Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Paul Uppal and Stephen Timms

Monday 13th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Timms]

The right hon. Gentleman will find out the answer to that question in due course. We have been consistent in supporting the principle of universal credit. We think that bringing in-work and out-of-work benefits together is a good idea that has a number of attractions. The problem is that the detailed work to make that policy fly has simply not been done by the Minister and his hon. Friends. There are desperate, gaping gaps in the policy and fundamental questions that he is unable to answer or explain about how the arrangements will work. As a result, the Bill, on departing this House, will leave many households, and many working families in particular, in a very precarious position.

Having talked about a lot of things that we do not know about, let me now deal with some things that we do know about. Clause 5, which I touched on a moment ago, will badly undermine the aspirations of people who are in work on modest incomes. Under the current rules—they have been a long-standing feature of the system—people who are out of work but who have above a prescribed capital sum are expected to use it to support themselves before claiming income-related, out-of-work benefits. If somebody has more than £6,000 in savings, the Government assume an income from them, which is then subtracted from the benefit entitlements; someone with more than £16,000 in savings will not receive means-tested, out-of-work benefits at all. Those two figures were increased from £3,000 and £8,000 by the last Government to help people retain some of their savings when they lost work. For people in work, the story has been very different. There is no savings cap at all on tax credits. Clause 5 will change that fundamentally by extending the rules on savings for those who are out of work to people who are in work.

The Conservative party used to tell us that it wanted to encourage people to save. Clause 5 will not just discourage people from saving; it will make it impossible for them to save. Anyone on a modest income who decides to save for a deposit to buy a house in the future, or for the cost of university education, will suffer an extraordinary punishment under the clause. It is impossible to buy a house today, or to obtain a mortgage for shared ownership, with a deposit of less than £16,000. However, if people have savings of £16,000 towards, say, the deposit for a mortgage—if, as Ministers seem to believe, they start to get ideas above their station—they will lose all their universal credit. Typically, that might be £5,000 a year. In addition, they will lose any support that they receive for the costs of child care, and on top of that they will lose any help that they are given with housing costs.

Those measures will add up to an extraordinary punishment for saving. They will make saving literally impossible, because as soon as people have managed to save £16,000 from their earnings, the Government will drain their savings away. The problem will start as soon as they have saved £6,000. The hon. Member for Redcar (Ian Swales)—who, I am pleased to see, is present—said in Committee that the problem would not last very long because people’s savings would soon be gone, and he was absolutely right. These proposals mean that if anyone attempts to start building up a saving that would be enough for, say, a deposit on a house or a contribution towards higher education costs, the Government will take it away by withdrawing their universal credit. The message being sent to people on low incomes who are doing the right thing and working to support themselves could not be clearer: “This Government will not support you.”

Amendments 23 and 24 would change that. They would allow people to save money in an individual savings account—up to £50,000 if they are in work. Ministers have told us that it would cost just £70 million a year to exclude all working households from the savings cap, and this measure is obviously more modest than that.

Surely we should be encouraging people to save, not punishing them for saving. People work to improve their lives and the lives of their families. They are aiming not for a bit more spending money each month, but for the means to buy a house, to help their children through university, to start a business or to pay for a child’s wedding. If they are to achieve such aspirations, people need to be able to save from their earnings, but clause 5 denies them the chance to do that.

[Paul Uppal (Wolverhampton South West) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman has stressed the importance of aspiration. New clause 3, which concerns free school meals, is also relevant to that. Does he not find it interesting that, according to an examination of educational attainment among different ethnic groups, the most successful sub-group are Chinese students, and the second most successful are Chinese students receiving free school meals? The issue is not just money, but how Government can encourage aspiration and ambition, which is the ethos of the Bill.

[Stephen Timms]

Certainly the Bill should encourage aspiration, but if it prevents people from saving in the way that I have described, as clause 5 will, it will undermine aspiration. That is the point: we want to change the Bill so that it will allow people, even those on universal credit, to save. We believe that everyone should be encouraged to save, rather than being punished for having saved.

The Secretary of State used to agree with us. In 2008, he said that

“poverty is not just about how little you earn; it’s also about how little you own.”

If we want people to work their way out of poverty in the way in which the hon. Gentleman suggests—and I agree with him about that—we need to offer them the chance to save. I am afraid that if the Government press ahead with making saving on a low income impossible, the phrase “compassionate conservatism” will be revealed as a sham.

