Autumn Statement
Richard Graham Excerpts(11 years, 11 months ago)
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Mr Osborne
Of course we regret any decision made by any company to reduce jobs, but we are creating jobs in the economy. In Humberside we have committed to new enterprise zones. We have reduced the tolls on the Humber bridge. We have introduced today new tax allowances from January next year to help small businesses in the hon. Lady’s area to invest. These will all help create jobs, and I hope the people she represents will also welcome the increase in the personal allowance, which will see a reduction in their income tax bill, and the decision not to go ahead with the Labour party’s 3p fuel duty rise.
Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
My constituents in Gloucester will appreciate the fact that the Chancellor’s statement increases take-home pay for all workers, gets us off the fuel duty escalator, clamps down on multinational tax avoidance and strongly supports investment in manufacturing, which is vital for growth and jobs in our city and county. Can my right hon. Friend say whether his announcement on funding and reforms for more houses includes the Gloucester proposal for social housing regeneration, which was well received by the Homes and Communities Agency and the Department for Communities and Local Government?
Mr Osborne
I will get back to my hon. Friend about the specific point about the bid for new housing in Gloucester. More broadly, we are investing more capital in housing development. We are also standing alongside families trying to buy their first home with our Firstbuy shared equity scheme, and we are also providing guarantees to registered social landlords not only to build social housing, but to build housing for the private rented sector. So in all sorts of ways we are helping the people of Gloucester, and I will look specifically at what more we can do to help.
Beer Duty Escalator
Richard Graham Excerpts(12 years ago)
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The Economic Secretary to the Treasury (Sajid Javid)
I congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Burton (Andrew Griffiths) and for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland) on securing what has been an excellent debate, and on the excellent work that they do through chairing the all-party beer group and the all-party save the pub group respectively. I also thank all Members who have contributed to the debate—I, too, counted 20 Back-Bench colleagues—as well as the 104,000 people who have signed the e-petition and all Members who are in the Chamber today.
Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the British brewing sector, British pubs and the British people have paid a heavy price for the previous Government’s beer duty escalator? May I urge him to hold a review and then do what Treasury Ministers have done to the previous Government’s fuel duty escalator, which is to stop it? In that way, he will deserve a celebratory pint from all my constituents in Gloucester, a pint of beer from the—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. The Minister will not have time to drink the pint if we have such long interventions.
Public Service Pensions Bill
Richard Graham Excerpts(12 years ago)
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Mr David Anderson (Blaydon) (Lab)
Let me begin by declaring an interest. For 20 years I was a member of the mineworkers pension scheme, for 16 years I was a member of the local government pension scheme, and for the past seven years I have been a member of the parliamentary pension scheme.
This is a debate about trust, or rather about the breakdown of trust. The people who are covered by the Bill are those we trust with our most precious possessions: our children, our partners, our parents, our families and our communities. As we all know, when things are going wrong it is the public servants we turn to, and in whom we place the maximum trust.
We turn to the firefighters when our safety is compromised, our homes are at risk and our lives are in danger. We turn to the police when we are in trouble, when we face the despair caused by burglary, car crime or petty theft, when our kids go missing, and when we are being persecuted by nuisance neighbours or antisocial behaviour. We turn to the nurse when we are at our lowest ebb, when we are desperate for help, and when we need real human kindness. We turn to the doctor when we are at a loss to explain our pain, when we need their skills to put us back together again, and when we feel that there is nowhere else to turn.
We turn to the social worker when we are in despair because of our parents’ dementia, when our youngsters are hooked on drugs, and when we need real help to sort out life’s real problems. We turn to the home care worker when we cannot cope any longer with our daily lives, when we need a stranger to come into our homes and become a friend, and when only an extra pair of hands will do. We turn to the teacher to take our children on to the next stage of life’s journey, to shape our kids for the world to come, and to inspire our most precious gifts.
There are so many more: the bin man, the caretaker, the school meals lady, the gravedigger, the gardener, the midwife—and, among the hundreds of others, the so-called back office staff. They are the people who make the front line work effectively, and the people whom the Government disparage most of all. All those people are trusted by us to do the right thing when we need them to. We expect—no, we demand—that they do their jobs properly, and we trust them to do so. But trust is not a one-way street: if we expect those people to do the right thing, we should do the same.
