Budget Resolutions

Peter Grant Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

My hon. Friend has done the maths and is absolutely right. Taking into account the changes to the tax threshold, the announcements yesterday and in November, and council tax, by the end of the forecast period the average family will be £870 worse off.

As the Resolution Foundation highlighted just this morning, the 8 million tax-paying pensioners will see their taxes increase by an average of £1,000. That is a collective £8 billion tax grab from our nation’s pensioners. As Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said yesterday:

“This remains a parliament of record tax rises.”

That is the legacy of this Conservative Government.

The Tory Government’s pickpocketing has meant higher taxes on working people, leaving them with less money at a time when their daily lives are getting more expensive. Yesterday, the Chancellor said that a person on average earnings is £900 better off, but let us take a look at that claim. He has ignored not only his own stealth tax rises, with the tax thresholds and council tax, but the rising costs of energy bills, food, mortgages and rent. In fact, rather than being better off, as he claimed, household disposable income is set to fall by £200 per person over the course of this Parliament.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I completely agree that deliberately leaving tax thresholds untouched at a time when pay and prices are increasing is a stealth tax. It is a stealth tax when this Chancellor does it, but it was also a stealth tax when Gordon Brown did it.

[Rachel Reeves]

It is interesting to have an intervention from the SNP, which is increasing taxes on ordinary working people—I would probably just stay on the Bench.

This is the only Parliament on record in which living standards are set to be lower at its end than at its beginning. The Chancellor chose to ignore all those realities, but the truth is that ordinary families cannot ignore them. As people up and down the country know, the definition of being better off is having more money. Under the Tories, people have less. People feel worse off because they are worse off.

Let us look at economic growth. Growth is critical for our success as a nation, for our living standards and for provide sustainable funding for public services, but the Tories have failed there, too. The context of yesterday’s Budget is a Prime Minister who pledged growth but has delivered recession. This economy is now smaller than when the Prime Minister took up office. Instead of bouncing back, the UK’s GDP is bumping along the bottom this year.

In his statement, the Chancellor rightly elevated the true measure of success:

“not just higher GDP, but higher GDP per head.”—[Official Report, 6 March 2024; Vol. 746, c. 837.]

I agree with him that that is the most important yardstick, so how are the Tories doing against that measure? The reality is that GDP per capita is set to shrink, not grow, this year, having shrunk and not grown last year, too. GDP per capita is now expected to be lower at the end of this year than it was at the start of this Parliament. Yesterday, we learned that forecast GDP-per-capita growth has been revised down for four of the next five years—hardly the success that the Chancellor was looking for.

The Chancellor said that it was important not to follow a path that relied on net migration to provide growth and GDP, and I agree. Has the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions seen the chart on page 29 of the Office for Budget Responsibility economic and fiscal outlook, which shows that net migration has been revised up by 350,000 over the next five years? That is the exact opposite of what the Chancellor spoke about.

Our country has gone through a difficult time over these past few years. The origins of many of the crises we have faced are global: pandemic, war, and the energy crisis. Other countries have also experienced those shocks, but each time crisis has hit, Britain has found itself acutely exposed because of the choices of successive Conservative Governments: austerity that choked off investment, then Brexit without a plan, and then the Tories crashed the economy with their kamikaze Budget.

This Tory record of economic failure has held our country back for far too long. If the UK economy had grown at the average of the OECD rate since 2010, when the Conservatives came to office, it would now be £140 billion bigger than it is today. That is equivalent to £5,000 per household every year, and would mean an additional £50 billion in tax revenues to invest in our public services. Growth matters, but the Tories are incapable of delivering it. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Aaron Bell) says from a sedentary position that we are doing better than the G7. There are only two G7 countries in recession today: us and Japan. That is the Conservatives’ record, and they should be ashamed of it.

This is the 12th Tory plan for growth in 14 years, and we are still in recession. Twelve plans from five Prime Ministers and seven Chancellors, with none of them succeeding. We are trapped in a Tory doom loop of low growth and high taxes, and it is working people who are paying the price.

[Rachel Reeves]

Those numbers about pensioners who pay tax are from the Resolution Foundation. They were published this morning, so the hon. Gentleman can also look at them, but it is a fact that because the tax thresholds have been frozen, pensioners who pay tax are paying more tax than they were before. That is the legacy of this Government. This is not just about lines on a graph. It is about our high streets, it is about whether businesses grow, and it is about whether we can create secure, well-paid jobs in all parts of the country, with more money in the pockets of working people, because if an economy does not work for working people, it does not work at all.

When the Tories are not pickpocketing the taxpayer, they are pickpocketing Labour policies. Having spent years defending the indefensible, the Tories have belatedly listened to Labour and recognised the importance of closing the non-dom tax loophole. I believe that if people make Britain their home, they should pay their taxes here too. The Office for Budget Responsibility says that the steady state amount of revenue raised by the non-dom policy is £3 billion per year. I first called for that loophole to be closed when it entered the public consciousness two years ago that some people were not paying their fair share of taxes, meaning that we have missed out of £6 billion in tax revenue—money that could have been invested in our public services.

If any further proof were needed that Labour is winning the battle of ideas, it is our time-limited windfall tax on the oil and gas producers. Having originally opposed the creation of such a tax, the Tories were dragged kicking and screaming by Labour to create an energy profits levy. Even after yesterday’s announcement of a one-year extension, the Tories are still leaving gaping loopholes, meaning that many energy giants will still pay less in tax. Meanwhile, the SNP opposes our proper windfall tax while, just three weeks ago, it put up taxes on working people in Scotland—on teachers, nurses, and plumbers.

[Peter Grant]

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

[Rachel Reeves]

I will happily take another intervention, if the hon. Gentleman wants to defend higher taxes on working people. Bring it on!

[Peter Grant]

Does the shadow Chancellor not understand that the SNP’s position is that there should not be a single windfall tax that punishes only north-east Scotland? A windfall tax should be applied to every sector that has profiteered from war, covid and price increases. Does she not understand that the SNP’s income tax policy means that low-paid workers—the people the Labour party is supposed to protect—pay less income tax in Scotland than they would in England, and that nurses and care workers are paid more in Scotland than in England? That is true, is it not?

[Rachel Reeves]

All I would say to the hon. Gentleman is: put that on your leaflet! The fact is that nurses, teachers and plumbers are paying more tax in Scotland. At the same time, the energy giants that are making huge profits from the windfalls of war will pay less tax under the SNP. That is its record, and it should be ashamed of it.

Labour is committed to investing more in our schools and hospitals. That was a priority before the Budget, and it remains a priority, because public services are on their knees after 14 years of Conservative failure. Labour believes in aspiration for all our children, and we will not stand by while the roof falls in on state education under the Tories. History is repeating itself: children are again being taught in portacabins, as they were when I was at school under a Tory Government. When the Tories undervalue our young people, they are squandering their potential and undermining our whole country’s future. That is why the next Labour Government will close the tax loopholes enjoyed by private schools. The money raised from ending their exemption from business rates and VAT will instead go where it is needed—to help the 93% of children in our state schools.

I will always be clear that all the policies in our manifesto will be fully costed and fully funded. Now that the Tories have U-turned on their policy on non-doms, which we welcome, we will do the necessary work to show how our plans will be paid for. We will set that out in an orderly and responsible way. Our public services are in a mess under the Conservatives, but a Labour Government will begin to turn them around, give an immediate injection of cash to our schools and our hospitals, and tackle Tory waste, through a serious plan to grow our economy and provide the sustainable finance that our public services need.

It takes some nerve for the Chancellor to wag his finger at local councils this week, when the Tories and the Prime Minister have squandered billions of pounds of taxpayers’ hard-earned money. Who has used excessive numbers of management consultants in central Government? The Tories. Who signed the cheques and lost an additional £10 billion through dodgy personal protective equipment contracts? The Tories. Who left the vaults open, so that organised criminal gangs could help themselves to £7 billion of public money through covid fraud? The Tories. Who made a costly mess of HS2? The Tories. Who handed £500 million to the Rwanda Government, and has nothing to show for it? The Tories.

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[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I thought it was interesting when the topics for these Budget debates were set, because those topics are what the Government want us to believe the Budget is all about. There is no mention of public services, the cost of living or climate change and net zero for any of the three days. We are talking about rewarding work, and I want to talk about rewarding not only those currently in work, but those who will be and have previously been in the workforce, because all three groups have been shamefully failed in this Budget.

For me, rewarding works means paying everybody a living wage—not a minimum wage. The Minister should be listening, but he does not particularly care about this. A wage that is not enough to live on is not a living wage—it is as simple as that. There is nothing in the Budget about banning exploitative zero-hours contacts. There is nothing, obviously, about repealing the shameful anti-strike legislation that the Government are imposing on a great number of public sector workers.

I wondered whether it was just that the topics chosen were not that good, and perhaps the Chancellor said more about those subjects in his speech. I had a look at the speech on the Treasury website—all 7,260-odd words of it. The word “poverty” is mentioned once, but “low pay” and “zero-hours” not at all. Net zero gets a mention, because the Chancellor mentioned his colleague, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, and zero emissions is mentioned once. Climate has not a single mention and Brexit—not surprisingly, as we are not allowed to talk about it any more—has no mention.

By necessity, some of my remarks have to be about what is not in the Budget, as much as what is. This Government are heading to become the worst Government in history for falling living standards. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has told us that it is unlikely that real household incomes will be any higher at the end of this Parliament than they were at the beginning. How can we call it economic growth when people in their real lives, in real houses with real jobs, do not notice any improvement in their standard of living over an entire five years?

Tax as a percentage of GDP will soon be the highest it has ever been. We have seen a £66 billion increase in the tax burden in this Parliament alone, and far too often it is people on lower incomes who pick up the biggest share. As has been mentioned, the six-year freeze on tax thresholds will cost taxpayers an extra £30 billion in stealth tax by 2027-28, even allowing for the impact of the 2p national insurance cut. The UK’s interest payments as a percentage of national income are about to become the highest for 70 years. If someone is an international banker, the rewards from work can be rich indeed, but they are not for someone trying to scrape a living in any kind of normal job.

This Chancellor’s time in office has seen the longest unbroken run of declining living standards since records began. The Government talk about rewarding work, but it is quite the opposite. Income inequalities in the United Kingdom are higher than in any other large European economy. What has the United Kingdom done that they did not, and what has everyone else done that the United Kingdom did not do? Germany, for example, had a covid pandemic, just as we did. Germany is impacted by the war in Ukraine just as much as we are—possibly more so, because it is physically closer to it. Middle-income earners in the United Kingdom are 20% poorer than their equivalents in Germany. I wonder what it could be that affected the economy and living standards in the United Kingdom that has not had the same impact on Germany, France, Italy and other EU member states? We are not allowed to say the B-word, so I will leave the Chancellor to work it out for himself.

As the Child Poverty Action Group has pointed out, child poverty is not inevitable, but a choice. It has said:

“With the right policy changes we can substantially reduce the extent and depth of child poverty across the country.”

Members do not have to take its word for what might happen if policies were changed; they need only look to what has happened in Scotland, despite the fact that the Scottish Government have substantially fewer fiscal, monetary and legislative powers than this place. Scotland now has the “game-changing” Scottish child payment—that is not our word, but that of the Child Poverty Action Group. We have the child winter heating payment, supporting the most vulnerable young people with disabilities to cope with their fuel bills. We have free school meals for everybody in primary 1 to 5 and for eligible children throughout their time in school.

[Michael Shanks]

The hon. Member mentioned the Child Poverty Action Group. After the Scottish Government’s Budget, it said that it was “bitterly” disappointed and that, as it stands, the Budget will at best stall progress, hampering progress towards reducing child poverty. Does the hon. Member think his own Government are reducing child poverty as much as they could be?

[Peter Grant]

I will come on to that in a minute. The Scottish Government are perhaps not reducing child poverty as much as they could, because nobody is ever perfect, but they are doing a blooming sight more than any Government down here ever will. As I said, we have free school meals for everybody in the first five years of primary school and for a great many children right up until they leave school. We have followed the example of our Scandinavian friends by welcoming every newborn baby in Scotland with a baby box containing the essentials for the first six months of their life. That is not just about practical physical help; it is also about the difference it makes to a new mum. It simply says to them, “We think your new baby is somebody special. Your baby is welcome as a new citizen of our country.” We have more than 1,140 hours a year of early learning and childcare for every three-year-old and four-year-old, and all eligible two-year-olds.

[Karin Smyth]

Just to correct an earlier point, when the hon. Member said that the Scottish Government would do more than any Government down here, I helpfully remind him that the last Labour Government lifted hundreds of thousands of children—I think up to 1 million —out of poverty, and we would seek to do that sort of work again. Who is in government here in Westminster does make a difference, does he not agree?

