Health and Social Care Levy (Repeal) Bill

Richard Burgon Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 11th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Steve Brine]

And corporation tax, as my hon. Friend says from a sedentary position. If we believe in prevention—and, as I say, I believe that those on the Front Bench do—we need to have the courage to act on that. That will mean doing unpopular things, but sometimes we have to do unpopular things to do the right things, and that means preventing some of the major killers and some of the major causes of ill health that I have mentioned. If we do not do that, the NHS will continue to cost unsustainable amounts of money and it will become unsustainable. There endeth the lesson of Dr Brine.

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

I want to focus my remarks on my new clause 2. I thank the 25 right hon. and hon. Members who added their signature to mine on the amendment paper, and I am pleased that it has support from Plaid Cymru, Alba, Labour, Green, and Social Democratic and Labour party MPs.

The Conservative party was wrong to introduce the health and social care levy, so it is right that it is being scrapped, but it is wrong that the Government are imposing a package of unfunded tax cuts, which have created financial panic and led to interest rates shooting up and millions of people fearing how they will keep their home. The package has created a Tory crisis made in Downing Street, but being paid for by working people.

As I say, I welcome the scrapping of the levy, but of course health and social care still need the extra funding that it would have raised. We only have to look at today’s news about how the number of social care workers has fallen for the first time in a decade to see just how broken our care system is, and rising waiting lists and soaring ambulance waiting times show that the NHS is in dire need of a funding boost. So my new clause 2 would require the Chancellor, in addition to scrapping the levy, to look at different taxes to raise the income that would have been raised by the levy. Specifically, it calls on the Chancellor to look into the iniquity of tax rates on wealth being lower than the taxes paid on income from work.

We are, I am afraid, one of the most unequal countries in Europe when it comes to income distribution, but it is even worse when we look at wealth. The richest 1% hold almost a quarter of UK wealth, so we need a full and wide debate in our country about wealth taxes. I have been calling for a wealth tax—for example, a one-off wealth tax of 10% on wealth over £5 million, which could raise £100 billion and provide an emergency wealth fund to help get us through this crisis—but today, with new clause 2, I want to concentrate not on the taxing of wealth itself, but on taxes on income deriving from wealth.

We have a scandalous situation in our society in which income derived from wealth is taxed below income derived from work. If someone is lucky enough to be able to live off share dividend payouts, they will pay less in tax than someone who earns exactly the same amount by getting up each and every day and going out to work. Likewise, capital gains tax, which is paid on profits when selling assets such as a second home, is paid at rates below income tax rates. How on earth can that ever be justified, and how can it be justified when the Government are plotting—without any democratic mandate, I would add—to cut benefits and public services across society?

In fact, there is huge potential for increasing tax revenues by simply ending the significant tax discounts that go to income from wealth over income from work. How much would be raised by doing this? Ending the lower rates paid on capital gains and share dividends, and removing the related exemptions on those taxes, would raise around £24 billion per year. That is a lot more—nearly double—than the amount from the national insurance tax hike on working people, which would have raised around £12 billion to £13 billion. The funds that my proposal would raise could be a big down payment on the investment that we need to ensure our social care system delivers for everyone, and it could make a big difference in addressing the crisis in our health service.

For those on the Conservative Benches who may be appalled by this idea or this moderate proposal, I want to point out that the former Chancellor—not the last one, but the one before, the right hon. Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Rishi Sunak)—commissioned a review of capital gains tax, and that review recommended slashing the annual allowance and aligning capital gains tax rates more closely with income tax, in a move that could raise billions of pounds for the Exchequer. On this, Margaret Thatcher, even, had an interesting view. Under Thatcher’s premiership, the same basic unfairness of lower taxes on capital gains was ended. It was back in 1988 that the then Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, said that

“there is little…difference between income and capital gains, and many people effectively have the option of choosing…which to receive. And…it is by no means clear why one should be taxed more heavily than the other.”—[Official Report, 15 March 1988; Vol. 129, c. 1005.]

Since then, wealthy people living a low-tax lifestyle have been benefiting from even lower capital gains rates than over 30 years ago, so something has gone wrong and it is now time to put that right. We need solutions to deal with this economic crisis in a socially just way, not through austerity, not through benefits cuts and not through public service cuts. Social justice means putting tax justice at the heart of our economy. We should start by ensuring that those who live off their wealth pay at least the same level of tax as those who live off their own work.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

I disagree with new clause 2 and new clause 1. I welcome very much the legislation. One of the objectionable features of the original proposal was hypothecation, because I do not think it is possible to identify a single tax that just happens to meet the costs of a particular service, let alone a tax that would then have revenue growth at the right pace to take care of the needs of that service. This one was particularly misleading. There was no way that the amount of tax to be levied got anywhere near paying the full costs of social care. It was misleading to make people feel that social care might be as cheap as this particular tax, although the tax itself was burdensome on all those who go to work.

There are still strong elements of hypothecation in new clause 2, which I would equally object to. Again, we should not mislead people into believing there is a simple, relatively low tax that takes care of a huge problem—social care. Indeed, when the Government compounded the difficulty by saying that in the first instance the tax would be mainly used for the health service, and by some magic that would drop away and it would go to social care, it all became incredible to me. That is why I did not like the idea in the first place. It is very good news that we are sorting it out.

The challenge of new clauses 1 and 2 is a perfectly fair one, and I think the answer is straightforward. Social care does need more money to go into it, and it will need progressively more. If we fund our social care better and expand it, it will release some of the pressures on the NHS. There are some people who could vacate a bed quite safely and get better social care if that were available, so this is worthwhile expenditure from that point of view as well. Above all, it is worthwhile expenditure because people deserve better care and better treatment and that should be funded out of general taxation.

The Government are right now to abolish the hypothecated specialist tax, to give up the idea that there is a single, relatively low tax that solves all the problems, and to accept that social care and NHS provision together is a major claim on the general taxation of the country. If the general taxation of the country does not reach total spending—it does not seem to at the moment—it is also a claim on borrowing.

On that last point, we should remember that for the previous two years the Office for Budget Responsibility grossly underestimated the revenues that came into our economy, and we borrowed considerably less than it was forecasting. It may not be so wildly wrong this year, when it looks perhaps as if its borrowing forecast is a bit on the low side, but we must remember that the way to pay for these services is to grow the revenue. That was what we were doing last year and the year before, and that is what we must do next year, to take care of the need to spend more on the NHS and social care.