Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Nia Griffith and Robert Flello

Tuesday 14th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)]

This was a shambolic, shameful, pitiful Budget, more interested in grabbing headlines, trying to get the Chancellor in the slot for a future place in No. 10 and trying to lay political traps. This was not a Budget for the future of Britain. My right hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West and Royton (Mr Meacher) had it down to a T: this is a Budget to provide cover for the Chancellor to shrink the size of the state. That is all that this has been about.

The Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills talked about security, but security for who? There is certainly no security for the working poor of this country, those on zero-hours contracts or the people who provide care on the minimum wage who do not get paid for their travelling time or travelling costs, who have to provide their own uniforms and who quite often have to contribute towards any training they receive, if they are lucky enough to get any. In short, this was a Budget providing no security whatever for the poorest, the most vulnerable or the weakest in our society, but plenty of security for multimillionaires looking to pass on assets and for other people.

The Secretary of State also talked about this great plan that the Government have got. They had a great plan in 2010 that was supposed to pay down the deficit over five years. That great plan failed to do that because it stalled the economy for three and a half years—three and a half years to get back to the same level of growth we had in May 2010. So much for hard work rewarded. No matter what the Chancellor thinks, there are people who work very long hours who can only dream of limiting their hours to those in the working time directive and who can only dream of a decent wage and being able to come back to a home that they can afford to live in. Hard work rewarded? There has been a lot of hard work from those people and very little reward for what they do.

I want to take a quick canter through some of the measures in the Budget. Much has been made about the supposedly national living wage. What an absolute con! The living wage has been put at £7.85 or £9.15 in London. The aspiration over the term of this Parliament will be to reach £9 by 2020.

So talk about this being a living wage is simply not the case. The proposal for it to be set at £7.20 is already well short of the necessary £7.85. As has been said many times, including by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield), setting the living wage takes into account tax credits and additional support. Actually, the real living wage should be recast at a higher figure now that so much of people’s tax credits has been wiped out. This aspiration for what amounts to a rebranded minimum wage is nonsense.

To pick up on an earlier exchange, many employers have, sadly, seen the national minimum wage as a reason to dumb down wages rather than to use it as a baseline. Here there is an issue with tax credits because some employers have indeed said, “Hang on, let the state subsidise our profits and we’ll pay the minimum wage.” Those self-same employers will not now say, “Well, we should not have done that even though we did, but we are now going to put the minimum wage up to a proper living wage level”. Of course not. They will keep people working on the same minimum wage and see that their workforce are worse off on account of the reduction in tax credits.

Yet again, this is all about pulling the rug from under the working poor. The Chancellor makes great play of how the Government want to help people in work. These are people in work; they are people who are doing their best and working very long hours, but they are having the rug pulled from under them.

We hear talk about tackling aggressive tax avoidance and evasion, yet this Government have made various attempts to deal with it. We have seen various attempts to introduce general anti-avoidance type provision, but none of them had teeth and none was really designed to address the situation. I remember from when I was a tax and finance adviser in a previous life that people were capable of coming up with schemes to get round legislation within minutes. The Government have known about this for a long time; this is not new. To be fair to the Government—I rarely try to be fair to this particular Government, but I will be on this occasion—from time immemorial, Governments have not seized the opportunity to provide for proper anti-avoidance measures that will have teeth and will work. There are simple ways of achieving that.

As we have heard, reductions in public spending are about trying to take us back to a small state. The proposal to increase personal allowances, much heralded at the Dispatch Box, sounds wonderful, but it is all jam tomorrow. It is a £400 increase in the personal allowance, which is nowhere near the level it should be and nowhere near the level necessary to provide a genuine living wage in the sense of a basic amount that people need to live on. People will continue to earn less than they need to survive—and will be taxed on it, thrown into the bargain. Raising the threshold for higher rate taxation and raising the personal allowances has provided double help for those on higher incomes, who will see less of their income taxed.

[Nia Griffith]

Does my hon. Friend suspect that the Chancellor has deliberately renamed this “the living wage” so that he can break the promise of taking everybody on the national minimum wage out of tax?

[Robert Flello]

Absolutely. That could well be one of the motives behind it: it is certainly not about giving a genuine living wage to people, and it is certainly not about ensuring that people who work 40, 50 or 60 hours a week just to make ends meet will actually be able to secure a decent living wage. As I say, £7.20 from next April is already short of the £7.85 needed to take tax credit changes into account.