[Peter Grant]

I am not saying that a Government here cannot do it—in fact, I am saying that a Government here can do it. The problem is that the Government, which the hon. Member’s party said we could trust with the welfare system, are not doing that.

We have also introduced free bus travel throughout Scotland for 2 million people, including all young people up to the age of 21. That is important, because it not only significantly helps those people with the cost of their travel, and therefore the cost of living, but it encourages young people not to get into the habit of travelling by car. It encourages them to get into the habit of seeing public transport as a viable option.

In answer to the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Michael Shanks), independent analysis has indicated that 100,000 children in Scotland will be kept out of child poverty this year because of actions by the Scottish Government. If the UK Government were willing simply to do what has already been done in Scotland, there could be 1 million fewer children living in poverty in the United Kingdom. Child poverty is not inevitable; it is a deliberate political choice. Scotland has chosen to say no to child poverty. The Budget has chosen to allow it to continue and to grow.

As well as the right support for children in low-earning families, the Government could have announced any number of things to help people in work to have better and secure pay. I have already mentioned the living wage, and they could have strengthened protection for workers instead of taking away the right to strike of those working in all sorts of public sector work.

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

On strengthening protection, is it not true that the SNP hired people on zero-hours contracts to deliver literature during the Rutherglen by-election?

[Peter Grant]

I read that in Private Eye—

[Steve McCabe]

It must be true, then.

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[Peter Grant]

It is in Private Eye and therefore it must be true. I do not know if that has been fact-checked. If the hon. Gentleman can provide me with evidence from something other than Private Eye, we will certainly look into it. I should say, incidentally, that the Labour party’s record of industrial relations in its own workforce is nothing to boast about. He might want to have a look in his own house first of all.

Among the other steps that the Government could take—I look forward to a likely incoming Labour Government committing to doing all this—they could outlaw despicable fire and rehire practices and support the Bill proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands). They could ban unpaid work trials, as was attempted by my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow South (Stewart Malcolm McDonald) in his private Member’s Bill. They could give people the right to flexible working, rather than making it feel as if it is not really proper working. They could finally take action, seven years after the Taylor review. They could repeal the anti-strike legislation. Incidentally, the Scottish Government have undertaken not to use any of the anti-strike provisions included in that legislation. I look forward to an incoming Labour Government undertaking not to use them, as a precursor to repealing them altogether.

There are some changes in the Budget that we can mention, although they do not go far enough. Changes to the high-income child benefit charge are certainly welcome, but they do not go far enough to catch up with the downturn in income people have suffered over the years of that freeze. In the same way, the VAT charge threshold for small businesses, which increased by £10,000 a year, is welcome, but that is not enough even to make up for the deterioration in small business income after seven years of that ongoing stealth tax. Of course, we still have child maintenance liability for a non-resident parent based on assumptions about wage levels and cost of living levels that are years out of date. The Government say they do not have time in the legislative programme to bring forward primary legislation to change it. However, last week the House finished three hours early because we had nothing to talk about. Come on—if they were serious about it, they would have done something about it.

I mentioned net zero and climate change earlier, and I welcome the confirmation of up to £120 million more —although the words “up to” worry me—for the green industries growth accelerator, which is, to quote the Chancellor,

“to build supply chains for new technology, ranging from offshore wind to carbon capture and storage.”—[Official Report, 6 March 2024; Vol. 746, c. 844.]

Can we get an assurance that the Government will not make the same mistakes with that as they did with contracts for difference? The former BiFab yard in Methil in my constituency went into administration because although it could have made jackets for offshore wind turbines under contracts for difference, firms chose to import them from halfway around the world. While workers who could have done that work in my constituency were being laid off, we were paying to transport heavy-engineered goods from the other side of the world. Will the Government commit to reviewing the criteria for the GIGA to include the manufacture of those jackets? They make up about 40% of the total cost of a turbine and 40% of the supply chain but are currently excluded from that incentive scheme. If included, that could help to bolster the workforce in my constituency and a number of others across the UK.

I would like the Government to welcome again the contribution that green hydrogen can make to our net zero future. I am very pleased that Methil in my constituency is home to H100, the world’s biggest ever conversion of domestic gas supply to run on clean, renewable green hydrogen. It is the biggest example of that kind of green energy innovation anywhere on the planet. The next stage was even more ambitious: the Government promised to support what they called a hydrogen town pilot to extend the same technology and the same practices into tens of thousands of houses. I would love to see that happening in Methil and the surrounding areas, but I would rather see it happening anywhere than not happening at all.

The Government promised an announcement in March last year; that is now a year overdue. I, and many others with an interest in clean energy technology, are concerned that the Government are simply losing enthusiasm for this world-leading work. We threw away our world-leading position on other green energies during the Thatcher years. We cannot afford to do it again.

Briefly, I point out that if we are talking about rewarding work, we must also extend that to how we reward those who have finished their working careers and now rely on the state pension to get by. In spite of all the rhetoric, we still have one of the meanest state pensions in western Europe. There are still millions of WASPI women—women against state pension inequality —but the Government hope that if they just ignore those women, they will go away. They will not, so the Government had better stop ignoring them. We have seen more than £1 billion illegally underpaid to pensioners—that is utterly scandalous —and woefully inadequate protection from pension scams both for people building up their private pensions and, as some Members will be all too aware, for pension funds such as those of London Capital & Finance, British Steel and United Kingdom Atomic Energy Agency Technology, and dozens of others.

We have a Budget that chooses to leave hundreds of thousands of children in poverty, chooses to allow the scandal of low pay and exploitative work practices to continue, and chooses to continue inflicting stealth taxes that hit low-paid workers hardest. In answer to what the shadow Chancellor said earlier, I do not have a problem with debating a progressive tax regime that has lower taxation for the low paid and higher taxation for those who are better off. When we are talking about high rates of tax and low rates of tax, though, we should remember the entire tax burden and not just be selective about income tax, for example.

Let us look at council tax. I am the proud possessor of two council tax bills, with one for my house in Glenrothes and one that is paid by the taxpayer for the flat I use while I am down here. So I have the flat in London and, fortunately for me, a very nice detached house in Glenrothes. The flat in London already costs more in council tax than the house in Glenrothes, and this year the Labour-controlled council whose area I live in is likely to increase the council tax by 7%, while the council in Fife has accepted the Scottish Government’s funding to allow it to freeze council tax. The council tax on the flat in London will therefore be 15% higher than that on a very nice, spacious detached house in Glenrothes. When we are talking about the different tax burden on people between the two countries, let us consider the entire tax burden, not just the narrowly defined income tax burden. Of course, as I mentioned before, one reason why some people in Scotland pay higher taxes is that they are paid more than their colleagues doing the same jobs south of the border.

The Budget chooses not to support the children of working people. It chooses not to support working people. Then, when people’s working lives are over, it treats them far worse than people of a similar age and similar background are entitled to be treated in almost any other civilised economy. By contrast, the SNP has a vision for a country where every child and every parent is valued and supported, and knows that they are valued and supported; every worker is guaranteed a fair wage; every worker is protected from exploitation; every pensioner is entitled to a pension that is enough to live on without having to fall back on state benefits; and people get the care they need as they grow older and less able to look after themselves, valuing and fairly rewarding not only today’s workers but the next generation of workers and previous generations of workers, all of whom have been let down by this Budget.

I hold out no great enthusiasm that an incoming Labour Government will significantly change the situation. I would like to be proved wrong, but I cannot really see it happening. During the shadow Chancellor’s speech—it may have been an intervention—it was said that if the Tories had any confidence in their record, they should name the date for the general election. Absolutely. Can I suggest that if the incoming Labour Government had any confidence in the record of the Union, they would have no hesitation in naming a date on which to put it to a democratic test? We will wait and see whether the incoming Labour Government are a greater respecter of the will of the people of Scotland than the outgoing Conservative Government.

In his closing remarks, the Chancellor said that

“those with the broadest shoulders should pay their fair share”,

and I absolutely agree. He also said:

“An economy based on sound money does not pass its bills to the next generation.”—[Official Report, 6 March 2024; Vol. 746, c. 839-50.]

Oh, really? I agree with both those statements. For that reason, among others, I cannot support this Budget, and it does not deserve the support of anyone else in this Chamber.

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[Dame Jackie Doyle-Price]

Yes, I agree. With hindsight, that was a big mistake. It was done with the best of intentions. Given that local authorities were in a new set of circumstances, there was a desire to give them freedom to be more relevant and to have fewer constraints, but it has given licence to risky behaviour. We will see further consequences of that in due course.

Clearly, we would all like to be in a much better place with regard to the strength and growth rate of our economy and the state of our public finances, but we need to reflect that the last 15 years have been challenging. We have had three significant shocks that have cumulatively made us poorer than we would like to be—that is just a fact. The 2008 financial crisis had to be managed, and we have had the consequences of the pandemic; one way or another, we locked down our economy for the best part of two years, which has clearly had a massive impact on growth. The billions that we spent on keeping people in their jobs still have to be paid for. There is also Ukraine. Not only do we need to support the people of Ukraine, but we need to address the consequences for energy prices.

Returning to the need for responsible leadership, we should level with the public about what these things mean. The public are not stupid, and they are not deceived by spin and rhetoric. They know that these shocks have consequences. If we do not treat people with the respect that they deserve by levelling with them, they will show us the same lack of respect. They understand that this all needs to be paid for. If we do not face up to that, we will end up compounding the challenges created by those political choices.

I return to the financial crisis. Clearly, there was a need for a massive intervention to prevent the whole banking system collapsing, but we got addicted to quantitative easing. The correction that should have taken place following that financial crisis never happened, because, guess what, we do not want middle-class people who vote to have a reduction in the value of their property. By sticking with that policy, we ended up with interest rates that were artificially low for a very long time, which completely distorted asset class prices. That meant that everyone put all their investments into property, which has contributed to massive inter- generational unfairness, because people cannot now afford to buy a house. Does that not just show the short-termism and the failure to get real, explain things to the public and make long-term financial decisions that will do the most to grow this country? We all bemoan the lack of growth in our economy but if we have generated a system where there is more profit to be made by investing in housing than in business and wealth creation, this is where we end up. We all need to make a determined effort to be more long-term in our decision making and not just pursue the retail benefits of going up a few percentage points in the opinion polls.

We spent billions during lockdown to keep people in their jobs, but, again, that has to be repaid by the taxpayer. People do understand that; they know that nothing can be made for free. We also need to address the wider consequences of what we did in lockdown, because there is a longer-term impact on our nation’s productivity. We were all psychologically damaged by being taken out of social circulation for two years, and we have ended up with work practices that are not always the most efficient. Worst of all, we have an expectation that the state will deal with every problem. Again, we need to get back to having the leadership that says, “We’ve all, collectively, got to fix this problem.” Fighting covid is the equivalent of fighting a war. After the second world war, everyone knew that there was going to be a massive effort to get our country back together again. We have pretended, never more so than on public services, that the situation is easier than it is.

I hear over and over again about underfunding, but what does that mean? If there is not enough money to deliver what people are expecting, we have to be honest about that and cut our cloth; we have to recognise that nothing can be delivered without being paid for, so we must either increase taxes or look at what we are delivering. We all want to get to a position where we are much richer and can pay for a lot more, but concessions will have to be made before we get to that place after the shock we have had to deal with.

We also need to have a much more honest debate about what we should be spending our money on. The situation in Ukraine clearly illustrates the need to spend more on defence. Since 1989, we have taken our eye off the ball, but we now face a more challenging and unstable world. To keep our energy prices low and stable, the best measure is to invest in defence at an increased rate.

The two biggest challenges that face us are perhaps not the focus of mature debate or leadership by this place. First, there is no doubt that the public think we have too much immigration, on which we have become dependent as a source of cheap labour. From 2006, the UK’s openness to immigration from eastern Europe had a very positive effect on growth, but it was “growth” as in the overall quantum. The impact on individual productivity, earnings and GDP per capita was poor, because earnings were depressed. Overall, the resentment towards immigration comes from a lot of those people who found their earnings diminished as a consequence. We think about the “Auf Wiedersehen, Pet” generation of builders and labourers who earned lots of money by going overseas. Post-2006, they found that their earnings were depleted because people here were choosing to employ Lithuanians and Poles, because that was cheaper labour. Naturally, they will have a clear view that immigration has reduced their earnings.

[Peter Grant]

The hon. Lady’s account is completely inaccurate. Often UK employers have employed workers from the European Union because the labour has not been available here. That is why, for example, we now have a crisis in recruitment to social care professions; we have stopped the Europeans coming in and there is nobody in the UK who is able to do the work.

