Fuel Duty

Pete Wishart Excerpts

Monday 12th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Albert Owen]

I will in a moment, but given the time limit I do want to make some progress.

I want to raise three issues, the first of which is the impact of fuel duty on businesses, especially those in peripheral areas of the United Kingdom. The Government also chose to impose a VAT increase, despite the Prime Minister having told the country before the election that they had no intention of doing so. Every time constituents throughout the country put petrol or diesel in their cars they pay an extra 3p per litre because of the tax introduced by this Chancellor of the Exchequer.

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

I am genuinely confused. What is the difference between a Labour fuel tax hike and a Conservative one?

[Albert Owen]

Scottish National party Members always use that line on fuel duty, and I am not going to waste my time on it—[Interruption.] If the hon. Gentleman had checked the record, he would know that I have been consistent on fuel duty. I have followed SNP Members through the Lobby on that. Previous Labour Chancellors froze the duty following pressure from people. That is on the record. We can play games about previous Governments, but the serious issue is the cost—

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[Mr Bain]

If the hon. Gentleman has the courage of the convictions he has just expressed, he should join us in the Lobby tonight. That will be the evidence his constituents will be looking for tomorrow morning.

On incomes, millions of ordinary people are under huge pressure because of the collapse in real wages, which has hit particularly hard since the onset of the current recession.

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Bain]

I am running out of time, and I am sure the hon. Gentleman will have a chance to make his own speech.

Since 2007, real wages have declined by about 4% for the vast majority of ordinary people, damaging their spending power and weakening prospects for a consumer-led economic recovery. In my constituency, almost three in 10 workers, including half of all the 10,000 part-time workers, earn less than the living wage of £7.45 an hour. The increases in fuel duty have hit them especially hard. As the Resolution Foundation’s recent Commission on Living Standards report established, just 12p in every £1 of growth generated in Britain finds its way into the pay packets of workers in the lower half of the income scale. They need help on fuel costs tonight.

Britain stands at a crossroads. Without a change in policy, people will be no better off in 2020 than they were in 2001, but with the right kind of reforms on pay, tax and benefits, that can be reversed and we can see the gap between rich and poor falling once again. Tonight we can make our contribution to supporting growth and improving the living standards of our constituents over the next few months, by rejecting the Government amendment and boosting much needed job creation by cutting fuel duty.

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[Pete Wishart]

Does the hon. Lady think that Scottish Labour’s cuts commission’s plans to do away with free personal care and free bus passes for the elderly, and to introduce tuition fees, would lower the cost of living for Scottish people, who are suffering in the very conditions that she describes?

[Sheila Gilmore]

I am glad that the hon. Gentleman has made those comments in an intervention, because I heard him say that earlier from a sedentary position.

Cuts have been made in Scotland—the hon. Gentleman should be absolutely clear about that. They have been made to social care in Scotland, partly because of the council tax freeze. I heard the Economic Secretary boast about that freeze, but it is an extremely regressive policy. For people who do not pay council tax because they receive council tax benefit, that policy has not benefited them by one penny. In Scotland, those people have not benefited for five years. Indeed, it gives a far greater benefit to people who pay the highest level of tax.

As a result of the council tax freeze, councils in Scotland have suffered a great deal, as councils in England are now suffering. A service that has suffered is social care. I will not take lessons from the hon. Gentleman, because cuts have already been made in Scotland as a result of his Government’s policies. Those things will happen in England too. I would not be as proud as the Economic Secretary of the council tax freeze, because it has a severe downside for many people who depend heavily on the services that councils provide, which are important for their living standards. We must not forget that.

As my hon. Friend the Member for East Lothian (Fiona O'Donnell) mentioned, people who work in social care are not only on low wages but they are told by their employers, who often have outsourced contracts from councils that are trying desperately to make savings, to use their own car to travel to do the job. They are not usually paid for travel time, and they are not refunded if they have to park somewhere and pay parking charges. They are on the lowest income levels, they are working hard in a hugely important service, and they deserve much more attention from us. They are suffering from the increases in fuel tax.

The Minister said yet again all this stuff about all the jobs that the Government claim have been created. As I have said before, if we say that there have been 1 million new jobs since the election and that that is a huge improvement, we should remember that, at the beginning of 2011, only eight months after the Government came to power, they said that they had created 500,000 jobs. I contend that those jobs were created as a result of the economic stimulus from the previous Government. In the following 22 months, another 500,000 jobs were created at a slower rate of growth. Many of those jobs are part time, which has increased spending on welfare benefits, thus increasing the problems that the Government face in trying to balance their financial books. People with part-time jobs claim housing benefit—98% of new housing benefit claimants are people in employment—and they claim more tax credits, because their hours of work have decreased. That is not a stable basis on which to proceed. If the Government want to scrap the proposed fuel increase in January, perhaps they should simply tell the nation that today.