxes.

It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Edward. This debate could not come at a more important time. People face the biggest single-year fall in incomes in 70 years. We in this House often hear shocking statistics, including about the 2 million food bank parcels that are handed out and the 5 million people who have to choose between heating or eating. Behind each of those statistics, however, is a real person who is struggling, be they a mother who is refusing certain foods at a food bank because she cannot afford to cook them, a pensioner riding the bus to keep warm, or a parent missing yet another meal so that their children have just enough to eat to get through the school day. For some, however, this is not a crisis; it is a boom time.

[Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this extremely importantly debate. As always, he is making a powerful speech. Britain has in recent years gained a record number of billionaires. Between them, they own £653 billion, which is about triple the annual operating budget of the NHS. During the pandemic, their wealth increased by more than a fifth. Does he agree that such wealth is obscene—especially in the midst of a cost of living crisis—and that we should do everything we can to redistribute it away from the super-rich, who have profited from the pandemic and rocketing prices, towards the workers who kept society running throughout and now face poverty and destitution?

[Richard Burgon]

As always, my hon. Friend makes a crucial point, and she is absolutely right: that is a moral imperative.

In the past few weeks alone, we have learned that the number of billionaires in Britain has risen to 177, and their wealth is now at record levels. Britain’s billionaires have increased their wealth by a staggering £220 million per day over the past two years. On top of that, we have learned that bankers’ bonuses are up 28% over the past year and are rising at six times the rate of wages. We have also learned that the bosses of Britain’s top 100 companies have seen their annual pay increase to an average of £3.6 million. We have food banks for nurses in hospitals, but at the top of Britain’s finance sector, the champagne corks are well and truly popping.

That phenomenon is not confined to Britain; it is global. The total wealth of the world’s billionaires is now equivalent to 14% of global GDP—up threefold since 2000. The global wealth of billionaires has risen more in the past two years than in the previous 23 years combined. If we are to tackle inequality and hardship, we need to address our rigged economic model.

Community Debt Advice Services

Nadia Whittome Excerpts

Wednesday 1st December 2021 Westminster Hall

[Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Bardell. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy) for securing the debate and speaking so passionately about the impact on her constituents, and indeed all our constituents.

In the last 13 years, families in Nottingham East have faced blow after blow to their finances. People lost jobs and savings in the 2008 financial crash, more than a decade of austerity has seen benefit payments brutally cut and, in the pandemic, incomes have plummeted. Throughout all of that, our community has been able to rely on St Ann’s Advice Centre, which has been a lifeline to so many people in Nottingham. Its debt advisers help to set up manageable payment plans, help people to complete financial statements and apply for certain grants, carry out benefits checks, and provide advice on budgeting decisions. More than that, from employment advice to food, furniture and clothing, the advice centre takes a holistic approach to supporting individuals. It is a one-stop shop for people facing poverty.

St Ann’s has three debt advisers funded through a MaPS contract. However, under the new proposals, it will lose all of them and, because MaPS has the monopoly on debt advice, it is unlikely to get support from anywhere else. MaPS argues that, while community-based face-to-face services are being cut, more money is being put into a centralised digital and telephone-based system. There are a number of major problems with that change, but I will outline just two. First, removing the local face-to-face element will take away an entire support system from people. When people come through the door at St Ann’s for debt advice, they can also get support with a whole range of other issues tailored for them locally—they can leave with a food parcel or a clothing parcel—which cannot be replaced on the internet or over the phone. Secondly, digital and phone advice is simply not appropriate for some of my constituents.

According to frontline debt advisers working on webchat, about 50% of all clients either disengage or need to be directed to face-to-face services to ultimately have their problems resolved. Can the Minister say what will happen to people whose problems cannot be solved by digital and phone-based services? Who will support them if community debt advice is cut? Disabled people, elderly people, those who require translation or who lack regular access to a phone or the internet due to homelessness or poverty—those people will suffer. Many of them are among the most marginalised and vulnerable in society.

Recently, St Ann’s debt helpline inbox received 455 emails in one week. That is the worst they have ever seen. These changes and cuts would be wrong at any time, but to implement them now—after a pandemic has wreaked havoc on people’s lives, as families have £20 a week cut from their universal credit payments, as national insurance contributions rise, and as bills and food prices soar—is simply inhumane.