[Dame Jackie Doyle-Price]

On social care, the hon. Gentleman has a fair point, but I do not think that what he says is true as regards HGV drivers, builders, labourers or anyone else in the construction industry. It is true that we have relied on cheap migrant labour to deliver social care, but that is largely because we have not valued social care as a profession. While we have had that abundance of cheap labour in the sector, we have also been able to kick the can down the road about how we fund social care and our later stage of life, so the impact has been not just on earnings but on allowing policymakers to be lazy about grappling with these difficult issues.

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[Michael Shanks]

I forgot she was a sitting Member, Mr Deputy Speaker; I apologise.

The Government are putting off any long-term spending plans to the next Government to avoid facing up to the reality that public services are crumbling. Shamefully, they are not putting aside a penny for the victims of the contaminated blood scandal or the victims of the Post Office scandal.

Minutes after the Chancellor sat down, we had the spectacle of the Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie) refusing to say whether he would back his own Government’s plan to expand the windfall tax on the oil and gas industry. I am not sure if he is still on resignation watch or whether his chat with the Chancellor has moved him back to a stronger position, but yesterday, the Tories in the Scottish Parliament had a debate denouncing expanding the windfall tax, and the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, the hon. Member for Moray (Douglas Ross) has said he will vote against it. This morning, the Chancellor said it would present a little local difficulty. This is utter chaos, less than a day after he delivered the Budget. With any other Government, at any other time, they would be the laughing stock of the country, but so low have our expectations fallen that it is not even getting the attention it should.

We should welcome the Government’s conversion to Labour’s economic plans, following where Labour has led on the non-dom tax loophole or expanding the windfall tax. Now it is only the SNP that is out on a limb, saying that it does not support increasing a tax on the £1 billion a week profits from oil and gas, while happily putting up taxes for those earning £29,000 a year. In SNP Scotland, teachers, plumbers, police officers and nurses pay more; oil and gas giants do not.

[Peter Grant]

The hon. Member mentions the specific case of nurses. His colleagues were reluctant to acknowledge the fact that nurses in Scotland start off with much higher pay than those in England. I did some checks while others were speaking. A newly qualified ward sister in Scotland on 2023-24 rates, even allowing for slightly higher income tax on part of their earnings, is taking home £31,884 a year. His or her equivalent in England is taking home £30,960. Why does the hon. Gentleman want nurses in Scotland to earn £900 less when moving to England?

[Michael Shanks]

I know I am in a different party to the hon. Member, but I am in the same country, so it concerns me how nurses in Scotland are treated, and they are paying more tax than their colleagues in England. That is the reality of the SNP’s budget.

The truth is that a lack of economic growth across the UK means less for public services, despite the Scottish Government receiving almost £300 million in consequentials, including £237 million from increased spending in the NHS. I hope that the Scottish Government use that to invest directly in public services, and especially in Scotland’s NHS, where statistics this week have shown a damning picture of the SNP’s 17 years in power. The list of in-patients waiting more than 12 weeks has gone up 125 times in a decade. Cancer treatment within 31 days is three times worse than a decade ago. All the while, taxes are going up in Scotland and wage growth is stagnating.

The House of Commons Library has carried out some research that shows that weekly real earnings are lower today than in 2007 when Labour left office in Scotland and the SNP first came to power. The analysis shows that real wages continued to rise until 2010, when the Labour Government left power in the UK, but under the Tories and the SNP, the average Scot earns less in real terms now than they did in 2007. EY this week found that average employment growth in Scotland between 2024 and 2027 is expected to be just 0.8%, lagging beyond all other parts of the UK.

There are some really tough long-term issues in Scotland’s labour market that we must wrestle with. Long-term sickness appears to be a particular factor in economic inactivity in Scotland, accounting for nearly 32% of inactivity compared with 27% across the UK. There are difficult demographic trends, too. These issues are not easily resolved, but they require a Government with a laser focus on the problem, not one from a hopelessly distracted party.

The Secretary of State spoke about levels of employment in the UK. Recent research by the Work Foundation and Lancaster University found that of those in employment, 21% are in extreme job insecurity—workers who experience involuntary part-time work, involuntary temporary forms of work and precarious work—and a further 33% suffer from low or moderate insecurity. In other words, more than half of people currently employed have a degree of insecurity in their work. The UK is becoming a less secure, precarious place for people to work, and part of the cause of low productivity and rising levels of in-work property is that problem. It is a challenge for us to wrestle with, but we must do so.

The Tories are the architects of this economic mess, ably assisted by the growing incompetence of the SNP. Neither can be the solution. Scots will rightly ask themselves after 14 years of the Tories and after 17 years of the SNP whether they feel any better off. The answer will come back: no. They will ask if public services and the NHS are better now in Scotland than they were 17 years ago, and the answer will be no.

The only way out of this doom loop of economic chaos, higher taxes and stagnant living standards is real change, with a Government focused on growing the economy, making work pay and turning the UK into a green energy superpower. That is the change that Scotland needs. That is the change that the UK needs. That is the change that Labour will deliver. We need a general election so that we can get on and do it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nigel Huddleston]

The hon. Gentleman gave quite a wish list earlier, which, by my calculations, could come out as being quite expensive. I do not know whether he has had conversations with the hon. Member for Leicester West, who is on his Front Bench.

On the hon. Gentleman’s point about non-doms, we will be scrapping the non-dom status, but we will be replacing the system with one that is residency based, including measures that will encourage and incentivise further investment into the UK, because we will be implementing transition measures. I did not hear the Opposition talk about them. Those transition measures are likely to encourage £15 billion of additional investment into the UK. Non-doms at the moment pay about £8.5 billion in taxes. We want to welcome people, but we recognise that those with the broadest shoulders must carry the greatest burden. None the less, we want to be internationally competitive, and the new system that we have proposed will be.

Returning to the childcare measures that I outlined earlier, this commitment would mean over £500 million of additional investment in childcare over the next two years. This will give childcare providers the confidence to invest in expanding at a crucial time, to deliver the free childcare expansion and help bridge the gap between parents’ career demands and their childcare needs.

This approach complements further changes that we are making to the tax system to incentivise parents to increase the hours they work. Yesterday, the Chancellor announced that from 6 April the high-income child benefit charge threshold will be raised to £60,000. In addition, the level at which child benefit is withdrawn completely will increase to £80,000. That was very much welcomed by many Members on the Conservative Benches, including my hon. Friends the Members for Devizes, for The Cotswolds and others. As a result, no one earning under £60,000 will now pay the charge. This will put pounds in parents’ pockets, saving nearly half a million families with children an average of £1,300 a year. According to the OBR, this change will also result in an increase in hours for those already working, which is equivalent to around 10,000 more people entering the workforce full time.

[Peter Grant]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. One of the remaining injustices with the high-income child benefit charge is that a single person earning £60,000 will have to pay the charge, but a couple earning £59,000 each will not, because it is assessed on a single earning. Do the Government have plans to amend that anomaly? If so, when can we expect to see that happen?

[Nigel Huddleston]

If the hon. Gentleman had not intervened and given me just one more second, I would have said that, going forward, we will also consult on moving the high-income child benefit charge to a household- based system, to be introduced by April 2026. That point was also raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope), who pointed out the potential opportunities in other areas relating to household income. It is important, because our tax system is based on the principle of individual taxation, and there are many aspects of confidentiality and so on that are important in that as well. The Government will consult shortly on options to enable better targeting of economic support to households in times of crisis.

Child Maintenance Service

Peter Grant Excerpts

Tuesday 27th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Sir Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Child Maintenance Service.

I am delighted to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles.

I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for allocating this debate, prompted by the Select Committee on Work and Pensions inquiry on the Child Maintenance Service. We published our report last April, and the Government their response in July. The Child Maintenance Service, which I shall refer to as the CMS, was introduced in 2012 to replace the Child Support Agency.

Child maintenance is paid in three ways: non-statutory, family-based arrangements, in which the CMS plays no part; direct pay, where the CMS calculates the amount due and draws up a schedule, but the parents themselves arrange payment; and, thirdly, collect and pay, where the CMS calculates the maintenance owed, collects it from the paying parent and transfers it to the receiving parent. For direct pay, there was, until yesterday I think, a £20 application fee, waived for under-19s and in cases of domestic abuse. For collect and pay, the paying parent pays an extra 20% of the maintenance owed and the receiving parent receives just 96% of what they would have under direct pay.

The Department for Work and Pensions reported 2.5 million separated families in Great Britain in March 2022, with 4 million children in those families. The National Audit Office says that about half receive at least some child maintenance, and one in three has an arrangement that is satisfied in full. Of those with any arrangement, around 500,000 were on direct pay or collect and pay, but nearly 1 million had a family-based, non-statutory arrangement. The National Audit Office made the point that take up of the CMS has been lower than expected, for reasons that the Department does not know, and that setting up the CMS has not increased the number of effective child maintenance arrangements.

Our report made recommendations about the calculation of child maintenance. The maintenance assessed for some parents—I think this is now widely acknowledged—is unaffordable in some cases, causing serious hardship. The bands for calculating maintenance are in primary legislation, so it is hard to change them. Christine Davies, who is honorary senior lecturer in mathematics at Royal Holloway, University of London, told us that because inflation over the past quarter of a century has not been allowed for, someone earning £15,000 today should, according to the scheme’s original intentions, be paying £364 per year in maintenance, but is actually required to pay almost 10 times that or £3,500 per year.

The Callan review called for the formula to include both parents’ income, instead of only the paying parent’s. The Government rejected that, but said they would explore the possibility in their review of the calculation formula. The Government have committed—I welcome this—to a “fundamental review” of the child maintenance calculation. The Minister in the Lords told us in correspondence that the review would be wide ranging and take some time. When the Minister winds up, will he tell us whether we can expect changes before the election?

This is urgent. We have heard of paying parents taking their own lives, because the demands being made of them are simply impossible for them to meet. I was in touch yesterday with Mr Ian Briggs, whose son, Gavin Briggs, took his own life. Mr Ian Briggs told me that on 26 June 2020, the CMS sent his son a letter telling him he owed nearly £16,000. His son took his life a few days after that on 1 July, and on that day his account showed less than £4,000 in arrears. Mr Briggs asks:

“How can this be possible?”

He has had no answer to that question.

The CMS was established to deliver more effective maintenance arrangements, but there is little data on how many direct pay arrangements are effective. We do not know how much child maintenance is not being paid. We asked DWP to monitor the effectiveness of the arrangements proactively—for example, with yearly surveys of parents with direct pay arrangements—but the Government said no to that. My question to the Minister is: what are the Government’s plans for monitoring that for research on the subject? Does the Department think that it understands the effectiveness of direct pay? If so, what evidence is it using? We do not think that it does. How many direct pay arrangements switched to collect and pay or family-based arrangements in the first 12 months? Does the Department know why that is happening?

The Committee also raised concerns about collect and pay. About half of paying parents with those arrangements do not pay or pay less than they should. We heard that enforcement is slow and often ineffective, so we welcomed the Child Support (Enforcement) Act 2023. That was taken through the House by the hon. Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie), who I am delighted is in her place this morning and who makes a distinguished contribution to the work of the Committee. The Act aims to speed up enforcement by allowing CMS to make administrative liability orders when a paying parent has not paid and deduction of earnings is not appropriate. Previously, CMS needed to apply to a court for a liability order, taking up to 22 weeks. The secondary legislation on that will specify the notice that CMS must give to the paying parent before making an order—seven days for those living in the UK and 28 days for those overseas—and set out the process for paying parents who want to challenge a liability order. The Government published their response to the consultation on that two weeks ago, on 12 February. Can the Minister tell us when the secondary legislation will be introduced?

Another set of recommendations in our report was about domestic abuse. In October 2021, the Government asked Dr Samantha Callan, who I already mentioned briefly, to conduct an independent review of CMS processes and procedures for supporting parents subject to domestic abuse. Her report was published in January 2023, and the Government accepted eight of its 10 recommendations. On the first recommendation, the Child Support Collection (Domestic Abuse) Act 2023 received Royal Assent last July; I am pleased to see the hon. Member for Hastings and Rye (Sally-Ann Hart) in her place this morning as well. Where there is evidence of domestic abuse, a parent can set up collect and pay at the start instead of first trying direct pay, so the two parents need not be in contact. Last September, a written answer said that bringing the Act into force would require consultation and secondary legislation. Can the Minister tell us what the timetable is for those?

Our report asked for a timetable for all the work arising from the Callan review. One strand of that is a pilot of single, named caseworkers for complex domestic abuse cases. In the written answer that I referred to earlier, the Minister said that the Department had started a pilot and it would be evaluated. Can the Minister tell us when that will be and how the pilots went?

