Business and the Economy
Debate between Paul Holmes and Torsten Bell(1 week, 4 days ago)
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Torsten Bell
The most important fact for my Swansea West constituents is that wages at the end of the Conservatives’ period in office were stuck at the same level as when they came into office in 2010—14 wasted years for my constituents. To respond to the hon. Gentleman’s question about unemployment, I would not use the claimant count at that level because the data is not as robust as it should be. Several hon. Members have, over the course of the debate, talked about increases in the unemployment rate in recent months. Why has the unemployment rate gone up? It is not because employment has come down, but because the inactivity that shot up on the Conservatives’ watch has started to decline. That is what is going on beneath the numbers.
Why do Conservative Members not want to talk about their disastrous record on the labour market? It is because they left us as the only G7 economy whose employment rate still had not returned to pre-pandemic levels. They left us with 2.8 million people out of work through long-term sickness, and 1 million young people not in education, employment or training—more than one in eight young people were left on the scrapheap by the Conservatives.
Let me turn to the labour market today, which hon. Members have mentioned. Some 200,000 jobs have been created since the Government took office. Pay has outstripped prices, with the strongest real pay growth for years. Let me pause on the question of wages, because for many people, what they get paid is the economy. Here is a fact so staggering that it tells us all we need to know about the failure of the previous Government and the progress made under this one: wages have grown faster in the first 10 months of this Government than they did in the first 10 years of Tory Governments from 2010. That is what a country turning a corner looks like.
Torsten Bell
It is not boom and bust. Wages for workers need to rise in Britain once again. We also need to turn the corner on an economy that is far too unequal. That is what our Employment Rights Bill will do.
Employer National Insurance Contributions
Debate between Paul Holmes and Torsten Bell(5 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Paul Holmes
I simply say—and the Chief Secretary should know this because he supposedly wrote the Budget that we voted on a couple of weeks ago—that growth forecasts were higher under the last Government than those of the Government for whom he is now leading in the Treasury. I say to the Government that business confidence is at the lowest it has been for years.
Torsten Bell
The hon. Member has raised the issue of business confidence, which I have heard a few times from Opposition Members. That leaves me pondering why, if businesses were so confident under the previous Government, we had the lowest private sector business investment in the entire G7, and the only country in the OECD that saw lower levels of private investment was Greece.
Paul Holmes
I know the hon. Gentleman liked to pride himself on being the oracle of economics when he led a think-tank, but if he looks at the bare facts of business confidence out there, he will see that it has been lower under the five months of the Labour Government than it ever was under the 14 years of the Conservative Government.
I want to mention some of the impacts that this measure will have on my constituency of Hamble Valley. There are 4,000 people employed in the hospitality sector in my constituency. Just last night, a business leader—a small business leader who owns three local venues—outlined to me that, because of the measures this Government have brought forward, he now has to find 5% extra of his total turnover to pay his taxes. That leads to a number of options: he can reduce staff count, meaning higher unemployment in my constituency and nationally; he can close venues, which again means lower employment and the death of our town centres—in every constituency, I remind Members—or he has to choose between not hiring local staff and stopping expansion, as every extra person he wants to take on will cost the business an extra £800 because of this national insurance contributions rise. That choice is facing businesses up and down the country, with lower growth, higher bureaucracy and higher taxes on the people who create jobs and wealth in every constituency in this country and drive the economy that we need to fund public services.
What is most damaging about the Government’s proposal is the catastrophic impact it will have on charities across this country. I defy any Labour MP to stand up in this Chamber and say that they are willing to bring in and happy to vote for a measure that will mean frontline services delivered through our charitable sector are cut. There are other options the Government can take, and they have chosen not to.