For decades, many of those workers have been putting their trust in us as representatives of the state, and have paid into pension funds every week or every month in the belief that they will be rewarded properly for their work. Let no one in the Chamber claim that public servants somehow get a free ride when it comes to pensions. As was pointed out earlier by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), they have given up a percentage of their pay in order to have a decent retirement and not to have to rely solely on welfare payments in old age.
There is no free lunch for those workers, no matter how much the divisive policy of the Conservative party or the TaxPayers Alliance may try to claim it is so. The Bill clearly undermines the trust that these workers have been able to place in their pensions for decades. Just five years after the agreement to changes that were supposed to be affordable and sustainable, they are seeing the imposition of changes that will significantly weaken their potential to plan properly for their retirement.
We should hear no more about unaffordability until we in the House face up to our culpability in terms of where we find ourselves today. It was Members of Parliament who allowed public sector scheme employers to take lengthy contribution holidays while the lads and lasses at the front end had no such luxury. The classic example, which I raised earlier—and it is not the only one—is Royal Mail. Between 1998 and 2001, it made no contributions whatsoever to the pension fund. Now we are told that the service must be privatised because there is a huge black hole in the pension fund.
Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for calling me to speak in this long and important debate on pensions. This is a subject on which we would surely all agree that the object is to get cross-party agreement on issues that affect so many of our constituents, and that should be achievable. Indeed, the coalition Government have already achieved it across the two parties, and by seeking and taking Lord Hutton’s advice they hoped to secure agreement from Labour. In that sense, it is good news that this Second Reading will be unopposed, but it is none the less sad that we have heard so many speeches in which Labour Members were unable to rise to the challenge of reaching agreement and seeking harmony and instead sought to make a series of party political, aggressive and disagreeable contributions to the pensions debate.
Let me start with the hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), who led the debate for the Opposition. She said, for example, that the Opposition had accepted the need for a move from RPI to CPI as an index for pensions only as a temporary deficit reduction measure for the life of this Parliament, and she criticised its timing. However, she completely failed to mention that the Labour party itself had already changed the index for its own pension scheme for its party workers from RPI to CPI before the Government did likewise for all public sector workers. Unfortunately the hon. Lady is not in her seat, but the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), who is here, said that the change had been imposed without warning and called it the moment at which the Government had lost their moral authority. I am sure that he will be able to explain to his own party workers quite what moral authority his party has on this issue, having made precisely the same change. The reality is that both the Labour party and this Government have had to face uncomfortable facts— above all, the consequences of the fact that so many of us are living for so much longer—and have had to tailor pensions accordingly.
The hon. Member for Leeds West rightly expressed concern for public sector workers. She may be a deferred public sector scheme worker herself, as am I and many other Government Members, and it is important for Labour Members to understand that we do not all represent purely the private sector. This is about seeking agreement for public sector and private sector workers from Members of Parliament who have themselves worked in both sectors. She rightly stood up for public sector workers but was unable to give any credit to this Bill, which has completely protected workers earning less than the full-time equivalent of £15,000 a year—some 15% of the work force—and provides considerable protection for people, many of whom live in my constituency, who earn less than the full-time equivalent of £21,000 a year.
The Bill also protects everybody who is within 10 years of retirement, which is very important for so many of our constituents who are in their 40s and early 50s. Crucially, it increases accrual rates, which is a technical point that will be appreciated by those who have worked in the sector, such as the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne. Above all, and most importantly, the Bill protects the risk-free investment nature of a defined benefit scheme.
On that point, I must refer to the speech by the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), who is in his place and whose integrity I respect. He quoted, as he would in his role as the Public and Commercial Services Union representative, the PCS briefing for this Second Reading debate and came to the same conclusion that
“members will work longer, pay more and get less pension.”
The reality, however, is that all of us will live longer, work longer and, if we are lucky enough to have one, get a pension for longer, and those who are public sector workers will have a much better pension than anyone else in the land.
My point to the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Blaydon (Mr Anderson), who is not in his place, is that it is no good simply championing the status quo for today’s workers and betray tomorrow’s. In many ways, that is what happened—I am afraid that the trade unions are partly culpable for this—to private sector DB schemes, which the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) has often referred to as the jewel in the crown. Many of them have closed precisely because the unions could not and would not see the future and adapt before companies decided that they could no longer afford the schemes and closed them.