I am worried about that, because yesterday I spoke to Rachel Parkin, who gave evidence to the Committee’s inquiry. She is an abuse victim. The former CMS chief executive apologised to Rachel for how her case was handled, assured her that she would be on collect and pay permanently and that she would be in the pilot of a single caseworker. She had a single caseworker for a period of eight months. Her calls in that period were automatically routed to the right caseworker—it worked very well—and she made real headway in resolving long-standing difficulties, but now, without any explanation, she is being put back on direct pay. She has simply been told by the service that it is not bound by promises made to her by a former chief executive. She will be back to random caseworkers and the debilitating need to go through her story every time, which so many people talked to us about during our inquiry.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I am reluctant to interrupt the right hon. Member in full flow, but while he is talking about the failures to give adequate support to people who report that they have been living in an abusive relationship, may I ask whether he was as concerned as I was to realise how completely unaware CMS senior management seem to be that very often the abuse or controlling behaviour starts only after the relationship has ended, and that until about a year ago that was something that just did not seem to have occurred to anybody at the CMS?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

The hon. Member makes a very important point, and I think he is right. I very much welcome his work and that of his colleagues on the Public Accounts Committee in drawing attention to a number of these problems.

I ask the Minister whether the idea of a single caseworker has now been abandoned. Is a domestic abuse team still in place or has that whole initiative, which the CMS talked to the Public Accounts Committee about last year, I think, now been given up? Why is it that someone such as Rachel Parkin has gone back to the arrangements that she was promised she would not?

In our report, we also raised concerns about paying parents who fraudulently attempt to reduce their maintenance assessment and about the fact that the Department does not estimate levels of fraud and error. The Public Accounts Committee, in its 2022 report— two years ago—said that the Department had

“not taken responsibility for detecting child maintenance fraud”

and had shifted the burden to receiving parents, who were expected to challenge false assessments. The Committee pointed out that a paying parent who was notified of being investigated for understating their income would no doubt guess that their ex-partner had reported them, and as a result, the Committee warned, many receiving parents would not report. I think that the Committee was right to make that point. In response, the Department said that it used risk profiling and threat scanning to target fraud in the child maintenance system and that it already had proportionate and cost-effective controls. Can the Minister tell us what exactly risk profiling and threat scanning are in practice?

We recommended that there should be specialist caseworkers for cases in which the paying parent’s income is from self-employment. In correspondence, the Minister in the other place who has responsibility for this part of the Department’s work, Lord Younger, pushed back on that, on the grounds of “funding implications”. However, the Department has said that it will legislate to ensure that unearned income, such as savings, investments, dividends and property income, is taken into account automatically when maintenance is calculated, to make it more difficult for

“the small number of parents who avoid paying the correct amount.”

Can this Minister tell us when that legislation will be introduced?

The Government have just introduced, as I mentioned earlier, secondary legislation to remove the £20 fee for all parents who apply for a statutory maintenance arrangement. I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm that that took effect yesterday as planned. The same secondary legislation also introduced new powers for the Secretary of State to write off maintenance arrears under £7 in certain circumstances.

Finally, I want to make this point. There are, as all of us in the House well know, unending complaints about very poor customer service from the CMS. It is very difficult to get through; calls go unanswered. There are incorrect assessments, and people are having to tell their story again from scratch on every call. The service does have a very tough job, against a backdrop of pain and conflict; it is very difficult to provide a good service in that situation, but can the Minister offer us any prospect that the improvements needed will be made?

--- Later in debate ---

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

Thank you very much, Sir Charles, for calling me to speak; I am grateful for the chance to begin summing up in this debate.

First, I commend the right hon. Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms), the Chair of the Select Committee, for securing this debate. I thank him and other Members of that Committee for giving me the chance to attend, as a guest, some of the hearings when they have had the Child Maintenance Service before them. Also, I want to give the right hon. Gentleman more than the usual token 20 or 30 seconds at the end of the debate to sum up, so I will try to keep within the 10 minutes I have; those who know me will know what a struggle that will be, but I will do my best.

I think this is the third time I have participated in a Westminster Hall debate on the Child Maintenance Service and I am again struck today by the fact that there has been very little disagreement in the Chamber; everybody accepts that the CMS is not working, that the time for talking about changing it is long past and that we need to start seriously changing it.

It was very noticeable in this debate today that the overwhelming majority of contributions have come from the Minister’s own party, with two of them from people who have been there with ministerial responsibility: the right hon. Members for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) and for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey).

Incidentally, while the right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North was speaking, I made a quick check and found that, since she moved from the Department for Work and Pensions in 2017, we are now on our fifth Minister with responsibility for child maintenance. Maybe that partly explains why it has taken so long to get anywhere. There are obviously reasons why there have been so many Cabinet changes in that time, but I think the Child Maintenance Service is far too important to be one of the things that gets added to the portfolio of someone who stays in post for six months before they get moved on, because it is complex and, if a Minister is in post for only a year, they will not get the time to get on top of the service and drive forward significant changes.

As I have said, this is a system that is simply not fit for purpose. I do not think that we can beat around the bush and look for minor changes; we need a complete overhaul and review, starting from a blank sheet of paper and redesigning the whole thing.

To illustrate that point, I will ask a question. If somebody came in who did not know what the Child Maintenance Service was for and just looked at what it did, would they ever be able to work out what its purpose is? If they did, I will guarantee that they would not conclude that its main purpose was to make sure that no child had to live in poverty simply because of the family circumstances that their parents have found themselves in. If we accept that aim as a valid purpose for the Child Maintenance Service, we begin to understand just how far away from hitting that target we are just now.

Depending on what figures people believe, the United Kingdom is probably the fifth or sixth wealthiest economy in the world, yet 4.2 million children in the UK live in poverty, according to the Child Poverty Action Group. Again, we can argue about the exact number of children in poverty, but we cannot argue that the number of children living in poverty in an economy with so much money spilling around in some places is simply not acceptable. By fixing the Child Maintenance Service, we can certainly reduce the number of children living in poverty, and in such a way that the people who pay for it are the people who should have been paying for it all along. The parents have had the children, but for one reason or another are simply not meeting their responsibilities to pay financial support for their upbringing.

One of the previous speakers—the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills), I think—talked about the fact that debt owed to the Child Maintenance Service is not seen as important or as such a high priority for collection as debt owed to the Government. Again, that is simply wrong. Why do we not have a system in which the DWP pays all the child maintenance due, and then the DWP chases the people who are fiddling the figures or trying to hide and not pay the money? I can guarantee that if the DWP were chasing an absent parent for the money, they would not be living on a fancy yacht in the Bahamas or in the Mediterranean, as mentioned by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). If they were doing that, but the money was owed to the Government, they certainly would not be posting on Facebook to boast about how much money they had or how much they were able to hide.

[Dr Mullan]

I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman was able to listen to my points about moral hazard, but does he agree that his proposal for the taxpayer to pick up directly the payments of absent parents who are not paying would double the impact of saying, “You don’t have responsibility. The taxpayer will step in directly and pay it for you.”?

[Peter Grant]

If the hon. Gentleman had listened to what I was saying, he would realise that that is exactly what I am not saying. I am saying that the full force of collection and enforcement that is in the hands of His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs or DWP should be brought to bear not only on those who refuse to pay what they are assessed as being due to pay, but on those who are lying, committing fraud and stealing from their own children. Ultimately, they would still be stealing from their own children, but HMRC has powers to enforce in a way that a single parent does not have. That is what I am saying. It is not a simple solution, but I think it would make a significant difference. As has been mentioned, the DWP’s own figures reckon that since the Child Maintenance Service was set up, £590 million of debt has not been collected. That does not include the undetected fraud or the under-declaration of income, assets and so on.

Something else that I always find concerning about the CMS is that it does not seem to have any curiosity about a parent who fights and fights to get a settlement but then just disappears off the system and gives up. In Child Maintenance Service cases I have dealt with, I have found that probably the single biggest outcome is that the parent with responsibility for bringing up the children simply gives up in frustration, deciding that it is better for them just to get on with their life and to struggle through—very often in or near poverty—because they can no longer cope with the stress of dealing with the Child Maintenance Service. That is a shocking indictment of any Government service, in particular one whose only point, whose only reason to exist, is to make lives better for vulnerable young children.

I have often noticed that, when speaking to parents, the paying partner always talks about how much they are having to pay to their ex-partner. They often do not see it as paying for the upkeep of their children. Something about the language we use here, we need to look at. Something raised by one of my constituents at a roundtable held by Fife Gingerbread, which I hope the Department has picked up and started to act on, is that CMS letters get addressed to the parent—the parent’s name is on it—and it does not say “To the parent of” with the name of the child, which would be a simple way of making it clear that this is about the children.

There will often be bad will between two partners who have split up. Whether they split up amicably or acrimoniously, once they start disagreeing about money, it is likely to become quite a bit more acrimonious. The children, however, should never be made to suffer as a result.

I mentioned Fife Gingerbread. I again need to commend the outstanding work that it has done, and not just within the boundaries of Fife. It is one of the organisations that has influenced the way in which the Child Maintenance Service now operates. On the scrapping of the £20 fee for being able to claim child maintenance, for example, I am convinced that Fife Gingerbread is one of the organisations that can claim part of the credit for having achieved that, as well as a number of other changes that we are seeing.

We have had reference to the fact that IT systems are not fit for purpose. This is the 21st century—we are almost a quarter of the way into the century—and we are using systems that are 40 or 50 years out of date. The Chair of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for East Ham, and other members of the Work and Pensions Committee and of the Public Accounts Committee will remember only too well what happened to the payment of state pensions when the Department carried on using systems that were no longer fit for purpose. We could be heading for an equally massive injustice in the assessment, payment and collection of child maintenance if we do not get those systems sorted out. As the hon. Member for Amber Valley said, it should not take three or four months for somebody to be told why the assessment is the number that it is. In some of the queries to HMRC, when people are assessed on self-assessment, they could go online, and sitting in front of them would be exactly why HMRC had assessed them for that amount.

The final thing is that one way to reduce the need for child maintenance is for Governments to take other action on children in poverty. This Government could undertake actions that have already been shown to be successful by the Scottish Government. There is the child payment, which has lifted about 50,000 children in Scotland out of poverty; if we do that down here, we are talking about half a million children being lifted out of poverty. Actions taken by the Scottish Government are estimated to reduce the cost of bringing up a child by somewhere in the region of £25,000 to £26,000 during their childhood. Policies similar to those would reduce the demands on child maintenance, reducing the need either for children to live in poverty or for their parents to almost literally come to blows arguing over who should care for their child.

I entirely agree that nobody should feel that they can just leave their children to be the responsibility of someone else. I find it interesting that financial neglect, which is what we are talking about here, is treated differently from any other forms of neglect. If a parent neglects their child in any other way, we do not just stand back and leave the parents to sort it out. If a parent is deliberately neglecting their children financially, they cannot be allowed to get away with it. I do not have confidence that the existing Child Maintenance Service will ever be able to address that, which is why we need to design an entirely new service fit for the 21st century that recognises the wide variety of circumstances that people live in today.

[Sir Charles Walker (in the Chair)]

Thank you, Mr Grant. That was a perfect 10 minutes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Peter Grant]

Clearly, there has been an error at set-up that the calculation needs primary legislation to be updated. Given that it is now 25 years out of date, is it not time to bring forward legislation to change it once and for all, so that future changes can be made through secondary legislation or by other means? There have been examples recently where other DWP payments were uprated through statutory instruments and it did not take nearly as much bureaucracy to get that done. We should be able to do that with the child maintenance system as well.

[Paul Maynard]

The hon. Member makes an interesting point that may risk becoming a digression. I note that the secondary legislation he refers to is regarding automatic uprating of particular indicators. This is a more fundamental change to how the entire structure of child maintenance is conducted, so is perhaps not suited to secondary legislation. We often hear criticism that too much goes through secondary legislation, unscrutinised by this place. As a Member rather than a Minister, I always think that I would rather such a fundamental change be scrutinised properly in the form of a Government Bill. That is an important point.

Oral Answers to Questions

Peter Grant Excerpts

Monday 5th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard]

My right hon. Friend is quite right that the Government have consulted on the use of curfews, which are complex and interact with numerous Government services. Several enforcement initiatives aimed at improving compliance are currently in train, and we need to get those in place and assess their effects before we can best see how curfews might fit with them. I note her enthusiasm for curfews and might well put her in touch with Viscount Younger of Leckie, the Minister in the Lords, whose policy brief this is, so that he can update her on our latest thinking.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

4. What recent assessment he has made of the adequacy of levels of benefits.

[The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mel Stride)]

Welfare is there to help those who need assistance, including many of the most vulnerable, which is why we increased most benefits by 6.7% for 2024-25. That was on top of an increase of 10.1%, including the benefit cap, in 2023-24.