The debt crisis will only grow. MaPS is removing some of the last genuine support my constituents have access to—the people they turn to when bailiffs are at the door; the people who will hold their hands in times of extreme personal difficulty and crisis. The Government must remember that savings made through cuts to community debt advice will have knock-on impacts on other public services, such as the benefits system, mental health provision and homelessness services.

I urge the Minister to pause this contract. He has heard today about the catastrophic impact these changes will have on people’s lives—on my constituents and on his. Go back to the drawing board and work with MPs across the House to implement the kind of debt advice system that would best serve our communities.

Health and Social Care Levy Bill

Nadia Whittome Excerpts

Committee stage & 3rd reading
Tuesday 14th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Jesse Norman]

It is helpful to have a diagnosis of why Labour Members might be opposed to or worried by this, but the fear is entirely without foundation. There is no suggestion that the Government wish to create a system that is anything other than free at the point of delivery, and that is the basis on which the Government have always proceeded and proceed now. We are trying to put a longer-term arrangement in place for social care that allows us to bring the same kind of clarity to it that people have enjoyed for many years with the NHS.

[Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)]

If the Government believe in a social care system that is free at the point of use, why are they not delivering a social care system like that, one like the NHS, which is universal and available to everyone?

[Jesse Norman]

I do not know whether the hon. Lady heard, but I was talking about the NHS and that has been a founding principle of the NHS, one the Conservative party have always adhered to, and rightly so. What we are doing with the levy is funding an expansion and a development of an existing set of arrangements, and, as I have discussed in relation to the question from my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), the potential to expand that through the use of other mechanisms of support, now that these catastrophic risks have been removed, or will be removed, from people’s lives.

Let me turn to the amendments tabled by the Scottish National party and Plaid Cymru which look to require a joint agreement between the Treasury and the Governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as to how the levy proceeds are to be shared between the four parts of the UK, and between healthcare and social care. As for how the levy revenue will be split between the four parts of the UK, this legislation mirrors existing legislation on how NHS allocation is divided between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It is right and appropriate that we should follow that established precedent. The Government will work closely with the devolved Administrations on the implementation of the levy, including on the process for allocating revenues across the UK and on the split between health and social care from April 2023 onwards. It is also worth bearing in mind that the devolved Administrations’ overall funding will continue to be determined by the Barnett formula, so that this process will just determine the element provided by the levy. I hope that the Members concerned will not press their amendments, for the reasons I have outlined.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nigel Mills]

I assume that my right hon. Friend is right that, if we reduce the number of people in work or reduce their pay rises, that will work its way through the system. The Minister may be better placed than I am to work out an answer to that question.

The nub of my argument, and the reason for amendment 8 and new clause 10, is that we have 18 months before the new levy comes into force—we accept that we cannot bring it into force in six months’ time, presumably because it is so hard to get the systems in place, and that we have to raise national insurance for the first year and move to the levy after that—so perhaps if we had all the information in front of us in the next six months or year, we could make a choice whether to go ahead with the new levy for the small amount of extra income, or whether to stick with the national insurance rise and find other ways to explain to people what they are paying their taxes for.

I think the Minister accepted that HMRC will publish its estimate, and I am sure we could find a way of getting an accurate estimate of the cost to business of complying with the levy. We could then take an informed decision before we finally introduced the levy. I think that would be a positive step in tax policy. However, if we really believe that we want a separate levy to show what people are paying directly for health and social care, I think that we should move the existing 2% of national insurance that goes directly to the health service into the levy, so there is one hypothecated payroll tax that goes to the NHS on people’s payslips, rather than it being hidden in a part of national insurance. I cannot see any reason why, if we go down the line of introducing a new health and social care tax, we would not want to have all the hypothecated payroll taxes going into the NHS or social care to get any of the advantages of that.