The point of this Bill—this should be something on which every Member of this House can unite—is that this Government are trying to work with unions and Opposition Members to keep defined-benefit schemes for the public sector, despite the fact that we will all live for so much longer than our fathers and mothers, and that, therefore, the cost of those pensions will be so much greater. To use the analogy of the hon. Member for Blaydon, it may be raining, but this Bill will make sure that the umbrella is kept for public sector workers.
Chris Leslie
The hon. Gentleman says that we should all stand together to defend ongoing defined-benefit schemes, so could he explain why the Bill does not honour that commitment? Clause 7 states that schemes created under the Bill can be defined-benefit schemes, but they can also be defined-contribution schemes or
“a scheme of any other description”.
Where is the guarantee that these will be defined-benefit schemes?
Richard Graham
I have no idea whether the word “guarantee” is in the Bill. In life, only two things are guaranteed as far as I know: taxation and death. We are talking about not guarantees as such, but a defined-benefit scheme in which the entire risk is taken by the taxpayer and the certainty that gives people the chance to budget in their retirement is with the scheme’s beneficiary. In fact, it is even better than that. As the hon. Gentleman will know, because he has studied these things carefully, the advantage of a career average defined-benefit scheme is that it benefits precisely those workers whom I would have imagined he would be most in favour of protecting.
The Pensions Policy Institute, which the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington referred to, says:
“The Coalition’s proposed reforms will remove the different outcomes for high-flyers and low-flyers which exist in final salary schemes.”
It goes on to estimate that, under the current scheme, a high flyer
“would have had a pension benefit of 29% of salary, compared to 11% of salary for the low-flyer.”
Under the reforms proposed by this Government, both high and low flyers will have
“the average value of the pension offered being worth 15% of salary”.
That is a significant improvement for the low flyers. I would be astonished if all Members of the House were not in favour of that reform.
The hon. Member for Leeds West recognised that something had to be done, but tellingly, she made no reference at all to three of Lord Hutton’s four tests—affordability, fairness to the taxpayer and governance and transparency. Did she not think they mattered? Should they not be at the heart of what any Government do? That was a disappointing series of omissions.
John Healey
The hon. Gentleman said a moment ago that the total risk of the schemes was borne by the taxpayer. Does he not realise that he is making the same mistake as Ministers in not recognising that the local government pension scheme is a funded scheme? The income from its investments last year topped £3 billion, and there is also a strong contribution from employees alongside that of employers. That makes it a case apart from his general argument.
Richard Graham
The right hon. Gentleman makes half a good point. I know local government pension schemes very well, as many of them are my former clients. The reality is that they have never been as separate from the public sector balance sheet as he might be implying. One of his predecessors as Economic Secretary, Ruth Kelly, tried to amalgamate the whole lot, recognising their fragility. As the National Audit Office has revealed, the schemes are significantly underfunded, and I think I am right in saying that 20% of all money paid in council tax now goes towards paying the pensions of scheme members. He is right to say that local government schemes are different from others, but they are not quite as different as he suggests.
The hon. Member for Leeds West mentioned the fear that public sector workers would opt out of schemes altogether, because they might become unaffordable, and thereby become a burden on the state in a different way. I think it is fair to say that she did not recognise that opt-out rates have not altered. There is good reason for that, because although contributions are higher than they were, the value of a defined-benefit scheme is still considerable. In case her concern becomes real and there are large numbers of opt-outs, the Government have built into the Bill a provision for regular reviews to address the situation if and when it arises.
Several Opposition Members have expressed the concern that the Government are trying to set the private sector against the public sector. I have already totally rejected that point. All Government Members are as committed as anyone to helping every worker get some form of pension as quickly as possible. The hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) missed the crucial point that the Government are trying not only to make defined-benefit schemes sustainable for the public sector, but to get millions of workers in the business sector to have a pension at all through the auto-enrolment scheme. It is disappointing to me, and I think to others, that she did not understand that.