For similar reasons, I hope that Government Members will share my concern about the Bill’s discouragement to self-employment. Schedule 1 provides for a minimum income floor when calculating universal credit for self-employed people. Under that provision, Ministers are making the assumption that self-employed people will be earning at least the minimum wage for every hour they work, but anyone with even a passing knowledge of what is involved in starting up in self-employment will know that that is absurd. While establishing their business, many self-employed people work extraordinarily long hours and earn hardly anything at all, and their income fluctuates hugely month by month. It is absurd to assume that they will earn the minimum wage for every hour they work, and that they should therefore have their universal credit reduced accordingly. That is why the Chartered Institute of Taxation has warned that this new system will be much less supportive of self-employment than the current one.

Finance Bill

Debate between Paul Uppal and Stephen Timms

Monday 12th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Timms]

The amendments are probing amendments. We are keen to understand the thinking that led to the figure of 28% as the rate of capital gains tax. We will not vote against the Government’s proposal or for the lower figure proposed in the three amendments.

I noted that some of my hon. Friends, including some who are in the Chamber, tabled an amendment calling for a higher rate at 40%. I understand why, in accordance with convention, it was not selected for debate. However, I am puzzled that no Liberal Democrat Members put their names to that amendment because it appears to reflect the proposal in their manifesto.

The Liberal Democrat manifesto, which is always an interesting read, sets out, under the slogan, “Change that Works for You”, a series of tax-raising measures, including,

“taxing capital gains at the same rate as income, so that all the money you make is taxed in the same way.”

The document, “Liberal Democrat Tax Plans”, went into more detail. It states:

“We propose to tax capital as income in order to remove this anomaly.”

That presumably means applying a 50% rate to those on the highest income, as well as a 40% rate to those on the higher rate tax. The Liberal Democrat document claims that that would raise £3.2 billion a year. It also argues for reducing the annual tax exempt allowance from the current figure of just over £10,000 to £2,000, thereby raising a further £0.9 billion a year. That is more than £4 billion a year—a significant contribution to avoiding the unfair VAT rise, which is at the heart of the Budget and against which the Liberal Democrats campaigned. If more than £4 billion had been raised in that way, one percentage point of the 2.5% VAT rise could have been avoided.

Some of the thinking in the Liberal Democrat documents survived in the coalition agreement, which states:

“We will seek ways of taxing non-business capital gains at rates similar or close to those applied to income.”

The Liberal Democrats were therefore successful in at least getting the idea into the coalition agreement, but they signally failed to get it into the Bill. The Chancellor in his Budget speech flatly rejected the suggestion of reducing the annual exempt allowance. He said he would leave it at £10,000 and, far from reducing it to £2,000, would continue to uprate it in line with inflation in future.

I am encouraged to see the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) in his place, together with some of his hon. Friends. He has tabled an amendment, about which he will speak shortly, and he may seek to pursue the ideas in the Liberal Democrat manifesto. It would be interesting to know whether Liberal Democrats really supported those proposals when they campaigned on them. Have they been persuaded by their coalition partners that they were naive or unrealistic, or that the proposals were damaging? Have most Liberal Democrats just given up, smothered in the embrace of their new partners and no longer capable of defending the policies on which they were elected?

I am very much looking forward to what the hon. Member for St Ives has to say on that. He has already described himself as a free-ranging Back Bencher, although he was not quite free enough to range into the Aye Lobby with the Opposition earlier this evening. I am keen to hear from him and perhaps from other Liberal Democrats, who appeared to have such distinctive views on capital gains tax during the election campaign but who have since seemingly abandoned them, choosing instead to support what is traditionally the Conservatives’ favourite tax-raising device, namely an increase in VAT.

We also need an explanation from the Minister, because, as I said, the coalition agreement states:

“We will seek ways of taxing non-business capital gains at rates similar or close to those applied to income”.

It is a bit hard to see how 28% can be described as

“similar or close to”

40%, let alone to 50%, and I hope the Minister can offer some explanation for the adoption of 28%, which seems to be at variance with the agreement. Perhaps he could shed some light on how vigorously—behind the scenes within the Government—Liberal Democrat members of the coalition fought for the position that they succeeded in negotiating into the agreement. Alternatively, is the truth that having got that into the agreement, they simply gave up, vacated the field and meekly accepted 28% as the best that the Conservatives were going to offer them? It would be of great interest to many of us if the Minister could shed light on those discussions.