I will not be pressing my two new clauses to a Division, but I urge the Minister to give some serious consideration—I suspect he did not know about this new levy until around about last weekend, when it was probably dreamt up in No. 10 as a way of selling a tax rise—to using the 18 months he has before the levy comes in to try to work out whether the costs of collecting it are worth the small change. If he really does think there is a compelling argument for charging people over retirement age national insurance if they stay in work and are earning, let us charge them the full rate, rather than 1.25%. I cannot see how we can justify that they do not pay the existing 2% that goes to the NHS but they do pay the 1.25%. There seems to be no logic in that at all to me, so perhaps we should think properly and coherently about the tax system. Let us have the full rate in that situation.

Let us have a decision when we get around to the Budget in 2022. Is going ahead with this levy going to raise more money than it costs? If it is not, let us just leave it on national insurance where it will be sat at that point. That would be a more coherent way of running our taxes.

[Nadia Whittome]

With your permission, Dame Eleanor, I will speak to new clauses 3 and 5, tabled my hon. Friends the Members for Ealing North (James Murray) and for Erith and Thamesmead (Abena Oppong-Asare). New clause 3 requires the Chancellor to assess the impact of the Act on tax revenue from different sources of income and new clause 5 calls on the Government to publish an equality impact assessment of the Act.

Dame Eleanor, given that even in Committee this has been a wide-ranging and broad debate, I hope you will allow me to set out the context of those new clauses. It is people in poorly paid jobs who will bear the brunt of the national insurance increase, at a time when in-work poverty is already at a record high. How can it be right to ask those who are already saddled with extortionate housing costs, poverty wages and mountains of debt to pick up the tab for this Government’s failures on social care? To put it simply, the Government are choosing to protect the interests of the wealthy who fund them at the expense of low-income workers and renters. While landlords and the super-rich who are hoarding wealth and housing pay nothing under this new tax, my constituents will be having their pockets raided.

Since 2010, under this Government’s watch, £7.7 billion has been cut from social care budgets. If I could sum up this policy—if we can call it a policy—in one word, it would be “unfair”: unfair on the working people who are funding the tax rise; unfair on the care workers who will not see their pay and conditions improve; and unfair on those relying on social care, whose needs will continue to be unmet. Figures released this week show that nearly 70,000 people in England could die waiting for social care before these changes even come into force.

If the Government were interested in fairness, they would tackle the soaring housing costs, low-paid jobs and inadequate benefits that my constituents are facing. Instead, their policy agenda is fuelling inequality and impoverishment. As we heard from the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn), 2.5 million working households will be hit by the cut to universal credit and the increase in national insurance. Working families will be losing, on average, over £1,000 next year. Meanwhile, the furlough scheme is ending and evictions are resuming.

There is, however, a group of people who have benefited from the pandemic—who have done very well, in fact: British billionaires. They have increased their wealth by over £100 billion. That is why now is the time to get serious about taxing wealth. The Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, the right hon. Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt), said earlier in the debate that this tax hike would raise more than a wealth tax, but I am afraid that that is not true on any measure. City A.M.—this is City A.M., not “Das Kapital”—calculated that one wealth tax option would be to tax wealth progressively between £1 million and £10 million, with all wealth beyond £10 million taxed at 3%. That would bring in a total of £55 billion over five years. Alternatively, the economist Richard Murphy calculated that, if wealth was taxed at the same rate as income, that could raise up to £174 billion a year.

Will the Minister explain why none of those options was considered and what the Treasury makes of those calculations? And perhaps the Chancellor could explain to us, as a multimillionaire, why he cannot dig deep into his own pockets and why it has to be my constituents—in fact, all our constituents—instead. I think that this House and working people across the country deserve to know why a wealth tax was dismissed in favour of a tax on the poorest and the lowest paid, and what is more, to fund a plan that will not even work.

We have heard during this Committee that the Government’s excuse for not ring-fencing the money raised for social care is that health and social care are interlinked. I agree, to an extent, and that is why, to fix our social care system, we need a national care service, like our national health service, which is free at the point of use. We need to redesign the system so that the needs of care users, for want of a better word, and care workers are at its heart. The money to do that is there but it is in the pockets of the richest and it is the political will from this Government that is sorely lacking. Anything less than a national care service, funded by a tax on wealth, not on workers, would be a great disservice to the people we are elected to this place to represent.

