Economic Update

Rachel Hopkins Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Rishi Sunak]

The hon. Member talks about real cash and business rates grants. We have deployed more than £10 billion in cash to local authorities across this country, which has found its way to 800,000-plus businesses, through grants of either £10,000 or £25,000 targeted at businesses in the retail, hospitality and leisure sector. It has been a lifeline for small shops and businesses up and down the country.

[Rachel Hopkins (Luton South) (Lab)]

I am pleased that the Chancellor has spoken about the hospitality and retail sectors, but in my constituency many of those are reliant on passengers going through Luton airport. Until there is targeted support for the aviation industry, those employees will not be supported. Many are young and from BAME backgrounds. Can I be assured that detailed equality impact assessments have been done on all aspects of the plan?

[Rishi Sunak]

I have said before that this is a matter of social justice. It is precisely because the people who work in the sectors most affected are disproportionately younger, from BAME communities and women, and on lower pay and often are part time, that we have taken bold and decisive action to help those sectors. Ultimately, we are trying to help those 2 million employed people. The hon. Member is right. It is because of the equalities impact that the moment demands such action.

Finance Bill

Rachel Hopkins Excerpts

Report stage & Report: 2nd sitting & Report: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 2nd July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Workington (Mark Jenkinson) on his maiden speech and warmly welcome him to his place. I shall attempt to tune my Surrey ears to his Cumbrian dialect, and I very much look forward to hearing more from him.

I want to take this opportunity to ask the Government, in their response to the coronavirus and all the challenges that are still to come, to focus particularly on two priorities when making their decisions about how to allocate resources to meet this enormous challenge. The first is to focus on the interests of our children and young people. It would have been unthinkable at any other time for an entire generation of schoolchildren to have missed a whole term and a half of schooling. Among all the justifiable anxiety about infection rates, testing, PPE and reopening the economy, the needs of our children seem to have been somewhat sidelined.

I welcome the Secretary of State’s statement earlier today about reopening schools in September. Like the rest of the House, I fervently hope that infection rates continue to decline to facilitate this. I would like to see a wholesale commitment from this Government to overcoming the educational deficit that has resulted from the shutdown. We already know how much of an attainment gap opens up between different groups of children over the summer holidays, and we can only imagine how much more pronounced that this will have become after half a year’s worth of missed schooling. I urge the Government to allocate generous resources to schools so that they may invest in the additional staffing and resources that they need to meet the needs of all children who have been disadvantaged.

I would also like to see a commitment to more diverse forms of learning to help engage young people who have become alienated from traditional forms of learning over their time away. Music, drama, sport, and open-air learning can all help children to re-engage with their education and will also help to revive employment sectors that have been damaged by the shutdown.

Beyond education, we have a cohort of school leavers who are attempting to enter employment at the worst possible time. If we are not to doom this cohort to a lifetime of missed opportunities, we must act now to provide them with the employment opportunities where they can build real skills and lay the foundations for a meaningful working life. In that spirit, I welcome the aspiration in the Prime Minister’s speech to build, build, build, as I recognise that this will provide opportunities for high-skilled jobs and apprenticeships. However, I ask that the Government include a real commitment to retraining career changers to help people who have lost their jobs in this pandemic to find work among the new opportunities that these projects will provide.

I note that the sectors the Prime Minister promises to provide funding for are areas of employment that are typically masculine. I urge the Government to redouble their efforts to engage young women and female career changers in training for careers in construction and engineering if those are the sectors where employment is due most quickly to recover. We know that child poverty is most effectively overcome when women are in work and earning a good wage, supported by affordable childcare.

On that note, I draw the Government’s attention to the financial precariousness of both our pre-school providers and our universities. Every one of these institutions that is forced to close or scale back activity as a result of the pandemic is a narrowing of opportunities for our children and young people, and every effort should be made to support these sectors. While I am on this point, I should like to take the opportunity to raise the issue of travel in London for those under-18. For many years, it has been free for under-18s to travel on Transport for London services, and that has opened up to all of them a much wider range of opportunities—education, cultural, sporting and social. As part of the package that the Government put in place to bail out Transport for London earlier this summer, they specified that that travel offering for the under-18s had to be scrapped. In support of that decision, they cited the fact that young people use buses only for short journeys that they would otherwise walk. I have obtained from the Minister the evidence for that assertion, and it came from a report published some years ago that concluded that free travel for under-18s had an overwhelmingly positive impact on young people’s social and educational lives. I urge the Government to prioritise young people in this recovery and to make a start by scrapping this restriction on their travel.