[Peter Grant]

That is all very well, but the rate of inflation for low-paid families has been significantly higher than the headline rate of inflation for some time. That means that those families who were struggling badly last year are struggling even worse this year. Citizens Advice has shown that families on low incomes have less disposable income this year than they had last year. Does the Secretary of State accept that it is time to introduce an essentials guarantee so that nobody on universal credit or another income-based benefit can ever be allowed to fall below a level where they cannot afford the basic essentials of life?

[Mel Stride]

As the hon. Gentleman will know, we keep all benefits under review. I point him to various things that we have done to ensure that we look after those lower-income families, including increasing the national living wage by about 10% in both of the last two years; the increase in the local housing allowance to the 30th percentile announced at the last fiscal event, which will be worth about £800 a year for about 1.6 million people; and, of course, the tax cuts that the Chancellor was able to bring forward, which for an average earner are worth £450 a year.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mel Stride]

I congratulate Philippa’s son on the very good work that he does. We have disability employment advisers in our jobcentres. I am visiting my hon. Friend’s constituency later this week; I know that he has been involved in the Denbighshire project, including the We Mind the Gap programme for young people, and I will be interested to discuss that and other matters.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

T2.     Fife Gingerbread, based in my constituency, contacted me to point out that most of the provisions in the Child Support Collection (Domestic Abuse) Act 2023, which was unanimously agreed by the House and received Royal Assent at the end of June last year, have still not been brought into force. That means that far too many vulnerable people who want to make a claim through the Child Maintenance Service find that abusive ex-partners use it to control their behaviour. Why is it taking so long to put in place the measures in the Act?

[Paul Maynard]

I can confirm to the hon. Gentleman that the Child Maintenance Service has a domestic abuse plan to ensure that parents are not placed in danger as a consequence of any suggestion of domestic violence; for example, it has a centralised sort code to limit the risk of parental involvement.

Autumn Statement Resolutions

Peter Grant Excerpts

Monday 27th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Nigel Huddleston)]

Well, we have seen it, haven’t we—the same old Labour, never knowingly missing an opportunity to talk the country down yet again. I will return to that theme in a moment because it is very serious. I am delighted, in my first debate in this House as Financial Secretary, that I get to offer the closing words in our debate on the autumn statement. I also thank my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions for opening today’s debate. His speech was a compelling argument for the value of work. This is an autumn statement that is good for the businesses of this country and good for the people of this country. We know that the two things go hand in hand.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

The Minister referred to his colleague in the DWP. Earlier today, we heard one of his colleagues in the Home Office confirm that the Government had no intention of allowing asylum seekers to work to help pay the cost of their accommodation. How does it make sense to say that the way to stop a disabled person being a burden on the taxpayer is to force them to work when they are not fit to, but that the way to stop an asylum seeker being a burden on the taxpayer is to ban them from working even if there is a job they want to do?

[Nigel Huddleston]

The hon. Gentleman is missing the purpose of the reforms that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions clearly outlined earlier today. Perhaps if he had been in the Chamber, he could have listened to it directly.

When this Government came to power, we inherited not only higher unemployment from Labour, as always, but a lopsided welfare system that discouraged people from even seeking work. In the last 13 years, by reducing workless households, tackling low pay and reforming the welfare system, we have helped hundreds of thousands of families out of poverty. In the wake of covid-19, we have nearly 1 million vacancies in the economy, yet more than 7 million adults of working age, not including students, are still not working. Even Opposition Members seem to recognise that many of them want to work, and therefore we will be spending £1.3 billion over the next five years to help nearly 700,000 people with physical and mental health conditions to find jobs. And we will provide a further £1.3 billion of funding to offer extra help for the 300,000 people who have been unemployed for over a year, to help them find work.

The Government also recognise that, to get more people working, we must back business, as it is business that creates the jobs and pays the wages that lift up our communities, as my hon. Friend the Member for Clacton (Giles Watling) articulated. We will help the households of this country by boosting business through a variety of measures outlined in the autumn statement. Of course, the much-asked-for full expensing will be pivotal. We are also providing £4.5 billion over five years to support strategic manufacturing sectors that already have, or can gain, a competitive edge, namely in aerospace, automotive, clean energy and life sciences, as mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) and others.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) mentioned, we are also supporting small businesses in this autumn statement. For those smaller businesses that are so integral to their communities, we are freezing the small business multiplier and extending the 75% business rate support for retail, hospitality and leisure businesses for another year. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East and my hon. Friends the Members for Cities of London and Westminster (Nickie Aiken) and for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double), and others, for highlighting the importance of the tourism sector, which they know I care passionately about.

We are also establishing new investment zones throughout the country that will generate billions of pounds of investment, as my hon. Friends the Members for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) and for Clwyd South (Simon Baynes) highlighted.

There are other things we can do to ensure that work rewards workers, such as increasing their rate of pay and making sure they keep more of their earnings, which is exactly what we have done. We are abolishing class 2 national insurance contributions and cutting class 4 contributions. Alongside these cuts, we are raising the national living wage by 9.8% to £11.44 an hour and, of course, we are cutting the main rate of employee national insurance by two percentage points, giving a tax cut to 27 million workers. The Opposition may not appreciate that, but I assure them that their constituents do.

These measures will create work, get people into work and make sure that work is rewarding, as Conservative Members have recognised, particularly my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Jayawardena) and my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton).

Before briefly addressing some of the other points that have been raised, I take this opportunity to congratulate the new hon. Member for Tamworth (Sarah Edwards) on her maiden speech. She started well by praising her constituents, which is always a good move, and I wish her well in this House.

The hon. Member for Gordon (Richard Thomson) mentioned R&D, and the Government will merge the existing R&D expenditure credit scheme and small and medium-sized enterprise scheme from April 2024. This will simplify and improve the system, helping to drive innovation in the UK economy. That message of simplification was also pushed by my hon. Friend the Member for Boston and Skegness (Matt Warman). These reforms represent an overall increase in support to R&D companies of around £200 million a year by 2028-29.

The hon. Member for Gordon also mentioned the Scotch whisky industry. It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that his party’s Members have singularly failed to support any one of the new trade deals that we have signed and are signing, despite the fact that they support every single nation and region of the United Kingdom and are transparently in the interests of their constituents.

Responding to MPs’ Queries: DWP Performance

Peter Grant Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

Before I begin, I hope it is in order, Madam Deputy Speaker, for me to place on record my hearty congratulations to my hon. Friends the Members for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn) and for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mhairi Black), who have just been announced as the new leader and deputy leader of the SNP group here in Westminster. I offer my congratulations to both of them.

I am grateful to have the opportunity to raise in the House the woeful performance of the Department for Work and Pensions in responding to queries from Members of Parliament. I was particularly keen that the debate title should cover not simply correspondence, but all forms of communication—or non-communication—because the Department’s repeated failure to put in place a reliable and efficient way for MPs and our caseworkers to phone with urgent inquiries and speak to someone who actually understands the case is a recurring theme that I know causes immense frustration for MPs of all parties.

Let me quote just one of the many constituency cases I could refer to. Alison has a job, but it is low paid, so she gets universal credit and should have got her cost of living payment in July. It did not arrive. That, remember, is money that the Government have accepted she absolutely needs in order to make ends meet. By early September, Alison contacted my office in desperation. She told us that she had stopped the payments for her rent, council tax and internet service, that within 10 days she had to cancel her car insurance and that she was being referred to sheriff officers for council tax arrears.

My caseworkers went through the whole rigmarole of phoning and emailing all the right addresses at DWP, but they could not speak to or correspond with the people who were responsible for making Alison’s payment. None of the people my staff were allowed to speak to had any authority, even to ask for her payment to be prioritised. Two promised payment dates were not kept. Alison eventually received the money she was owed on 28 October, over three months late.

It is not the fault of overworked DWP staff that they could not do anything to help; it is the fault of the way the DWP has chosen to make it unnecessarily difficult for MPs to do our job of providing support to constituents in need. For Child Maintenance Service casework, our staff have access to an MP hotline and a dedicated email address. Until 2020, there was an MP hotline for working-age benefits such as jobseeker’s allowance, employment support allowance and income support. That gave my caseworkers and others a direct line to the local, regional and national complaints resolution team—based in Glasgow in this case—where staff had access to the various benefits systems and could contact other DWP departments with queries and to chase responses. The team was also contactable directly by email.

With the introduction of universal credit, that hotline became less useful—although the DWP staff at the other end continued to do the best they could. Eventually, the hotline for working age benefits just disappeared altogether—but the casework certainly did not. The current confidential list of all MP hotline contacts says in big bold letters, near the top of the DWP section:

“There is no MP hotline for Universal Credit”.

The question has to be: “Why not?” Similarly, the retirement services hotline was removed, although it was reinstated earlier this year after a lot of pressure from my office and a great many others. Sometimes, if the wheel squeaks often enough, it gets the grease.

Those hotlines and dedicated email addresses are not a perk for Members of Parliament; they are not some sort of freebie. For our constituency staff, whose workloads are heavy enough as it is, there is a massive difference between being able to phone and speak now to someone who understands the problem and can access the system, look at the details of the case and get someone to fix it straightaway, and waiting for an hour or more to speak to someone who is not allowed access to the constituent’s full record and who, because of their lack of experience or because their specialism is elsewhere, probably would not understand the complexities of the case even if they were allowed to see the details.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way on that point?

[Peter Grant]

I believe there would be major repercussions—Parliament would probably go into meltdown—if I declined to take the intervention.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Not from me. [Laughter.]

[Jim Shannon]

I commend the hon. Gentleman for securing the debate. Although it is sometimes frustrating when our queries are not answered, we must appreciate all the highly skilled workers working in Government Departments and external agencies. Does he agree that to deal with delays in correspondence, we must ensure that those employed within Departments are able to deal with all issues presented to them, with the knowledge and ability to prevent delays and get queries answered?

[Peter Grant]

That is absolutely correct. I would not for a second want my comments to be taken as any sort of slight about the dedication and professionalism of staff at the DWP. There are simply not enough of them, and they do not have access to the information that they need. In fact, I would like to flag up some of them for special praise, but I am worried that the way in which they are being so helpful to my caseworkers is maybe beyond what the DWP thinks they should be doing, and I certainly would not want to get them into trouble for being too good in helping my constituents.

The way my office operates is that, when necessary, everyone in my staff takes on casework, so when I refer to my caseworkers, I mean everybody on my staff team. Every one of them does a fantastic job—as do the caseworkers of MPs right across the House—often delivering truly life-changing results for vulnerable people. I know that my constituents value them almost as much as I do—they could not value them more. But their performance is dragged down when they cannot get the answers that my constituents deserve.

Alan was diagnosed with a chronic and incurable medical condition, and was advised that he should claim employment support allowance, which he did online through his universal credit journal. He contacted us when he got no response. My caseworker emailed the only available email address—the generic DWP correspondence address—on 25 March, and on 26 April, 3 May, 25 May and 7 June. During that time, Alan told us that he had finally got his ESA but that it was not backdated. The DWP knew that we had been in contact about this, but it never came back to my office to tell us that Alan had got the money—well, he did. The DWP came back to us in November, months and months later.

When we got a reply on 21 July to my first two emails, whoever sent the reply had not been told about my three other emails, so I got a reply in July that did not mention the other emails I had sent—two in May and one in June. They explained how Alan’s payment had been calculated. It turned out to be correct. We thought he had been underpaid, and in this case we got it wrong and the DWP got it right. If there had been a properly supported ESA hotline we and more importantly Alan would have been told exactly how much he was entitled to and exactly when it would be paid in a single phone call almost four months earlier.

In response to Alan’s case and many others, I drafted a letter to the then Secretary of State asking for the ESA hotline to be reinstated. Some 63 MPs from, I think, every party represented in the House signed it, and I am grateful to each and every one of them. The letter went in on 29 July. Two reminders and nearly five weeks later we got a response, which stated:

“It is currently not possible to provide a date upon which the issue of the MP Hotline might be resolved.”

After I had applied for this Adjournment debate, my office received a copy of a letter dated 23 November 2022 referring to the joint letter of 29 July and stating that the working-age benefits hotline had been re-established. I did not remember seeing that letter come in—that is nothing unusual; I often do not—but what was unusual was that no one in my office knew anything about it, and they do not let these things slip.

I checked with colleagues who I knew had co-signed our letter. They confirmed that the reply had been sent out by email to all the joint signatories, but when they looked at the email circulation list, my name had been missed out. I do not know who else had been, but the person who initiated the letter had been omitted from the circulation list for the reply. The DWP had forgotten to tell me about its improved communication with MPs.

