Income Tax (Charge)

Paul Howell Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Edward Miliband]

That is definitely the Whips Office’s talking point. The reality is—[Interruption.] I will tell them: our last manifesto said that

“the substantial majority of our emissions reductions”

should happen by 2030, and that is absolutely right. We should be going faster and we should not be delaying. The interesting point is that delay is wrong not just for the climate, but economically. That is the brilliant platform on which my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West, the green shadow Chancellor, is standing. We will fall behind if we do not act, and I suspect that, in his heart of hearts, the Business Secretary knows it.

[Paul Howell (Sedgefield) (Con)]

On the right hon. Gentleman’s comments about credibility, I have sat on two north-east Labour councils, Darlington Borough Council and Durham County Council. When the Conservatives were in charge in Darlington, Labour wanted the target to be 2030. When Labour was in charge in Durham, it wanted the target to be 2050. Is there consistency in Labour party policy or not?

[Edward Miliband]

It is completely consistent, yes.

Let me turn from industry to retrofit and insulation. Of all the things that were missing from the Budget and that I thought the Treasury would have been persuaded about, the one that is as close as we can get to a fiscal, economic, climate no-brainer is a proper 10-year retrofit and insulation plan. If we invest, we cut bills and carbon emissions, make ourselves less exposed to the international gas market, and create tens of thousands of jobs. I do not get why it has not happened. All we get are piecemeal schemes and no proper plan. I will not even go into the fiasco of the green homes grant—emissions from buildings are higher than they were in 2015.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Howell (Sedgefield) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cardiff North (Anna McMorrin). In the limited time available, I will talk primarily about infrastructure and education, but I want to cover a number of other issues, too.

I start by talking about the many small businesses we have throughout Sedgefield. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Andrew Jones) that a more fundamental review of business rates would be very welcome. I have everything from small cheesemakers, such as the one in Mordon, to breweries such as Yard of Ale at the Surtees Arms, and I am sure that the changes to duty will encourage them to move forward. Emma McClarkin, the chief exec of the British Beer and Pub Association, welcomed the Chancellor’s continued support of the pub sector. I hope that the many pubs across Sedgefield, from Hurworth to Thornley and Ferryhill to Bishopton, also see the benefits of simplifying duty in particular. I must give a shout out to, of all names, The Impeccable Pig in Sedgefield, which was recently awarded “AA Inn of the Year”. There are clear benefits to small businesses, but there are also benefits, as other colleagues have mentioned, from people being able to socialise in pubs. Getting away from the cheap lager from the supermarkets is a good step in the right direction.

One thing we need to remember, whatever we are doing, is that we always talk about “this place”, and place is an important thing for us all to be thinking about. We need to think about where people are coming from and what they do there. That is where the importance of levelling up comes in. It is about looking after communities, but in particular those that my all-party parliamentary group for “left behind” neighbourhoods focuses on, which can miss out because they do not have the capacity to go for the grants and support being picked up by other people. We need to encourage all our businesses to be as cognisant as they can of social impact. We need to remember that the quality of place that people are coming from is a key driver in the quality of employee that businesses will get.

The primary town in the Sedgefield constituency is Newton Aycliffe, and it has put in a levelling-up bid to for town centre recovery. That is a key thing that must happen to help us grow. We also have some fantastic businesses there, ranging from Crafter’s Companion, which has been active during the pandemic in getting people into crafting work and helping their mental health, to the likes of Hitachi. Hopefully we will see some announcements in the not-too-distant future on HS2, so that we can get some certainty. Certainty is what businesses need to move forward.

I also have 3M, whose efforts on masks through the pandemic have been incredible. We need to be careful about restructuring supply chains, because of the investment that people have needed to make. We also have lots of coach businesses. I hope the Department for Transport will continue to support our local council on a capital and revenue basis to help those businesses transition back from the depths that they have reached, so that they can get back to viability. On council funding, I want to ensure that there is proper consideration of the rurality or deprivation indices for councils. Durham in particular sometimes suffers from the way that they are used in funding formulae.

To return to business and its the social benefits, there is a company called Finley Structures in my patch. Last week, I had the pleasure of going there to see a blue plaque put up for the Aycliffe Angels—the ladies who made munitions during the war. To our delight, a 100-year-old lady called Muriel Scott turned up unexpectedly while we were there. If funding comes through from the money that has been talked about for that kind of thing, John Finley, who runs the business, wants to create a museum to show what people like Muriel Scott went through.