The second area that I call on the Government to prioritise as we plan our future beyond this pandemic is the environment. I was really disappointed not to hear a greater emphasis on the progress towards our net-zero carbon targets in the Prime Minister’s speech. This is a fantastic opportunity to implement carbon-free and low-carbon standards into our construction of new homes and into our transport systems. We can also take this opportunity to specify new standards for biodiversity, water quality and air quality and to redouble our efforts to increase the proportion of our energy that comes from renewable sources. I particularly encourage the Government to think not just about new buildings, but about bringing existing buildings up to 21st-century standards. Committing to a programme of retrofitting insulation to our ageing homes, especially those belonging to low-income families, can provide skilled employment opportunities and help us to make substantial progress towards our net-zero carbon goals.

There are so many other challenges that this Government will need to face over the next few months and so many calls on taxpayers’ money, but I want to see the Government establish clear strategic priorities for their future spending, and I would like those priorities to be our children, our young people and our environment.

[Rachel Hopkins (Luton South) (Lab)]

After a decade of austerity, which has seen an assault on people’s living standards and our social security system, child poverty is at a disgracefully high level, and the Bill will not work towards tackling the root causes. I am speaking in support of Labour’s new clause 29, which would ensure that the Government review the impact of the Bill on poverty, and I commend my hon. Friend on the Front Bench for his opening remarks and others on this side of the House for the passion and understanding with which they have spoken.

Economic Outlook and Furlough Scheme Changes

Rachel Hopkins Excerpts

Tuesday 16th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Jesse Norman]

I almost did not recognise my hon. Friend with his new coronavirus growth, but I very much accept and recognise the point he makes. I thank him for it, and we will continue to work hard in this area.

[Rachel Hopkins (Luton South) (Lab)]

Aviation and associated businesses create stable jobs and economic growth in Luton. Coronavirus will impact the industry for the foreseeable future and recovery is going to be much longer. Does the Minister recognise that replicating the French Government’s commitment to ensuring that short-term work schemes and support are available for longer—for, say, two years—would support those long-term affected sectors, retain key skills in those industries and avoid redundancies?

[Jesse Norman]

We are of course looking closely at other countries to see if they are doing things from which we can learn and benefit. I would have some doubts about a scheme that went on as long as that precisely because we need to return businesses and people working in them to normality as swiftly and safely as we possibly can. This might have the effect of counteracting that, but the point is well made and we will continue to review these alternative arrangements.

Finance Bill (Ways and Means)

Rachel Hopkins Excerpts

Ways and Means resolution & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Tuesday 19th May 2020 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Hopkins (Luton South) (Lab) [V]]

The covid-19 crisis has had a dramatic impact on the UK’s economy. A small state, low taxes and pure free market economics have failed to prepare the UK for the public health crisis and the ever-present climate emergency.

The public health crisis has forced the Government to postpone this failed style of governance, in favour of an interventionist, corporate welfare policy, aimed at protecting the needs of capital, with the hope that benefits will trickle down to workers through business-first schemes. The post-covid-19 economy must have fair taxation and strong workers’ rights at its centre. Self-employed workers will be pivotal in our economic rebuild, and people who are genuinely self-employed deserve fair support while also paying their taxes.

The Opposition are fundamentally committed to promoting and advancing workers’ rights, so we are deeply concerned that IR35 reduces the rights of the worker and the responsibilities of the employer. It is essential that, during the review of IR35, the Government recognise the overlap between employment law and tax status, and do not see them as exclusive entities. An initial recognition of their interrelation provides the basis for levelling up self-employment protection and ending forms of self-employment that are used as cover for tax avoidance.

I am aware that some workers are forced into self-employment by employers trying to cut costs and reduce their obligations. That was directly referenced by the Taylor review, which stated, based on evidence submitted to it, that

“the nature of the tax system acts as an incentive for practices such as bogus claiming of self-employed status, by both businesses or individuals.”

This highlights the importance of not assessing tax law in isolation. A joined-up approach that brings together tax and employment law can ensure that everyone pays their fair share of tax and that no one is exploited by holes in the system. It is vital that the Government recognise the relationship between poor employment practice, exploitative working arrangements and the tax system. Do the Government intend to introduce any additional measures to tackle the enablers of tax avoidance schemes, including those who exploit gaps relating to tax and employment law?

The precarious nature of certain forms of self-employment has made it difficult for many to access the coronavirus self-employment income support scheme. A large number of my constituents, including those working in the creative industries, cannot access SEISS as they receive less than 50% of their income from self-employment. Will the Minister consider introducing additional support that can be offered to those who receive less than half their income from self-employment, and who may also have been using short-term pay-as-you-earn contracts?

The covid-19 crisis has created a critical juncture in our country’s economy. I urge the Government to ingrain workers’ rights and fair taxation into the post-covid economy.