Several Members have claimed that the real scandal is the lack of pension provision in the private sector, but it is a curious fact that one legacy of the previous Government is that 13.5 million workers in the private sector have no pension at all. Some Ministers in the Labour Government did good work, including the late Member for Croydon North, to whom I pay tribute for his work in the pensions sector. However, as with so many things, it has fallen to the current Government to seek an agreement and to implement reforms that will give people without pensions the chance to have something to retire on for the first time in their lives.
Today’s debate has covered many aspects of the Bill. As I said, it is a good thing that its Second Reading will not be opposed today, but I can see that there will be many arguments ahead in Committee.
Let me leave with hon. Members the points that I make to everyone in my constituency who is employed in the public sector and is in a defined-benefit scheme, whether they are teachers, nurses or other workers. First, the defined-benefit pension has fabulous benefits for all those involved, especially lower-paid workers; secondly, the increase in accrual rates means an improvement of some 8% for public sector workers; thirdly, anyone within 10 years of retirement is completely protected; and finally, I hope that the Opposition will drop their instinctively tribal approach, and recognise that the Bill tries to reform public sector pensions in a way that will, above all, be sustainable. Should our children and grandchildren work in the public sector, they will receive a career average defined-benefit pension, as will today’s workers, should the Bill go through successfully.
Oral Answers to Questions
Richard Graham Excerpts(12 years, 2 months ago)
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Danny Alexander
The hon. Gentleman, as he knows, is referring to the OBR’s forecasts. Of course, a number of problems in the global economy, not least those in the eurozone, have become more serious since those forecasts were made. I would have thought that he would applaud the fact that our plan is sufficiently flexible to allow the automatic stabilisers to support our economy when there is weakness in the global economy.
Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
No one in the House underestimates the size of the economic challenge before us or the importance of supporting manufacturing and exports, which make up a fifth of the gross domestic product in my constituency, but at a time when the employment figures are encouraging, our manufacturing indices are outstanding and our global competitiveness has risen by two places, does my right hon. Friend agree that two impediments to business confidence are the threat of strikes by unions and the chorus of despair from the Opposition?
Danny Alexander
My hon. Friend is right to highlight some of the positives in the UK economy, especially the employment figures. My experience of dealing with trade unions is that one should not pay much attention to the rhetoric at their conferences. When one gets down to business with the trade unions, as I did on public service pensions, the majority of them are willing to behave responsibly. That said, and as the shadow Chancellor has said, the British public and trade union members do not want to see strike action in this country.
Professional Standards in the Banking Industry
Richard Graham Excerpts(12 years, 4 months ago)
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David Rutley
I am not familiar with that approach. As a former member of the Treasury Committee, however, I should like to say that I have worked with my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie), and that I have a huge amount of respect for his knowledge and experience in Treasury-related matters, and also for his independence of mind and personal integrity.
Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that what our constituents really want is a recognition of what went wrong, swift action to prevent this from happening again, and then work to restore trust in this sector, which is so important to the country? As Lord O’Donnell said, the public will not want us to kick this into the long grass.
David Rutley
I completely agree. It is so important that we drive for urgent action that I hope Opposition Members will reconsider their stated position and vote with us this evening in support of a parliamentary-led—
Finance Bill
Richard Graham Excerpts(12 years, 4 months ago)
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Bill Esterson
People in the hon. Lady’s part of the world must be incredibly lucky, because it must be the only place in the country where that is the case.
In reality, every Member knows that the youth unemployment figure has gone over the 1 million mark; that is a fact which everyone here accepts.
Bill Esterson
I ask the hon. Gentleman, when he intervenes, to explain why one of this Government’s first acts was to scrap the successful future jobs fund, which the previous Government introduced and Members who are now on the Treasury Bench said they would keep.
Richard Graham
I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way, after some careful thought. In answer to his question, in my constituency the biggest difficulty with the future jobs fund was that, first, the placements were not real jobs but national service, because they were from the Government or charities; and, secondly, they had no future. They did not, therefore, meet even the definition of their own title: future jobs fund.
The hon. Gentleman has heard about the situation in South Derbyshire. The situation in Gloucestershire is that the number of apprenticeships has risen massively over the past three years and has continued to go up by 20% over the past year, and that youth unemployment has fallen by 150 every month for the past three months. It is not perfect, but things are getting better.