Let us move on to some of the Chancellor’s real friends in all this and consider inheritance tax and the increase to a £1 million threshold. How many people will benefit? It will be a tiny number, and that has to be set against the millions of people who are, to quote the Secretary of State’s words, “hard work rewarded”. It is nonsense, and it shows where the Chancellor’s thoughts lie and who he is really concerned about.

The reduction in corporation tax is another issue. On the face of it, it might seem very good. We already have one of the most competitive rates of corporation tax, but what about the small businesses that are not corporations or not incorporated companies? What about those small businesses that, as sole traders or partnerships, are the lifeblood of our country? What of the small businesses that do not pay corporation tax, for which it is not an issue?

Another item on this long list of measures is the introduction of a supplementary tax on banking sector profit versus the bank levy. I suspect—and I fear that I am right—that more smoke and mirrors has been going on in respect of what the levy was levied on and what profits will be subject to the supplementary tax; I suspect that this will work in favour of the banks.

The increase in insurance premium tax is another measure that will hit those on the lowest incomes. The Minister shakes his head, but there are no two ways about it. People who are already stretching their budgets to try to afford their contents insurance, for instance, will then be hit by a massive increase in insurance premium tax, from 6% to 9.5%.

As for the proposals for the Chancellor’s good friends, those with non-domiciled status, they are welcome on the face of it, but how soon will it be before someone comes up with a great ruse to get around the “15 of the previous 20 years” residence rule? How soon will it be before someone says, “That is OK; I will go abroad for a year, and then restart my clock”? How soon will it be before someone takes advantage of some scheme or other? Why not be more assertive, and take much stronger action?

I am conscious that time is beating me again, Mr Deputy Speaker, but I want to draw attention to a few more points. There are to be more apprenticeships, but the question is the quality of those apprenticeships. The ending of student maintenance grants will hit the poorest yet again—in this instance, the poorest students. I have already made my point about the public sector pay increase.

Buried among these measures is the reduction in the backdating of housing benefit from six months for working-age claimants and three months for pensioners to a maximum of four weeks. It is not really about reducing benefit; it is about saying, “If you were not quick enough to spot the benefit that you were able to claim, or if the paperwork was not processed, or if you are a pensioner who struggles with paperwork, you will lose out.” That will save £10 million, which is outrageous.

Fuel Prices

Debate between Nia Griffith and Robert Flello

Tuesday 15th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Robert Flello]

Indeed. Every aspect of what we do is affected by the price of fuel, whether at the pumps, domestically, or at the heavy duty pumps that the haulage industry and other industries use. All sorts of other issues then come into play. For example, hauliers will be looking to ensure that their vehicles are running as efficiently as possible, yet on the European stage there is the possibility of a reduction in the height of trailers to 4 metres, which will have a negative impact on our haulage industry in the United Kingdom, exacerbate the problem of the price of fuel and increase the need for a cut in the fuel duty.

As has been said, a temporary VAT cut would be absolutely the right thing to do to secure an immediate impact for the domestic motorist, but something different is needed for the haulage industry in the longer term. A VAT cut would obviously have a wash-through effect, but we need a more serious change and a restructuring of the way the fuel costs of the industry and associated industries are met.

Other factors that impact on the haulage industry, such as London’s low emissions zone, also have a knock-on effect. I wish that Mayor Boris would respond to my letters and agree to meet to discuss the impact on the haulage and haulage recovery industries. It has a direct impact on fuel efficiency and keeping traffic moving on London’s streets if vehicles that should be on the streets helping to recover other vehicles and keep traffic flowing are prohibited from doing so. That will of course become a greater concern in the run-up to the Olympics.

Indeed, other aspects of the price of fuel will affect the membership organisations—I will not name them—that come out when their members break down by the side of the road, and those organisations’ costs are passed on to their members through the running costs of the yellow or orange vehicles that assist people at the roadside. That industry will also be hit by Green Flag’s terrible announcement that it is devastating the number of contractors who work for it. Some of them will unfortunately end up unemployed.

[Nia Griffith]

Does my hon. Friend recognise the real danger to haulage companies from foreign competition because of the price differentials?

[Robert Flello]

My hon. Friend makes her point well.

In the 20 seconds remaining, I wish to make two points. First, instead of cutting the top tax rate of 50p for high earners, we should be helping motorists. Secondly, we should be looking at ways of taxing the speculators and the people who are making a profit from the ordinary motorist and make them pay instead.