Sure enough, the latest online edition of the list of MP hotlines shows an “MP hotline for working-age queries only”. It is open for a three-month trial. We are already nearly one month into that, and to the best of my knowledge the DWP has not told anyone about it apart from the 63 MPs—well, 62 excluding me—who signed my letter. About 10% of MPs have been specifically alerted to the existence of this hotline. It will be no surprise if it does not get much use if nobody knows about it.

One firm request to the Minister is to give the new hotline a fair trial and to make sure that every MP is told about it in a simple dedicated email. The Government should not just assume that our caseworkers will check the intranet every time they want to speak to a civil servant or Department, just in case a new hotline has been established since yesterday. They should make it a proper trial of at least three months in real time after they have told MPs about it, and not including the Christmas and new year period. Most importantly, if they are going to call it an MP hotline, please provide the staffing and systems support to make it a proper hotline.

Anyone looking at the list of hotlines would not know it, but the working-age hotline in the exact words of the DWP is only

“for non-complex general enquiries that can be answered with little interrogation of our systems…Enquiries or complaints requiring thorough investigation”—

which is about 95% of DWP casework in my experience—

“should be submitted in the usual way by e-mail to”

and it then gives the standard DWP email address that my office has to wait five months for a reply from. That phrase

“can be answered with little interrogation of our systems”

looks to me very like saying that they will be able to answer general questions about the rules and regulations, but we will have no way of finding out why, for example, Alison went through months of utter misery or why Alan was not entitled to as much as he had thought. In other words, it is not a hotline at all.

Now that the DWP has been good enough to tell my staff about the hotline, I know they will use it. I am willing to be proven wrong and will even come to the Chamber and say I was proven wrong if it turns out to be working effectively, but it has all the hallmarks of a trial that has been set up to fail.

To conclude, when a Member of Parliament takes up a DWP benefits case on behalf of a constituent, there is a very strong probability—these days it is even stronger than before—that the constituent is already at the end of their tether and of their money. Often they will literally have no money and nobody but the loan sharks to fall back on if the DWP does not deal with their case quickly and effectively. Waiting weeks for any kind of reply is immensely frustrating for MPs and our staff—it wastes a lot of our staff’s precious time—but it can be much worse for the people we are here to serve. It can mean they are being denied the basics and the simple human dignity that any benefits system should surely be designed to protect. No Member of this House would ever tolerate their constituents being treated as badly as my constituents have been treated by the DWP’s inability to communicate properly with me or my staff. I certainly will not, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

[The Minister for Employment (Guy Opperman)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) on securing this debate on a very important issue. I assure him that the Government take this issue extremely seriously, and that does not just apply to the Department for Work and Pensions; all parts of Government take the issue of Members’ correspondence on behalf of their constituents very seriously, and in the DWP we certainly do.

I want to start with two preliminary comments before I get to the nuts and bolts of the hon. Member’s important speech. First, I congratulate the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn) on his recent election and pass on the Government’s congratulations to him; I look forward to seeing him at Prime Minister’s Question Time tomorrow. Although this is a Scottish debate, it is only right, when we have an opportunity at the Dispatch Box, to congratulate the England football team and the England cricket team on their triumphs in Qatar and Pakistan respectively. We should not forget the beating that we hope to hand out to Monsieur Macron and his fellow Frenchmen on Saturday.

The hon. Member for Glenrothes is right to have high expectations of responses to communications that are submitted to the Department for Work and Pensions. As I will set out, in the vast majority of cases the DWP sends out timely replies. However, I accept and understand the frustration that all Members of Parliament, whether Government or Opposition, feel when the Department has not responded in the right way. We have worked constructively with Members on many occasions, and I am proud to serve in a Department with tens of thousands of people who are doing a fantastic job to deliver an awful lot of public services across this great country. In total for 2022-23, Department for Work and Pensions support and services represent £224 billion of public money, which is 9% of all GDP. That reflects the enormous force for good that the Department for Work and Pensions is and, as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) set out, the energy and efforts of thousands of DWP colleagues every single day to support people up and down the country, to change and improve lives. We should put on record our thanks for their sterling efforts.

I want to turn to covid, because many of the problems that the hon. Member for Glenrothes rightly identifies date back to the pandemic. We saw the degree of support that the Department gave during the pandemic, with enhanced universal credit to literally millions of extra people and masses of extra work coaches coming in, and there is unquestionably a context for why some of the hotlines were subject to cessation or have taken a while to come back. If he gives me a minute or two, I will explain why.

We rightly focused during the pandemic on ensuring that we got the right support to those who needed it quickly. That included, for example, responding effectively to the doubling of universal credit claims across the country and helping people to move back into work following the pandemic. We also had to make operational decisions, which ultimately are made by Ministers but fundamentally are made by the operational teams that run big Departments such as the DWP. A significant number of colleagues who would ordinarily be handling complaints and MP correspondence were redeployed to essential frontline services.

As part of that, the Department took the decision to temporarily suspend the retirement services hotline, while the disability services hotline was redirected to an answer machine, which was checked, and there was no change to the child maintenance hotline. To ensure that the Department continued to deliver a complaints service during this time, we brought all remaining complaints handlers together into one new centralised DWP complaints team. We also introduced a triage process that allowed us to prioritise complaints from our most vulnerable customers and those relating to payments. The centralisation of the complaints service meant that working-age and universal credit complaints teams were no longer aligned to individual districts. That may potentially have had an impact on any local arrangements between complaints team and MPs. However, the focus at that time was simply on supporting frontline delivery in the middle of a pandemic, with all the complications of running public services with the attendance of staff at that stage.

Following the pandemic, we have slowly but surely returned the handling of complaints and correspondence to service delivery areas, which has seen greater accountability and ownership and allows complaints and correspondence to be investigated by specialist complaints teams. The Department has also improved signposting on the w4mp website, which enables parliamentary staff to find the right contacts for general and case specific inquiries, and to direct complaints to a dedicated mailbox.

I will try to deal with the assertions made about MP hotlines. We now operate a number of dedicated MP hotlines in relation to child maintenance services, which continues; disability services, such as personal independence payment and disability living allowance queries; and retirement services, enabling people to raise issues on the state pension, pension credit or winter fuel payments.

Last month, we started a three-month trial of an MP hotline for queries relating to working-age benefits. This is available from 9 am to 4 pm, Monday to Friday, with a voicemail facility available outside those hours. As part of the trial, we will assess the demand for the service and ensure that it meets the needs of hon. Members and is sustainable for the Department. I assure the hon. Gentleman that his representations—most robustly made—have been taken on board about the degree to which he believes there is a demand.

We are also developing a dedicated universal credit hotline for MPs. System testing is under way and we hope to have the line up and running shortly. All MP hotlines are regularly checked during operating hours and calls from Members are answered directly or a voicemail message can be left that will be picked up and responded to as soon as possible.

The hon. Gentleman raised MP hotlines in particular, but I will briefly address other forms of communication, because this debate is about all correspondence and responses. In terms of written correspondence, as he probably knows, the Cabinet Office publishes guidance that sets out the principles that Departments must follow when handling correspondence from Members of this House, as well as peers, Members of the devolved Parliaments or Assemblies and members of the public. That includes performance response times for responding to correspondence—specifically, a timeframe of up to 20 working days.

In 2021, the Department received a total of 7,116 pieces of correspondence from Members, about 70% of which were responded to within 20 working days. The latest data from quarter 2 of this year shows that about two thirds of the correspondence received was responded to within that timeframe.

[Peter Grant]

Can the Minister clarify exactly what “responded to” means? All MPs—certainly everyone who has been an Opposition MP—will have had responses from Ministers that do not tell them anything. Does he mean a response that actually provides information or does an email that simply says, “Thank you for your email” count as a response within 20 working days?

DWP Estate: Office Closures

Peter Grant Excerpts

Thursday 17th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[David Rutley]

As I have said before, we are working with the vast majority of the individuals who can be relocated very close to their current facility. We will continue to work hard with others, too. This is our top priority. We value our colleagues, who have helped the Department through some incredibly challenging times over the past couple of years, and we want to support them through the period now. I highlight to a couple of Members who have made this point that we continue to be committed to the Newcastle area, but I will meet those colleagues after this urgent question.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) for securing this urgent question, although I entirely agree that it would not have been necessary, had the Minister not tried to sneak the announcement out in a written statement on Friday after most of us had gone back to our constituencies. One of the premises earmarked for closure is Victoria Road in Kirkcaldy, which is not in my constituency, but employs a number of my constituents and provides support services for about 3,000 of my constituents in north-west Kirkcaldy. I echo the plea made earlier that the Minister should write to all Members of Parliament, because he probably does not know which constituencies have people who are affected by each of those closures. In that letter, will he explicitly set out why they should believe the assurances being given that this office closure programme will have no impact on public service, when similar promises given about HMRC’s office closure programme turned out to be utterly worthless?

[David Rutley]

Those MPs who have affected sites in their constituencies will be written to by 1 pm today, so further details will be available. If other colleagues may be affected tangentially, we will make an extra effort to contact them as well.

Oral Answers to Questions

Peter Grant Excerpts

Monday 8th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mims Davies]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for visiting that fantastic jobcentre. We have jobcentres doing that work up and down the country, and it is crucial that 100,000 young people are getting that first step on the employment ladder. He is right to point out that there should be no cherry-picking of the easiest people to move into employment. Kickstart is about getting young people on to the first rung on the employment ladder, which is why we have kickstart quick start and direct meetings with employers, so that nobody is left behind. The flexible support fund will address any barriers and we will make sure that everybody is job ready and nobody is left behind.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

In May this year, the then Minister for Disabled People, Work and Health, the hon. Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), told the Work and Pensions Committee that the Department did not routinely collect information on disabilities from young people who enter the kickstart scheme and that it had no immediate plans to do so. That means it is impossible to monitor how accessible or inaccessible the kickstart scheme is for young people who have disabilities. Will the Minister confirm whether that is still the case? If it is, when is she going to sort it?

[Mims Davies]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point that will be picked up in the evaluation. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) mentioned the fact that we should not be cherry-picking; the kickstart scheme is about people with the biggest barriers and the highest likelihood of long-term unemployment, and nearly 100,000 young people have got on to the employment ladder because of it. We will look at the issue the hon. Gentleman raised, but the reality is that with the Access to Work programme and all the other interventions that come alongside a kickstart role, if someone has disabilities, that should not prevent them from being on the programme.

Compensation (London Capital & Finance plc and Fraud Compensation Fund) Bill

Peter Grant Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading
Wednesday 22nd September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I beg to move amendment 1, page 1, line 18, at end insert—

“(5) Within six months of this Act coming into force, the Secretary of State must lay before Parliament a report that assesses the impact of the payment of compensation to the customers of London Capital & Finance plc under this section, and in the light of that assessment, sets out the following—

(a) an assessment of the regulatory failures that gave rise to the need to compensate the customers of London Capital & Finance plc;

(b) measures the Government is taking to prevent such regulatory failures in the future;

(c) the reasons why the Government is providing compensation to the customers of London Capital & Finance plc but not the customers of other failed investment firms;

(d) criteria for when the Government should be expected to provide compensation following the collapse of investment firms; and

(e) the reasons for the capping of compensation payments under this section at 80% of what customers of London Capital & Finance would have been entitled to under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.”

This amendment would require the Secretary of State to lay a report before Parliament that assesses the impact of the Government compensating the customers of London Capital & Finance plc, as well as broader issues relevant to the mis-selling scandal.

It is a pleasure to open this afternoon’s debate and to speak in favour of amendment 1, which is in my name. My amendment would require the Secretary of State to report back to Parliament within six months of the Bill coming into force, with an assessment of the impact of the payment of compensation to customers of LCF. Crucially, it would require the Secretary of State in that report to give an assessment of: the regulatory failures that made the London Capital & Finance compensation scheme necessary; the measures that the Government are taking to prevent such regulatory failures; the reasons why victims of other failed investment schemes, of which there are many, are not being compensated; the criteria for when the Government should be expected to provide compensation following the collapse of investment firms; and, finally, the reasons for the capping of compensation payments under this scheme at 80% of what customers of London Capital & Finance would have been entitled to under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

--- Later in debate ---

[Peter Grant]

It may well have been achieved by the Government’s response to the report, but the Gloster report achieved nothing; it only achieves change if the Government accept its recommendations. An amendment that was not pushed to a vote at an earlier stage of proceedings would have required the Government to give regular reports back to Parliament as to what they are doing with the Gloster report. Regardless of whether that amendment had been carried, I would hope that the Government will still do that.

