Comprehensive Spending Review
Nia Griffith Excerpts(14 years ago)
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Lilian Greenwood
If only. I thank my hon. Friend.
What did I hear in the media coverage of the visit? I heard about the Prime Minister’s amazement that he had found a lad who liked broccoli. I did not hear the Prime Minister or Deputy Prime Minister telling the kids about the huge gamble that the Government are taking with their future. They are performing a huge economic experiment. They have a theory that if we cut public spending, lose 490,000 public sector jobs and, as PricewaterhouseCoopers tells us, lose another 500,000 private sector jobs that depend on the public sector, the rest of the private sector will somehow fill the gap. They do not seem to hear the warnings of economists who disagree. Listening to Ministers last week, one would have thought that the PricewaterhouseCoopers figures had about the same credence as Mystic Meg. The Government do not want to hear about the effect of their cuts, because they want to make them.
Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)
Has my hon. Friend found any evidence that the coalition Government have thought out how confidence will be created to stimulate the public sector, given that millions of people across the country are worrying that their household might be one of the million that will be hit by a job cut, and fearing that cuts to housing benefit will mean that they are left with very few pennies to spare after their mortgage payments or rent?
Lilian Greenwood
I thank my hon. Friend for that interjection. In fact, the latest figures for both consumer and business confidence are going through the floor.
Never mind the extra 1 million who will be out of work, the extra £700 million that we will have to spend on jobseeker’s allowance or the loss of tax revenues; the Government’s attitude is, “Cut deep and keep your fingers crossed.” But did the Prime Minister say that when he was in Nottingham? Did he tell those children about his gamble? Of course not, just like he did not tell them that their families, many of whom are in the poorest 10%, would be hit harder than anyone else. He did not mention that for all the talk of fairness, families with children will have to pay more than twice as much as the banks towards reducing the deficit. He did not mention that although his friend the Chancellor talked about continuing the decent homes programme, the funds have actually been cut.
Oral Answers to Questions
Nia Griffith Excerpts(14 years ago)
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Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)
1. What steps his Department is taking to increase the level of tax compliance.
The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (Mr David Gauke)
The Chief Secretary to the Treasury announced £900 million of investment in Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to tackle avoidance, evasion and fraud, sending a clear signal that the spending review will be focused on both fairness and deficit reduction. It will include an increase in prosecutions and steps to tackle organised criminal excise smuggling. HMRC also recognises the importance of helping businesses to get their tax right and has launched additional education and guidance packages in order to do so.
Nia Griffith
Given the enormous importance of reducing the tax gap, and thereby reducing the deficit, what assurances can the Minister give that actually he will be taking on more tax officers and ensuring a good geographical spread to make sure we get in the maximum tax revenues possible?
Mr Gauke
As was made clear in the Chief Secretary to the Treasury’s statement, the Government are determined to reduce the tax gap. It currently stands at £42 billion. It is too high, but we are determined to take measures to address it and we have already announced proposals by which we can reduce the tax gap.
Equitable Life (Payments) Bill
Nia Griffith Excerpts(14 years, 1 month ago)
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Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)
I am grateful for the opportunity to take part in the debate today, and I certainly want to support the Bill, because we do not want to do anything to delay the payments. The important thing now is to get those payments made as quickly as possible to the many ordinary hard-working people who made sacrifices in order to put money away in a scheme that they trusted to provide for them in later life. Those people were thinking ahead; they were the responsible citizens who had no intention of having to rely on the state. They continue to worry, however, and to suffer hardship, because they fear that there will be still more delays. They are also worried by the mention of a cap being placed on the funding of the payments. Most importantly, those people do not want smokescreens, spurious justifications or complicated explanations. They simply want the Government to take notice of the ombudsman’s letter of 26 July and move as swiftly as possible to making proper payments. They want those payments to be realistic, not just a sop; they want them to be made in the spirit of the ombudsman’s report.
I am very concerned by the fact that the Minister spoke today of linking the amount to be paid out to Equitable Life victims with the comprehensive spending review. That would be totally unacceptable. We know that the issue of Equitable Life has gone on for some years now, and it should not be arbitrarily subject to a review that is to take place in a few weeks’ time. Opposition Members are committed to seeing Equitable Life victims receive proper payments that reflect their losses. Anyone listening to what both the coalition parties said before the election would have thought that they too were committed to making proper payments. Indeed, they were vying with us to say that they would be more generous than we would. To state that the payments will now be subject to spending review cuts of perhaps 25% is absolutely disgraceful. What would have been a £100 payment could now be only £75. Frankly, that seems to me next to dishonest. Equitable Life victims were not responsible for the banking crisis, and they certainly do not deserve to be penalised by the slash-and- burn policies of the present Government, whom respected economists are now suggesting might send us into a double-dip recession.
