Oral Answers to Questions
Peter Lamb Excerpts(2 weeks, 5 days ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (James Murray)
Primary care providers have yearly negotiations with the Department on what services they provide and what money they are entitled to. More broadly, the reason why we are, in the Budget, taking difficult decisions about national insurance and other matters is precisely to fund the NHS, so that we have the health service that our country needs and deserves.
Peter Lamb (Crawley) (Lab)
Rachel Reeves
In the past four weeks since the Leader of the Opposition was elected, the Conservatives have made £7 billion of commitments to cut taxes, but with no idea of how they would cut public services to afford them. I do not know how they will vote on national insurance, but we can see pretty quickly how they ended up leaving us a £22 billion black hole.
Non-Domestic Rating (Multipliers and Private Schools) Bill
Peter Lamb ExcerptsMonday 25th November 2024
(3 weeks, 6 days ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Non-Domestic Rating (Multipliers and Private Schools) Bill 2024-26 View all Non-Domestic Rating (Multipliers and Private Schools) Bill 2024-26 Debates Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Peter Lamb (Crawley) (Lab)
National non-domestic rating multipliers: is there any more interesting topic for nearly 9 o’clock on a Monday night? [Interruption.] Quite right: absolutely not. I am sure that the regular readers of my blog would say much the same.
Our system of taxation and local government is the product of evolution and not of design. It has its roots in Elizabethan forms of taxation that have been inherited and altered during the passage of time to adapt to modern realities, and what we are talking about today is yet again adapting to those modern realities. Like many other Members, I am a former local government leader, and I might well have been one of those who were bending the ear of the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (James Murray), in asking for this change, because it is well overdue. We have heard town centres described as the heart of the community. What do we actually mean by that? Without a clear public space where the whole of society interacts, towns lack identity and a common sense of bonds between them. They tend to fall apart, and we see social degradation.
Council leaders such as me have spent the last 14 years trying to adapt to the new realities of our economy, spending a fortune in public money and investing countless hours—including countless officer hours—in trying to reinvigorate our town centres to ensure that they live on for the next generation, not simply because that is what we think best but because, overwhelmingly, it is the response that people say they want for their areas. They want their town centres to be vibrant again, and to be a fundamental part of their communities. The problem is that no matter what we do on the ground, no matter how much effort we put in, we simply cannot overcome the huge cost disparity between online retailing and physical retailing in the high street.
One would expect that, where these challenges exist, the state would use the levers at its disposal to encourage an extra boost for what we consider to be socially beneficial, as opposed to what we consider to be detrimental to society. The proposals under discussion do exactly that. They ensure that the parts of our community that our constituents want, which are fundamental to their identity, survive into the coming decades, while also ensuring that those that no longer have the profit margins they once had—surprise, surprise, in Elizabethan times the most profitable businesses were buildings next to the local church—are given a comparable break.
We have heard a great deal from Opposition Members about what parties in government over the last 14 years could, would or should have done given the opportunity, but I am sorry to say that they did not do any of it. As a council leader during that period, I was regularly making the case for changes. We were promised changes at various times, but they never happened. The one thing that we did end up with was full business rate retention. My local authority collects £120 million worth of business rates each year and we get to keep £4 million, which puts paid to the idea that words have any real meaning when they are used in connection with some of these policies.
This is the single biggest change that can be introduced to ensure that our high streets survive in the future. I am very proud that, regardless of whatever idealised form the Opposition may wish to imagine could exist, the policy being delivered in the Bill enables us to support the businesses that our communities desperately want, and will ensure that businesses that can afford to carry a bigger load do so.