The Government’s explanation for not even considering similar schemes for other mis-selling is that the exact details of London Capital & Finance’s mis-selling were unique and that none of the other mini bond scams were identical in every way. That is probably true because no two investment scams are identical in every way. The crooks will always find a slightly different way to get more money out of the victims, or to avoid whatever detection and prevention schemes are being developed, but the differences between the two companies are tiny compared to the similarities.

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I want to take the hon. Gentleman back to the point made by the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake). Is not the problem the fact that we are being asked by the Government to believe that, as a result of the Gloster report, the FCA has fundamentally changed and that there is not going to be a problem ever again with how the FCA regulates? Is there not a need for another body to keep oversight of the quality of financial regulation, and perhaps in particular over whether the FCA continues to do its job properly in the future?

[Peter Grant]

The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point, which is well worth consideration. I do not want to go into the detail of how we should fix what is wrong with the Financial Conduct Authority just now. The first thing that we have to do is recognise that it ain’t working, and regardless of what promises and assurances we have had, it still is not working. Whether that is best dealt with by putting yet another monitor on top of the regulator to monitor it, I do not know, but there has to be recognition that the existing scheme of regulation, as it is carried out by the Financial Conduct Authority, is simply not fit for purpose. The same applies to the parts of the regulatory environment that fall under other Government Departments. It is not only Treasury Ministers who have such responsibilities.

Let me return to the similarities between London Capital & Finance and Blackmore Bond. They both misled their victims into believing that their activities were regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. The only difference was that London Capital & Finance had a registration for something else, which it hid behind. Blackmore Bond did not have a registration of its own, but it hid behind the registration of other companies, which knowingly allowed their names to be associated with the marketing and selling of its products. The intention in both cases was the same, and that was to mislead—effectively, to con the customers. The results were the same: thousands of people lost everything. I do not understand why there is such resistance in the Government to saying that the remedy should be the same, or even to consider that the remedy should be the same.

In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of London Capital & Finance, the Financial Conduct Authority took steps to outlaw the marketing of mini bonds to retail investors. It outlawed the very practice that was at the cornerstone of London Capital & Finance’s business plan, as it was for Blackmore Bond and many others. There is still no explanation as to why, when the FCA was able to act so swiftly and decisively to close the door after the horses had gone, it took no effective action to stop those mis-sales years earlier, after it had been given credible and persuasive evidence of exactly what was happening in the mini bond market.

In earlier stages, I have raised concerns that there were other Blackmore Bonds just waiting to come to our attention. There were probably other mini bond-based businesses about to collapse. There were probably other investors about to face the awful reality that they had lost everything. That might be happening even as we discuss this Bill.

Last week, none other than Private Eye magazine reported that another mini bond company, Moregreen Capital Ltd, had written to its investors asking them to forgo their next interest payment. That might be the starting signs of severe trouble. I cannot confirm anything that was in the Private Eye article, and I cannot confirm very much from the public domain about Moregreen Capital Ltd in the way that I could for Blackmore Bond, for the simple reason that Moregreen Capital has failed to file its accounts for the last two years. Its only published accounts were so early in its trading history that today they are almost certainly useless. I should also make it clear, as is often the case, that company names can be similar and that that Moregreen Capital Ltd is unrelated to some other companies with Moregreen in their name. There might well be perfectly valid reasons for the action that Moregreen Capital has taken recently. There could be good reasons why it stopped publishing its accounts, or there might be yet another group of investors who are in the first stage of a journey that sees them lose everything with, as things stand, no prospect of compensation. The best-case scenario for Moregreen Capital’s investors is that they have nothing to worry about—that their investments are safe and that they will eventually get all the funds they were promised. But even if the best-case scenario pans out with Moregreen Capital, it will only be a matter of time before the next mini bond scandal rears its ugly head. Action has been taken to prevent that precise form of financial scam being allowed again, but we need action to anticipate and predict what scams will arise in future and to prevent them before they are allowed to take place. We have to recognise that thousands of people are victims of crime. They were the victims of criminal activity and they should be compensated in the same way as other victims of criminal activity have been compensated.

The amendment does not require the Government to establish an additional scheme, but it does require them to get this debate started. We in this Parliament are ultimately responsible for the regulatory framework in these islands. We collectively, and our predecessors, are ultimately responsible for having to set in place and to enforce a regulatory environment that would have protected our constituents from losing everything.

One of the examples I cited earlier was a retired military person who told Blackmore Bond’s directors, “This is my military pension—I can’t afford to lose it.” They took it and they lost it. That person deserves compensation. They have no chance of getting compensation out of Blackmore Bond. They are not covered by the financial services compensation scheme. Surely the Government have to agree that there is a case to be looked at in such examples. We have to look at a wider compensation scheme, in the same way we have for people who lose their holiday because their travel agent goes bust. Losing a holiday, which has happened to a lot of people over the past couple of years, is not a nice thing to happen—it is a distressing thing to happen—but when people lose their holiday, at worst they lose money they could afford to spend on a holiday; when people lose their pension they are losing their livelihood for the rest of their life. There has to be better provision for compensation for those who, through no fault of their own, see their pension, their plan for retirement and the future of their family’s financial security wiped out by charlatans who right now are taking advantage of a regulatory environment that is open to abuse.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

On the allocation of compensation to different individuals, all victims are victims of this scam, but is the hon. Gentleman saying that priority should be given to those who have suffered the most when it comes to how the Government move forward in the allocation of compensation for their losses?

[Peter Grant]

We have to remember that we are dealing with a large number of people. It is not just one company with 50 or 60 people who are victims; there are thousands of victims that we know of and probably many more than we do not know of, and the amounts of money that they have lost individually are life-changing for them. Someone who has worked for 20 years on a Member of Parliament’s salary probably has £20,000 or £30,000 they can afford to lose; these people did not. The amounts they have lost individually are significant; the amount that has been stolen collectively, as I said, is almost certainly over £1 billion. If people stole £1 billion out of a bank vault, law enforcement would not stop until every last one of them was behind bars for a very long time, and would, if need be, change the rules to make sure that it could not happen again. We should regard the theft of £1 billion out of people’s pension funds just as seriously as the theft of £1 billion of gold bullion out of the back of a Securicor van. All this amendment asks is that the Government recognise that as an issue and start to put answers in place as to how they can protect our constituents from falling victim to these scams in future.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to debate these issues. The amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) is interesting. Certainly I very much support the broad principle of greater scrutiny of the FCA, but I cannot support his amendment because I do not feel that it is effective, not least regarding the issues I raised earlier. Some of the issues in it have already been addressed. The regulatory failures were clearly identified in the excellent Gloster report. The report also—this was welcome—named individuals in the FCA who had failed and who tried to have their names redacted from it and exempted from any specific criticism. One of the cultural issues with the FCA is the lack of individual accountability either in the organisation itself or the organisations they regulate.

In subsection (5)(e) the hon. Gentleman talks about why we are compensating only 80% of the losses of individuals who lost money in London Capital & Finance. That speaks to a broad principle. Many of the investments people make have to be subject to the principle of caveat emptor. Especially with a relatively high-risk investment, it is incumbent on any investor to look at it and judge the risk for themselves. Some form of protection from the regulator is also required, but the regulator cannot be all things to all people and cannot be in all places at once. I had a constituent come to me who had lost a significant amount of money in London Capital & Finance investments, and they were quite clear that they understood that as they were getting an 8% return, whereas in a bank they would probably get 0.5% maximum in interest, there was a risk involved in such investment. It is quite obvious to most people that that is the case, whether they are sophisticated or unsophisticated investors. The broad principle of an investor having to look at the investment and judge for themselves is very important.

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[Mr McFadden]

The right hon. Member raises a very fair point. If we pluck a sum of money out of the air, it could be a lot of money to one person and perhaps less to somebody else, depending on their wealth.

Let me return to the questions for the Minister arising from the amendment and the Bill. The second is the important question of where the decision to compensate the LCF investors leaves investors in other firms where regulatory failure is alleged. Where has the bar now been set for future compensation in the event of regulatory failure? The taxpayer cannot stand behind every investment loss. Some investors will make money and some will lose. That is in the nature of a market economy. However, the question of compensation arises when there is a clear regulatory failure, because that is considered to be a different matter. Having come up with this scheme, where do the Government now draw the line?

How can we be sure this will not happen again? There are two aspects to this question. The first is the role of the regulator. The FCA is going through a transformation programme designed to ensure that changes are made to prevent a similar thing from happening in the future.

[Peter Grant]

There is clearly a need to specify which kinds of investment losses might be compensated, and which ones will not be. Given that the Financial Conduct Authority has outlawed the targeting of mini-bonds at retail investors, is that a clear indication that something was fundamentally flawed with all selling of those bonds, whether it was done by LCF, Blackmore Bond, or anybody else?

[Mr McFadden]

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point. On how we can be sure that this will not happen again, and the transformation programme, it is to be expected that companies would go through such a programme, given the damning nature of Dame Elizabeth’s findings. There is also, however—and this is not just about this specific case—understandable public scepticism when a scandal happens, people talk about lessons being learned, there are some changes to management, and the organisation moves on. How do we ensure that, while understandable, such public scepticism is not justified in this case because something different is happening, and that we will not end up back here, some time in the future, debating another investment scam that was not spotted and acted on in time?

The second aspect to the question of how we can ensure that this does not happen again relates to legislative protections. This scam was promoted by a lot of online advertising. The online safety Bill is coming up, and at the moment paid-for advertising is excluded from that. Why should that be the case? Surely the LCF case shows that paid-for advertising must be included. As the Minister will be aware, there is a growing coalition behind the argument that the online safety Bill must offer greater protection against financial scams and fraud, and that is bound to be a major issue as the Bill goes through the House.

That issue is important, because consumers are being targeted every day with adverts, text messages, emails, and phone calls geared either to obtaining their financial details, or promising get-rich-quick schemes. As covid has pushed more of our lives online, it is imperative that legislation keeps pace with the increased use of online scams that are designed to strip people of their money. It is becoming more and more difficult for consumers to ascertain the difference between a genuine approach and a scam approach. We in this House have a legislative duty to keep pace with what organised criminals are trying to do.

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[Peter Grant]

The SNP will, as we indicated, support the Bill on Third Reading. I thank everyone who contributed to the debate today. There were a number of interesting contributions on my amendment. I understand why some people did not feel they could support it in its entirety, but I was very clear that across the House the intention behind the amendment has a considerable amount of support. I hope the Government will take that on board.

The second point that became clear during the debate is that the regulatory failures that allowed London Capital & Finance to happen were not restricted to the FCA. There were catastrophic failures in that organisation—that is now undeniable—but they were not the only failures. It was not only the FCA that let down investors in some of the other scam companies mentioned during consideration of the Bill. Companies House did not enforce the requirements to publish company information. It says it is not its job to verify that companies submit the names of directors, for example. If that is not the responsibility of Companies House, whose responsibility is it?

Nobody enforces the rules that require companies to publish their annual accounts and other critical information on time. Companies and directors can have literally dozens of yellow card suspensions against a company, but then they are lifted and nothing ever happens to them. Those requirements are essential if people with an interest in a company are to get an early warning that things are going wrong. If those requirements are not observed, companies can be sunk before anybody has a chance to do anything about it.

I appreciate that part of that issue is not within the remit of the Treasury, but I hope that what comes out of these proceedings is that colleagues on the Treasury Committee and the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee will have plenty of new material to work on. Clearly, this is a failing of such proportions and complexity it will take more than one piece of legislation to put it right. Ultimately, we are the regulators. Every time we say there has been a failure of regulation, what we are saying is that we, in this Parliament, have failed to protect our constituents properly, so there needs to be a degree of humility among all of us at the degree to which this Parliament and its machinery failed to predict, identify, prevent and remedy the scams that we have, sadly, spent so much time talking about over the past few months.

In supporting the Bill, I share the comments made towards the Treasury team. I have been very grateful for the positive way in which many of my comments have been taken by Ministers, which does not always happen with comments from Opposition Members. A big shout out to Salma and Scott in the SNP research team, who once again made me sound as if I knew what I was talking about, which is quite an achievement. A big thank you, also, to all those who gave evidence, either written or oral. Some were talking about things that had hurt them greatly. It was difficult for them to talk about that on the record. I hope the Bill has been made a bit better as a result of their contributions and I hope their contributions will have made sure that the issues raised, if they have not been dealt with in the Bill, will be dealt with by other legislation very soon.