Gordon Birtwistle (Burnley) (LD)
The hon. Lady says that she is keen to see the payments made to the Equitable Life policyholders. Will she tell us how much Labour would have paid out if it had been in control?
Nia Griffith
What is important now is to move on and get those payments made. The worry is that these smokescreens are putting people off, and the policyholders will not see any money at all. They want to see actual payments.
The policyholders are also worried about tax and benefit loss. I am pleased to see clause 1(3) in the Bill, but it is far too loosely worded. It gives the Treasury the power to disregard payments to Equitable Life victims when assessing their tax liability or their entitlement to means-tested benefits, but I would like to see a much more strongly worded provision, as well as a genuine awareness among Ministers that any payment will be disregarded.
Nia Griffith
I would like to continue for a moment, because I want to explain what I have understood from the speech made by the Financial Secretary to the Treasury today.
I was perturbed by what the Minister said. Far from giving any assurance that there would be a disregard for tax and benefit purposes, he said that the Department for Work and Pensions would sort these matters out in the usual way. That will set alarm bells ringing, as anyone who has lost benefit, pound for pound, as a result of receiving a payout will confirm. Equitable Life victims, having waited all these years, could end up receiving their payment only to lose the equivalent amount in benefits or additional tax. We need assurances from Treasury and DWP Ministers alike that insult will not be added to injury in that way.
Gavin Williamson
It is incredibly interesting listening to the hon. Lady’s speech, but surely she ought to hang her head in shame at the actions of the Labour Government, who continually betrayed Equitable Life policyholders. Will she apologise for the Labour Government’s failure to act?
Nia Griffith
If the hon. Gentleman had been here under the previous Government, and been a regular attender at business questions, he would have known that the timetable for the Equitable Life programme was raised again and again. I can assure him that I made many representations to our Ministers to ask them to speed up the process. It was a complex process and there were enormous difficulties; there was also an enormous amount to read. That is why it took the ombudsman so long to produce the report in the first place. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that an enormous amount of good work was done, and that we would not be where we are now if we had not put in that work before the general election.
We need assurances from the Treasury and the DWP that people will not lose out in the way that I have described. People are worried because the suggestion of a cap is being bandied about, and because the figures might be cut again in the comprehensive spending review. If they were then to lose money through a clawback of tax or benefits, it would be an absolute disgrace. It would also affect the most vulnerable people in particular.
Another worry about the Bill is that it contains no mention of a proper appeals mechanism. The Minister made a few encouraging remarks about appeals, but there are no details in the Bill. I call on him to consult policyholders about that mechanism, and to publish the relevant details as soon as possible. We want to see the settlements made as soon as possible, but we also want to see an appeals mechanism that can hear appeals quickly and fairly. The last thing we want is for Equitable Life victims, who have already waited far too long, to have to wait in a queue for their appeal to be heard.
Amendments have been proposed by those on our Front Bench, including my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms). One relates to timing, which is crucial. We must have a specific start date so that we know when the victims are going to get their proper payments. We also need a scheme that will be totally independent of the Government. There is also an amendment that provides for hon. Members to vote on the scheme, to ensure that it is swift, simple, transparent and fair. That is vital if we are to have the trust of the public that this is a genuinely fair scheme, not one that has been cooked up in a back room and that will be cut and cut again in order to meet some overriding demand from the Chancellor. I look forward to debating the Bill more thoroughly in Committee. I very much hope that we will have the opportunity to table our amendments, and that they will be well supported by hon. Members on both sides.
Banking Reform
Nia Griffith Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Hoban
My hon. Friend makes a good point about the role of insurance. In this crisis, we must ensure that we distinguish between what has happened to the banking sector and the relative success of the insurance sector in withstanding the storms of this crisis. It is an important sector to the UK economy and a huge wealth generator. We need to ensure that the insurance sector, when it comes within the remit of the PRA, has the right sort of prudential regulation that recognises its strengths and challenges. It will of course be regulated as regards its relationship with consumers by the CPMA.
Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)
The people of this country want to see a bit of humility and payback on the part of the banks. One opportunity to do that would be through the so-called Robin Hood tax on banking transactions, with the money going to alleviate poverty here and to tackle climate change across the globe. Will the Financial Secretary urge his right hon. Friend the Chancellor to introduce such a tax and to influence colleagues worldwide to do likewise?