We need to drive science innovation. The Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman), and the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy have visited NETPark—the North East Technology Park—just outside Sedgefield, and understand its significance. If we can get the investment, we will have the north-east space hub there too. The local council is doing a good job, but we need to make sure that we pull that off.

That feeds into education and training, which are critical. T-levels have a place in the agenda, but I encourage the Government not to throw out BTECs. It is important that everyone has an opportunity, wherever they come from and whatever level of education they start from, to engage with the process and take the next step forward. That leads me to university technical colleges, of which I have one of the best in the country. Because it is linked to the likes of Hitachi and Gestamp, it attracts people from all over the north-east and Northumberland—as far away as that. Lord Baker wants more UTCs to be established, so I am hopeful that they will happen. I encourage investment in them to develop the opportunity for more people to learn technical skills and get us all into a better place.

To return to infrastructure, I have spoken many times in this place about Ferryhill station and the opportunity for it to reopen. The hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) referred to jobs. If that station goes in, the line will go through to Stockton North and connect to Teesside and to all the jobs being created by the Tees Valley Mayor, Ben Houchen. Like all railway lines and roads, however, it is a two-way link, so it would present the opportunity not only for my people from the Ferryhills of this world to get to Teesside and the jobs there, but for anybody in the Stockton and Middlesbrough area who wanted to come to NETPark for the high-value science-led jobs to come on the train in the other direction. It is at the evaluation stage and I am hopeful that it will come forward.

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) and I think that my constituents will feel that this is a fair Budget at difficult time. Opposition Members have made a number of comments about Labour’s position on business, but I sit on the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee and I have to say that the Opposition’s presence in that Committee is lamentable. The number of times that the only Labour Member present has been the Chair is poor. How can they talk about business when they do not even turn up to the Select Committee? When we went to Tata Steel, the hon. Member for Newport East (Jessica Morden) met us there; credit to her for joining us, but she was not a member of the Select Committee.

I welcome the funding for the British Business Bank. As a last point, because I do not think anyone should forget it, climate change is important but we need to make sure that we do things in context. There is no point in stopping doing things that nobody wants to do—I will use an easy example of the Cumbrian mine—only to then import coal from the other side of the planet and pay all the carbon costs that go with bringing it in from elsewhere.

There is a lot in the Budget that I like, but there is the odd thing, such as the Leamside line that was announced this morning, that I would have liked to get through, although that is not the Budget but the Restoring Your Railway fund. We will need to come back to that and have a closer look at it. In general, however, I welcome this Budget.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)]

I want to start where the Chancellor left off, by saying that I strongly believe that it is not just for the Government to fix every problem and tackle every challenge. I am a Conservative because I believe in and want to support strong families, strong communities, the voluntary sector and charities coming together to make our country a better place to live, work and raise a family. We saw that during the pandemic. The state played an enormously important role but so did families, volunteers and charities in Crewe and Nantwich and across the country, and I shall focus on welcoming the measures in the Budget that support families.

I welcome the introduction of family hubs—I supported my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) in campaigning for that—further funding for parenting support, more support for adopted children and their families, and the continuation of the holiday activity programme. In discussing the stability of families and poverty, we cannot ignore, and must pay greater attention to, some of the factors that make it much more likely for children to be living in poverty. Single-parent families and families with three or more children are much more likely to be living in poverty and I wish campaigners and those on the Opposition Benches would pay as much attention to these important factors as they do to the role of Government in topping up family incomes.

The emphasis on the first 1,001 days is also welcome. We are seeing increasing understanding across Government that the big impact we can have early on in terms of children and families is worth our attention and gets better results in the long run.

The Opposition too often focus purely on financial security. Of course financial security is important, but it is also important to support people to be the best parents they can be and to ensure that their children grow up with emotional security and have the kind of self-belief and aspiration that I was given by my family. Sadly, when I meet some children in my constituency, they do not have that. We have to do better at giving that to them.

As much as we argue over relatively small, albeit important, changes in the percentages and numbers of people living in absolute and relative poverty, if we take a step back and look at the big historical trends, those figures have been stubbornly in roughly the same place. I think that is because we focus too much on the money and not enough on the other factors that might lift people out of poverty and give them aspiration and opportunity.