Oral Answers to Questions

Peter Grant Excerpts

Monday 13th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dr Coffey]

Just today, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor have announced £650 billion of investment in infrastructure over the next decade. The right hon. Lady will be aware of the industries in her constituency, where there has been huge support from the Government to bring green jobs to her part of the world, and I am conscious of the other benefits that she and colleagues may see in respect of freeports. All that is putting into effect our aim: we want to help people not only to get back into work but to progress in work, with higher-skilled jobs that bring higher pay.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

This morning, the Secretary of State claimed to know exactly how many extra hours a universal credit claimant would have to work to make up the £20 by which the benefit is to be cut; this afternoon, she admitted to the House that she had no idea of the answer to that self-same question. That must mean that her comment to the BBC this morning was at best wildly misleading and recklessly irresponsible. Will she apologise for that inadvertent but serious error?

Compensation (London Capital & Finance plc and Fraud Compensation Fund) Bill (First sitting)

Peter Grant Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Mr McFadden]

Q Are you telling us that it was a difficult thing to swallow but you now have the systems in place to deal with it?

Sheree Howard: I was not in the FCA at the time, but it was a very large assumption of remit. We have changed systems. We have implemented various programmes highlighted in Dame Elizabeth’s report on delivering effective supervision and effective authorisation programmes.

As I have already outlined, the financial services market is not sitting still; the FCA cannot sit still—hence the changes that are under way and will be a fact of life going forward. We are undertaking a significant programme to ensure that we invest in digital and data and have much greater access to the information, given the quantum of firms that we oversee.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

Q May I start with the witnesses from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme? I am happy to let you decide among yourselves who is best placed to answer. One of the major problems with LCF was that mini-bonds were unregulated, and the same applies to a lot of other unregulated businesses involved in the same activity. If a decision was taken to make the sale of mini-bonds a regulated activity, would it cause administrative difficulties for the FSCS to start to include them in its compensation scheme?

James Darbyshire: I don’t think it would cause administrative difficulties; it would just mean an additional area of coverage for the FSCS. The cost to levy payers—to the financial services industry—would potentially go up, depending on whether there were any failures involving mini-bonds.

[Peter Grant]

Q Are you able to give an indication of how many claims or inquiries the scheme receives from people who turn out not to be entitled to compensation because their investments were unregulated?

Simon Wilson: Unfortunately, I cannot give an accurate figure, but I would be happy to look it up and come back to the Committee.

[Peter Grant]

Q I appreciate that you did not have notice of the question, but would it be fair to say that a number of investors come to the Financial Services Compensation Scheme and discover that their investments are not covered?

Simon Wilson: We certainly get calls and contact from our customers regarding investments that they made that we are unable to protect—that is correct.

[Peter Grant]

Q I shall direct my questions on the Financial Conduct Authority to Ms Howard, but if she wants to pass them on to Mr Jones please feel free to do so. The Financial Conduct Authority uses the term “unsophisticated investors” to described investors for whom investment is not a way of life but tends to be an occasional activity, investing a pension or redundancy lump sum. Do you believe that these investors understand that a company that is regulated by the FCA—that is allowed to display the FCA logo on its website—might still be involved in the sale of unregulated investments? Do they fully understand that distinction?

Sheree Howard: I will look to my colleague Robin in a moment, but Dame Elizabeth Gloster’s report highlighted the halo effect that occurred in LCF. It was unique as it was an authorised firm issuing mini-bonds, which are not regulated although the firm was authorised for other activity but was not undertaking regulated activity.

On whether unsophisticated customers understand that, we are seeking ways of working with our partners to enhance that understanding. There is certain information on that in the financial services register, but people who invest little may not understand that, so it is an area of focus for us, including thinking about how we might most effectively act against that halo effect. That includes strengthening our gateway—our authorisations process—implementing a nursery, where we look at firms shortly after to ensure that they operate in line with our norms and standards. We are looking to do that as part of our transformation programme, as well as considering legislative routes that might help—for example, not having the logo and the FCA name.

[The Chair]

May I ask witnesses to keep their responses as short as possible so that we can get in more questions from Members? Mr Grant, will you make this your final question, please?

[Peter Grant]

Q Possibly—depending on the answer.

Ms Howard, another major problem has been not the unregulated activities carried out by regulated organisations, but unregulated companies that hide behind the fact that some company associated with it is regulated—for example, if a regulated company gives section 21 authorisation for its marketing materials. I will ask the same question again: do the people being encouraged to make these investments understand that the fact that marketing material is issued by a company registered with the FCA does not mean that its activity is regulated?

Sheree Howard: In evidence as part of LCF there was substantial discussion of the financial promotions regime—of the section 21 approval regime in particular. The Government are currently considering changes to that regime to help to improve understanding by making it a specific gateway so that we can test firms that wish to give such approvals to ensure that they do so appropriately. That should help to ensure that consumers understand better.

[Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)]

Q I thank the witnesses for their time in giving evidence this morning. As the shadow pensions Minister, I have a series of questions on pensions, but I preface them by pointing out to those watching proceedings today who are not pensions experts that there have been some absolutely dreadful pensions scams.

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[The Chair]

I turn now to the SNP spokesperson, Mr Peter Grant.

[Peter Grant]

Q Thank you, Ms Ghani. The Fraud Compensation Fund comes into operation only when fraud or misappropriation has been established, certainly in the view of the board. How much of a delay does that cause between the collapse of a company and the people who had put into that company getting their compensation?

David Taylor: From the point at which an application is made to us, through to our making a payment into the scheme, we would estimate that it takes somewhere between six and 18 months to process that application and establish whether the various necessary tests have been satisfied, particularly a loss to the scheme due to dishonesty, and whether all other avenues for redress have been exhausted, because we are the fund of last resort. Once the application comes to us, it is relatively quick. However, in relation to the schemes that we are talking about here, people have been waiting for some time as a result of the uncertainty about the eligibility of those schemes for FCF compensation.

[The Chair]

Can we ensure that the questions are in scope, Mr Grant?

[Peter Grant]

Q Thank you, Ms Ghani. Secondly, Mr Taylor, can you outline the basis of your calculation or estimate that the cost from historical cases will be around £350 million? Is there an appreciable risk that the cost could be significantly higher than that?

David Taylor: The way that these cases typically work is that when they become known, the Pensions Regulator appoints a professional trustee to manage the case and to seek to bring in any assets that they can, any claims against the wrongdoers and so forth. The information that we have on the amount of claims is based on information that we have gleaned to date from the professional trustees and/or the Pensions Regulator. We have been liaising with them for some years in relation to these cases.

Inevitably, it is not until they make their formal application to us and provide us with all the documentation that we can really get into the numbers, so we have greater certainty about the numbers that have already applied, perhaps slightly less certainty about the longer-term pipeline.

I think it is fair to say that, based on everything that we have done to date, we are reasonably confident about the order of magnitude of the claims that we know about. There is no legal reason why we could not get more claims in future, so I cannot say, no, that number is not going to go up. For the reasons I mentioned earlier, about these claims not being so relevant anymore, we would perhaps be slightly surprised if it went up a great deal.

[The Chair]

I now call Mr Matt Rodda.

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[The Chair]

I call the SNP spokesperson, Mr Peter Grant.

[Peter Grant]

Q Thank you, Ms Ghani, and good morning to all of our witnesses.

Dame Elizabeth, may I come to you first? You will be aware that there are amendments that the Committee will consider later that ask for the Secretary of State to be required to report various things to Parliament. In particular, one amendment asks for a report within six months on progress towards the implementation of the recommendations in your report. Clearly, not all of the recommendations will be implemented within six months, but in your view what would be a reasonable time scale for Parliament to ask the Secretary of State to come back and give us an update as to what had been achieved by that point?

Dame Elizabeth Gloster: Thank you for the question; I don’t think I am really qualified, in terms of parliamentary process, to answer it. What I can say is that it was a matter for the FCA to determine how it responds to my recommendation, and my report specifically said that any such response should involve an assurance exercise to confirm that any of the steps, whether recommended by me or otherwise, to cure the defects in the regulation process have indeed achieved the desired objective.

I believe that implementation of my recommendations should be closely monitored, but I don’t really have a view as to whether that means the Secretary of State should be required to lay a report before Parliament, or, if they are, within what timescale. There may be other ways of monitoring progress in relation to the implementation of my recommendations, such as via the Treasury Committee or otherwise.

I think that is the best answer that I can give you.

[Peter Grant]

Q Thank you very much for that. Perhaps I can frame the question in a different way: would it be reasonable to expect to see significant progress within six months in the implementation of your recommendations?

Dame Elizabeth Gloster: I would hope so, but I am not saying that in an informed way. Nevertheless, since the FCA has had my recommendations, as indeed has the Treasury, for some months how, I would hope that they are cracking ahead with implementing the recommendations right now. I suspect that the answer to your question is probably “Yes, it would be reasonable”.

[Peter Grant]

Q Thank you. I have a final question for you, Dame Elizabeth. We hear a lot about phrases such as “mini-bonds” and “mis-selling”. Can those concepts be defined clearly enough to form the basis for a wider legal compensation scheme, if Parliament and the Government were minded to do so?

Dame Elizabeth Gloster: Well, I am a lawyer, so I can define anything, I suspect—[Laughter.] At the time, mini-bonds were not defined and nobody really knew what was being referred to. But, yes, of course you can define a bond that has particular attributes and define it as a mini-bond. It is a slightly open-ended question, but I would have thought that the answer is yes, you can define a bond with particular attributes that might or might not attract protection.

I do not know whether either of my colleagues want to come in on that answer.

[Peter Grant]

I can see on the screens that they are shaking their heads, so we will take that as a “no”. For the record, I do not know whether the camera showed this, but one of the lawyers on the Committee was jumping for joy and waving his arms about when you announced, Dame Elizabeth, that a lawyer can define anything when asked to do so. You have one friend on the Committee.

Dame Elizabeth Gloster: I am not expecting people to agree with that comment; it was only a frivolous comment.

[Peter Grant]

Q I turn now to Mr Agathangelou for the Transparency Task Force. I have a question for you that is similar to the one I just asked Dame Elizabeth. You are aware that there are two amendments asking for the Secretary of State to be required to bring reports back to Parliament, which essentially start to look at the wider issues of investment, mis-selling, regulation and compensation. Do you agree that there is a need for something like that to be brought back to Parliament and, if so, why?

Andy Agathangelou: I certainly do agree. The reason I agree is because there is a mountain of evidence suggesting that there are many similar cases to LCF—Connaught, Lendy, FundingSecure, Blackmore Bond, Exmount, Bentley Global, Store First, Park First, Premier FX, Woodford.

We have to ask ourselves one fundamental question: do we want the public to have good reason to have trust and confidence in our financial ecosystem? If the answer is yes, it follows that we must also want the public to have confidence and trust in the financial regulatory framework that oversees it. Unless we get to that point, we cannot have what we want, which is a system that we can all rely on.

I would argue very strongly indeed that we must look at, for example, Blackmore Bond. The evidence is crystal clear that there has been catastrophic regulatory failure. We need to do what is uncomfortable and open up the can of worms that is there, and the can of worms that is within Premier FX. We need to have the courage to recognise that things have gone wrong. We do not need to make it in any way personal—this is a systemic issue. We will only start addressing these problems if we move away from short-term, tactical, reactive responses to long-term, strategic, proactive responses. I and the many members of our organisation would be very pleased if Parliament were to decide to properly investigate the many other catastrophic regulatory failures that have taken place.

[The Chair]

I ask witnesses to make sure that you are on mute if you are not speaking, and to keep answers short. Mr Grant, is this your final question?

[Peter Grant]

Q Yes. I just want to ask Mr Bishop if he has anything to add.

Mark Bishop: Yes. I strongly endorse what my colleague Andy Agathangelou said and I would like to add a little more information.

As far as I am concerned, the debate is about what happens when the regulator fails in its statutory duty to protect consumers. There are a number of options. The consumers can bear the costs, and that is tough; the consumers can be compensated by the Treasury; or they can be compensated by the FCA.

At the moment, there is no effective route to be compensated by the FCA, because in the Financial Services Act 2012, Parliament—rightly or wrongly—gave the FCA broad exemption from civil liability. It is almost impossible to sue. There is a very narrow carve-out on breach of human rights and acting in bad faith. At some point, someone is going to try the human rights angle, but I do not think anyone has successfully done so yet, because the costs are high and the FCA effectively has unlimited resources.

Knowing that it gave that exemption, Parliament also created a complaints scheme. Unfortunately, it then allowed the FCA to specify the complaints scheme. As a result, the FCA has determined that it cannot give out material levels of redress and it cannot give out any redress where there is an allegation that the regulator has failed in its statutory duty—it has been negligent or it has just not done the job properly. In effect, there is no route for consumers to receive redress. There is a need to create one.

There are big ways of doing that, such as having a royal commission, as happened in Australia. There are also simple, pragmatic, quick ways of doing it. Modifying the Bill so that it could deal with other legacy cases of regulatory failure would be a very sensible way to do it.

[The Chair]

I call Matt Rodda.