[John Redwood]

I have worries about hypothecation. I thought the Treasury used to be against it and it is a difficult doctrine to make work well, because it is not always the case that a particular tax just happens to raise the right amount of revenue for a particular purpose, or if it does in one particular year, that may not be true in a future year because the revenue may grow too slowly for the purpose, or the purpose may become less popular and the revenue may exceed what is needed. I have always favoured the Treasury orthodoxy—I am not always someone to support Treasury orthodoxy—that it is better that we have a very big general pot into which we collect the taxes, and then we have general distribution based on tightly argued issues between Government Ministers and Departments on what their spending priorities are and the minimum amounts that they need to spend to get good results in their leading areas.

However, now that Ministers are treading the boards of hypothecation for the first time in this interesting way, I advise them that it is a very good rule, if they wish to sell the idea of hypothecation, that the tax revenue that they collect should pay for the thing that they are attaching to the hypothecated revenue. My big worry about this hypothecation is that the sum of money for social care—when we eventually get to that point after three years—collected by the so-called social care tax will be only about one fifth of the actual costs of social care to the public sector. Of course, there are additional costs to private individuals as well and I would not want my constituents to be misled. I have already had emails from constituents saying, “As the Government seem to be pressing ahead with this social care levy, I assume that I will no longer be asked to make any contribution through my council tax to social care”. Being an honest man, I have written back and said, “No, you can’t assume that at all. Social care is going to need a lot of money and I don’t think the idea is that the council tax levy part of it, or the need for that, will suddenly disappear.” So I think one does need to look again at hypothecation. If, for example, we wish to have hypothecated taxes to pay for the current costs of health, as identified by the Treasury for the current financial year, we would need to say that all income tax, all capital gains tax, all inheritance tax and all stamp duty—in other words, all income and wealth taxation—were already going to pay the large sums required for health in this year’s public budgets. Maybe we could start by renaming income tax and all the wealth taxes as a health tax, which would give people some idea of the scale of expenditure that we are talking about. There might then be a more interesting and useful debate to be had.

Health and Social Care Levy

Nadia Whittome Excerpts

1st reading
Wednesday 8th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)]

Yesterday, the Prime Minister said that universal social care would be too expensive. That is exactly what the Conservatives said about the NHS in 1945 when they voted against it 21 times. They have argued that since and they will do so again if given the chance, as we heard from the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) who, just minutes ago, described the NHS as a “socialist construct”.

A universal need demands a universal and freely accessible solution. None of us knows with certainty what will happen in our lives. Through disability, illness and old age, many of us will come to rely on social care if we do not do so already. The care we receive should not be a lottery based on wealth and postcode. We should all have the security of knowing that there will be someone to look after us no matter what. The NHS is there for all of us if and when we need it from the cradle to the grave. It has long been time for the social care system to provide the same.

We need a national care service funded by progressive taxation, including a wealth tax. The Prime Minister’s plans could not be further from that. Even the free market Adam Smith Institute condemned them as “morally bankrupt”, saying that the Government was asking

“poorer workers to bail out millionaire property owners.”

That comes just weeks before the Chancellor will plunge hundreds of thousands of families into poverty with his universal credit cuts.

Mr Deputy Speaker, you would struggle to design a more unfair and economically illiterate social care policy if you tried. Less than £1 in every £6 of the money raised will go to social care in the first three years of the plan. It is a triple whammy that the Government are presenting us with today: nowhere near enough money; not ringfenced for social care; and low-paid workers are funding it.

Why is it that Amazon is paying only 7.5% of its income in tax while a graduate on a standard starting salary is expected to give up around 50%? Let us be clear what this is really about; it is about protecting the inheritances of the very wealthy. What is the Government’s excuse for raising taxes on struggling people and for breaking their manifesto pledge? It is covid-19. We have heard it again and again today. I have seen at first hand, as have my former colleagues in Nottingham, how social care was in crisis well before the pandemic, and this Government cannot use covid-19 as a cover for 11 years of Tory failings, and they cannot use it as an excuse to take money from those who have been on the frontline and not from the billionaires who have profited from the pandemic, increasing their wealth by more than a fifth.