Supporting people into work and better jobs is absolutely part of that, not just because it improves people’s incomes but because we know that work helps to improve people’s mental and physical wellbeing. I am proud that, compared with 2010, there are half a million fewer children growing up in a household that has been out of work long term. That is the kind of achievement that sustainably lifts people out of poverty.

That is why I welcome the emphasis on the changes we have made to universal credit—using the money wisely to encourage people into work and to keep more of their own money—and to the minimum wage. We need to do everything we can to ensure that the right incentives are there for people to be in work. Of course, closely tied to that are the commitments we made earlier in the year on things such as the lifetime skills guarantee and further funding to support free childcare. We need to look closely at whether we can go further when it comes to childcare. We still have historically high childcare costs in this country, and that remains a difficult barrier to work. Things such as the change in the taper would go further if childcare were cheaper.

We also need to look at child maintenance, which is another key factor in poverty. Some 60% of children living in single-parent households that are not in receipt of maintenance would be lifted out of poverty if that maintenance were received. When the restrictions and measures brought in to tackle this issue, which largely focused on things such as deduction orders for people’s earnings and court orders to seize assets, were considered, I do not think enough thought was given to the realities of using them, because most of those things make it difficult for someone to earn money, which defeats the object. Consideration was given to home curfews for people who were non-compliant with their child maintenance, but those powers were never enacted. We need to look at that again if we want to drive down the absence of child maintenance payments.

I am conscious that Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy colleagues are leading today’s debate, so I want to mention an area that will be important for job opportunities in Crewe and Nantwich, which I have been talking to the Secretary of State about—the geothermal industry. We saw earlier in the year the difficulties of over-relying on solar and wind power when it comes to our renewable energy drive. Geothermal is an under-utilised opportunity in this country. Unfortunately, earlier in the year, just as the industry wanted to invest, we removed the tariff that would give it a guaranteed return. That has obviously had a devastating impact on investment in geothermal. We see it rising across Europe and across the world, but it is not rising in this country because we do not have that guarantee. I will continue to work with BEIS colleagues to see whether we can do something about that.

Levelling up is important to us all. It is no good encouraging families and encouraging ambition if opportunity is not spread evenly around the country, as colleagues have mentioned. Yesterday, we saw the announcement of hundreds of millions of pounds of investment through the levelling-up fund. Through the impact of the £22.9 million Crewe town deal that we were awarded earlier this year, I have seen the real, tangible difference that those projects can make—led by local MPs, working with local authorities and, importantly, picking projects that are important to local communities across a whole range of issues. I look forward to us making a levelling-up fund bid in future funding rounds.

I am afraid that we have heard the usual today from those on the Opposition Benches. Labour Members want to tell everyone that there are no difficult decisions. There is never a request for more benefit spending that they say no to. There is no problem to which their answer is not just “tax the rich”, despite the increasing proportion of our tax bill being paid by the wealthy. Some 30% of income tax is paid by the top 1% of earners. I am not quite sure where Labour Members want that figure to be before they will accept that those with the broadest shoulders are carrying the biggest burden, and I do not think it is sensible in a global economy to further discourage wealth creators from living in this country.

Labour Members know that their rhetoric on taxing the rich does not add up. That is why, despite all the talk, they have outlined only one measure, which—along with all the measures they have talked about but failed to detail—they know full well does not come close to meeting their continual spending commitments. For example, they wanted us to spend not just £6 billion on retaining the uplift on universal credit, but £2 billion to extend it to those on legacy benefits, and £1 billion to extend it to those on tax credits. They wanted £2 billion to scrap the two-child policy; £2 billion to turn advances into grants—I could go on. They never explain how they would pay for that, besides broad discussions about taxing the rich. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Easington (Grahame Morris), from a sedentary position, talks about champagne. It is classic Labour to misunderstand what it means to be aspirational. The people I know who want to buy a glass of champagne are not wealthy; they are people from ordinary families who maybe have a wedding or another special occasion and want to enjoy themselves. The hon. Gentleman’s disdain for that measure just shows how he does not understand the people he is supposed to represent.

[Paul Howell]

Does my hon. Friend agree that when we talk about champagne, we are probably more likely to be talking about a £7 bottle of prosecco?