Income Tax (Charge)
Debate between Nusrat Ghani and Greg Smith(2 weeks, 6 days ago)
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Greg Smith
As ever, the hon. Gentleman has hit the nail exactly on the head. In its briefing, which I am sure all Members have received, the National Farmers Union points out that the Treasury’s own figures on who will get caught up in the APR changes are fundamentally wrong, because they include a lot of very small-scale areas—perhaps a private residence with one or two fields or a very small number of livestock. That is not what any of us would define as a working farm. In reality, when all those family farms are brought into the numbers, the vast majority of our food producers who contribute to food supply chains will get caught up in those changes.
When the Chancellor was on the BBC on Sunday morning, she said that the individual claim for agricultural property relief is now £1 million, but if a farm is owned by two people, that allowance could be transferred to the other person. Some confusion needs to be ironed out here, because unlike the nil-rate band and residential nil-rate band, the policy paper entitled “Summary of reforms to agricultural property relief and business property relief” published on 30 October this year states that
“any unused allowance will not be transferable between spouses and civil partners.”
Perhaps in summing up the Minister can clear up that confusion caused by the Chancellor on the Kuenssberg show.
The APR changes are not the only changes that will hammer our farming families and agricultural communities. I am sure there is a joke somewhere along the lines of “When is a pick-up truck not a pick-up truck?”, but it is no laughing matter for farmers. For them, it is just a basic bit of equipment that they need to operate, but this Government are hammering them on the cost of that equipment if it happens to have rear seats. As I raised earlier today in this House during the urgent question, the Government’s carbon tax will put up the price of fertiliser by between £50 and £75 a tonne. Either that is going to have a direct impact on the cost of food, or the Government are asking farmers—already operating on incredibly tight margins, often with no profit at all—just to swallow that extra cost. I urge them to reconsider.
Other measures in the Budget that are clearly wrong and the Government must U-turn on include VAT on private school fees. The vast majority of parents I talk to in my constituency who choose to send their children to independent schools scrimp and save and make sacrifices in order to give their children that opportunity. An additional 20% in fees makes that unaffordable for those parents, and when I talk to representatives of independent schools in my constituency some are saying that they can see a path to having to close their doors. I know that a lot of Labour Members would probably quite like that outcome, but the reality is that it will be denying children opportunity and denying parents choice, and it will have the knock-on impact of class sizes in my kids’ school—and, I am sure, every other hon. Member’s kids’ school in the state sector—going up. That will cause overcrowding and put pressure on our state schools. This is all before I come on to the other problems in this Budget, not least the cruel attack on our pensioners through the withdrawal of the winter fuel payment.
Lastly, just to prove how bizarre and simply unserious the Government are about value for money, they have chosen someone as their new value-for-money tsar who is inextricably linked to one of the most inefficient and wasteful projects ever to come out of the British state: HS2. How on earth can someone so linked to that project be considered an arbiter of value for money?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
We now come to another maiden speech. I call Andrew Ranger.
Automotive Industry
Debate between Nusrat Ghani and Greg Smith(1 year, 4 months ago)
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Ms Ghani
I could not disagree with my hon. Friend, who is a champion for all things technology and transport, as well as for his constituency. The investment made in R&D has enabled large manufacturing firms to work closely with our academic institutions, and to de-risk some of the technologies that are now becoming mainstream, and we continue to support that area. That leads on to my next point about the Advanced Propulsion Centre and the automotive transformation fund, which are key in us trying to de-risk and adopt new technologies to drive the sector forward.
On the Automotive Council, the hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde said that he was engaging with the sector, but I am not quite sure where and when. A lot of the comments he made will not go down well with the sector because they were not very positive on all the work it has been doing. I engage directly with firms to see how hard they are committed to the sector, and what they expect from their politicians is support, not to be talked down.
I put on record my thanks to Graham Hoare, the current co-chair, Mike Hawes, Neville Jackson, Ian Constance, Markus Grüneisl, Paul Willcox, Murray Paul, Adrian Hallmark, Michael Leiters, Tim Slatter, Alan Johnson, Richard Kenworthy and many other indispensable members of the Automotive Council. I thank them for all the work they do, considering how challenging times have been not just for us but for our counterparts in Europe. I recently spoke at the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Trader’s parliamentary reception, and I welcome its “Manifesto 2030” with its five key priorities: green automotive transformation strategy, net zero mobility, green skills, made in Britain, and powering UK clean tech. There is a lot that we agree on, and I look forward to working with the sector to try to protect and strengthen the whole automotive industry. Car companies want to innovate, and we want to support them to do so. That is why the Government have an overarching goal of making the UK a global hub for innovation, as alluded to by the my hon. Friend the Member for Bosworth.
Greg Smith
In embracing that innovation—this is further to my intervention on the shadow Minister—the UK is a leader in the development of the synthetic fuel sector. By that, I do not mean fuels made from feedstocks; I mean green hydrogen merged with atmospheric carbon capture, whereby what comes out of the tailpipe is the same volume of carbon that is then recaptured to make the next load of fuel. With whole system analysis, that will be shown to be net zero, but the zero tailpipe mandate gets in the way of that. Does the Minister agree that, to embrace this innovation properly and to give an eclectic future to the automotive sector, we need to embrace those innovators as well?
Ms Ghani
We do need to embrace those innovators. One of the reasons we have so much investment in the UK in innovation and the automotive sector is that we are often first out of the door in helping to de-risk and test that technology. The Minister of State, Department for Transport, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire, will touch on tailings, but just last week I was at the Lower Thames Crossing, which is putting out a pitch to ensure that all vehicles on the construction site have green hydrogen. The several thousand vehicle movements on and off the site carrying freight will also have green hydrogen. The site is a port, and given the level of construction that is taking place, it may be one of the largest construction sites to get to green hydrogen first. I am not sure, but I think it is pretty well on track to being a world leader in that.
The UK-wide innovation strategy sets out our long-term plan for delivering innovation-led growth. Our primary objective is to boost private sector investment across the whole UK, creating the right conditions for all businesses to innovate, giving them confidence to do so and ensuring that we are leading the future by creating it.