Why was the figure of 28% chosen? It somewhat narrows the differential between tax on income and tax on capital gains, but it does not narrow it any further than the position before the introduction of the 50p rate, and nowhere near abolishes it. Indeed, increasing the rate by just 10 percentage points means that somebody on the 50p rate of income tax has exactly the same incentive to convert their income into capital gains as when they paid tax at 40p in the pound. For those people—the highest earners—there has been no reduction in the incentive, but as I understand it, reducing the incentive was the whole reason for the change.

There was one hint in the Chancellor’s Budget speech on the reason for choosing 28%. He said:

“I asked the Treasury to examine what would have happened if we had increased the rate much further beyond 28%, and its dynamic analysis showed that that would have resulted in smaller total revenues.”—[Official Report, 22 June 2010; Vol. 512, c. 178.]

I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm whether the Government’s view is that 28% is close to the revenue-maximising rate. Is 28% the rate at which proceeds from capital gains tax are maximised? Is he willing to place in the Library the “dynamic analysis” to which the Chancellor referred that shows how proceeds would decline if the rate were set at higher than 28%, more in keeping with the proposal in the Liberal Democrats’ manifesto?

The Red Book tells us that that change will generate £725 million next year. That is certainly a handy and significant sum, but it is only about one sixth of the amount that the Liberal Democrats wanted to raise from increasing capital gains tax. Can the Minister tell us how much of that £725 million will be raised in capital gains tax, and how much of it will raised in income tax that would otherwise have been avoided by switching to capital gains?

[Paul Uppal (Wolverhampton South West) (Con)]

I pay tribute to the right hon. Gentleman. It is good to see him in Committee. As a new Member, I was appalled by the dreadful event that afflicted him and it is good to see him in good health and good temper.

From my experience of the working of capital gains tax, and from speaking to constituents, it is a tax that is at the discretion of the individual investor. If prudent investors accrued a capital sum over a period of time, under the old system of indexation they would hold it for a long time and then realise the gains, often paying a minimal amount of capital gains tax. He will remember the 1970s, when CGT was very high and private investors would often ask “Why materialise this asset and pay the tax?” The 28% rate strikes a fair deal, and those of us on the Conservative Benches who come from a real business background understand and appreciate that a deal has to be struck with private investors and business.

[Stephen Timms]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his kind remarks, and to the Minister for his generous remarks earlier.

Of course taxpayers have opportunities, for example, to defer payment of capital gains tax and I shall come to such instances in a moment. The hon. Gentleman suggests that 28% is a compromise, but the Chancellor suggested that it might be—or is at least close to—the rate at which revenue is maximised. The Treasury has carried out some dynamic analysis to illustrate that, and it would be welcome if it could be placed in the Library so that hon. Members can see it. We need to know more about the reasons for the choice of rate, and I hope that the Minister will be able to provide us and some of his Liberal Democrat partners with some much needed enlightenment.

I wish to press the Minister on two further aspects of the proposed change—the timing of the change and, on the change to entrepreneurs relief, the reason for the increase in its generosity and the change to the way the amount relieved will be calculated. First, on the timing point, the Minister will be very familiar with the arguments against changing tax rates mid-year. Indeed, when our positions were reversed, he used to rehearse regularly the arguments against the kinds of complexities caused by changing rates mid-year. Indeed, some of his hon. Friends said earlier that they were looking forward to the Government simplifying the tax system. This is their first Bill and they have introduced a new and unprecedented complexity. What is it that persuaded the Minister that this particular complication was worth introducing? I am told that there has never been a mid-year change of rate in CGT since it was introduced in the mid-1960s. Will he acknowledge that this should not be the norm—that sudden and unannounced lurches in tax rates, in the middle of a tax year, are damaging and undermine people’s confidence in the tax system? Can he assure us that the Government will do their utmost to avoid a repetition in future?

The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales says that there are likely to be a number of practical problems, in particular with changes to the supplementary pages for capital gains for the self-assessment tax return and for filing online. Are the Government aware of those problems, and is the Minister able to tell us how they will be addressed? ICAEW also makes the point that the transitional provisions for the current financial year are insufficient from a technical standpoint. Is it intended to make further transitional arrangements in the third Finance Bill of this year—the one to be brought forward in the autumn? Is the Minister able to confirm that these matters will be discussed with the experts of the CGT liaison group, ensuring through a collaborative approach that the final legislation later this year covers all the issues raised by a mid-year change?