When I use the word “plan”, I am being generous. This is not a plan. It does nothing to fix the system that is broken at its core. A constituent emailed me about her experience. She is a care worker in the community. Her wages have not increased for four years. She does not get any travel expenses, pension contributions or sick pay. She works extremely long hours to make ends meet and often earns less than the minimum wage once she factors in travel and expenses. At the same time, her mum is terminally ill and has been waiting for five weeks to get support. She wants to be with her mum in her final weeks, but she is doubtful that she will be able to afford to get time off. Sadly, disgracefully, her story is not unusual, because our social care system does not work for those who rely on it or for those who are employed in it.

Instead of grappling with these deep-rooted problems, this Government are yet again, as the right hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning) admitted, kicking the can down the road. Instead of giving our care workers the pay rise that they deserve—[Interruption.] Will Government Members be quiet while we talk about the service that care workers have given during the pandemic? They deserve a pay rise, but instead Members on the Government Benches will be voting tonight to make sure that care workers are paying so that their wealthy donors do not have to.

How much longer must my former colleagues in the care sector wait for change? How many more families will be consigned to poverty because their care worker mum brings home less than the minimum wage? How many more disabled and elderly people will be confined to their homes, unable to live the kind of life they want? Anything less than a national care service, funded by a tax on the wealthy, not low-paid—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. I call Bim Afolami.

Government's Management of the Economy

Nadia Whittome Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab) [V]]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and many apologies for the tech troubles earlier.

This pandemic has revealed the impact of a decade of cuts and deepening inequality. It is not just Government failures this year that have left us with the worst death toll and worst economic recession in Europe. The last 10 years of Tory austerity have paved the way to disaster. It was because of austerity that we went into the pandemic with insufficient hospital beds; it was because of austerity that care workers across the country—I sounded the alarm on this last year—were left without adequate personal protective equipment; and it was because of austerity that the social security net that had been built over many years was destroyed.

After covid, we cannot go back to life before. We cannot go back to an exploited workforce, to families hardly surviving on universal credit or to tenants being evicted at the whim of their landlords. From the rubble of war, the 1945 Labour Government built a new settlement; we built the NHS and the welfare state.

Just as the national health service was built from ruins, our society today is crying out for a national care service. We need the green new deal to bring hundreds of thousands of well-paid green jobs to every city, region and town in our country; tenants need a long-term ban on evictions; and the key workers whom Ministers applauded last year deserve nothing less than a pay rise.

If this is not the time to demand courage and ambition, when is? People who lived through the war and rebuilt this country afterwards deserve better than to die alone. My generation deserves better than to be robbed of secure housing, secure jobs and proper mental health support. Austerity was never necessary. People who did nothing to bring about the financial crash were made to pay for it. Our Prime Minister promised no return to austerity and we have to hold him to it.

Additional Covid-19 Restrictions: Fair Economic Support

Nadia Whittome Excerpts

Wednesday 21st October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Angela Rayner]

I thank my hon. Friend for his insight. Many of the local leaders I have heard from have said that it felt like they had been blackmailed and pressurised into taking a deal. Greater Manchester and the Mayor were not just trying arbitrarily to get more than somewhere else. We put a package together based on the needs of our city, our conurbation, our lowest-paid and the businesses that needed the support. It was not a bargaining chip to get this or that; it was about making sure that there was a floor that meant people were given the support that, by the way, this Government promised. They promised that support, and we are just asking them to keep to their promise.

[Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is grossly unfair that while the Prime Minister, reportedly, is complaining about not being able to live off £150 k a year, he is expecting my constituents in Nottingham, and all the constituents of every one of us in this House, to live off two thirds of the minimum wage unless a proper economic settlement is provided?

[Angela Rayner]

I thank my hon. Friend for her contribution. People on the Government Benches might grunt, but my hon. Friend was a care worker before coming into Parliament, like myself, and knows exactly how people on the minimum wage feel, and I commend her for standing up for her constituents, not leaving them behind like many Members on those Benches seem to be doing now.

Even the two-thirds wage support under the job support scheme extension is only available to businesses legally required to close. Someone who works for a firm that is not required to close, but whose business is severely impacted as a result of the restrictions—such as a brewery supplying pubs that have to close—gets absolutely nothing.