Bill Esterson
I cannot decide which of those 14 questions to answer, but as a former banker the hon. Gentleman is in a good position to comment on the financial crisis, which was caused by some of his former colleagues. What he says gives no comfort. He mentions national service, and I went back to the ’80s and ’90s, but he has gone back far further than that, to something that really did not solve any problems for young people.
Richard Graham
I shall be very brief, I promise. I have a specific suggestion for the hon. Gentleman—in two questions. First, how many jobs fairs has he organised in his constituency? Secondly, how many apprenticeships have been started in his constituency?
Bill Esterson
I speak to people in my constituency all the time, and they tell me just how hard it is to find jobs. I have employed somebody who was on the future jobs fund, and they have been extremely successful, but people who have been out of work for more than six months, whether they have left school, college or graduated from university, find it almost impossible to get jobs.
The reality is that, in this situation, just as in previous decades under previous Conservative Governments, employers are already turning to people who have just left school or college or just graduated; they are not looking at people who have been out of work for a long period. The depressing reality is that we will see another generation of young people consigned to the scrapheap unless this Government take the action that the Labour party proposes in repeating the bankers’ bonus tax.
Changes to the Budget
Richard Graham Excerpts(12 years, 5 months ago)
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Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
Most of my constituents want their Government, regardless of political hue, to be a Government who listen and appreciate their views. In this case, the changes made by my hon. Friend and the Treasury team have hugely benefited listed places of worship, which are an important part of our regeneration campaign, and an important local company, Janes Pantry, which makes pasties. They have also been much appreciated by all of us who donate to charities. We cannot have it both ways: we cannot have a Government who listen and then criticise them when they do. I am grateful to the Government.
Jobs and Growth
Richard Graham Excerpts(12 years, 6 months ago)
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Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
Today’s criticisms seem to be based on a familiar litany of three core ingredients: first, that the Queen’s Speech should have been the length of a speech by Fidel Castro at his peak; secondly, that it should have launched lots of new initiatives; and thirdly, that the Labour years represented a paradise lost. We have heard many of those points made today, and I commend to the Opposition the damning obituary given by the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) in one of his earlier books. He wrote that a day without a new initiative was a day wasted for new Labour. We do not need lots of new initiatives day after day; we need a series of cool, strategic policies that are well implemented.
All of us and our constituents have to win our jobs. Last year, I encouraged EDF energy, whose operational headquarters are in my constituency, to create 10 new apprenticeships there. One of them was won by an 18-year-old who came from Sheffield to Gloucester. He was interviewed, he moved down, he left his comfort zone and went for it, and now he is thriving in one of the most successful companies in our country. What he did is a great example to all our young people, not only in Gloucester but elsewhere in the country. We should learn from his determination to go and win a job.
In our city there are many new apprenticeship opportunities. In 2010-11, businesses in our city created 1,050 new apprenticeships. For the first half of 2011-12, we are up 20% and on target to create 2,200 new apprenticeship starts over the whole year. I visit two companies a week to see what the opportunities are, to encourage them to create new apprenticeships and to see whether those who have never done so are taking advantage of the Government scheme incentivising small companies with £1,500. I do a jobs fair every three months, on average, and I try to link our youth groups to trainers and the opportunities they can access with companies.
All of us can do our bit in our constituencies to help the policies along. I want to discuss the core policies on which we should be focusing. How many businesses have had loans from the national loan guarantee scheme, which is 80% guaranteed by the Government? Have they applied for this source of capital, which could help them to expand? How many of them have signed up to the youth contract and are offering Work programme work experience to our young people coming out of schools and colleges? How many of our manufacturers have applied to the regional growth fund manufacturing fund, which is available to them? Under the previous Government, manufacturing’s share of GDP was halved while benefits doubled, but in my constituency manufacturing is still 20% of our output. We have lots of good, thriving, small and medium-sized engineering companies, but they need help to access capital, and I need to help them to access the opportunities the Government have made available.
Today’s youth have the skills—or lack of them—that they gained predominantly under the previous Government. One secondary school in my constituency had the second-worst GCSE results in the country. Today, under the new Gloucester academy, those results have improved from 11% to 33% and, this year, to 40% of pupils achieving target grades. This type of long-term planning for improved opportunities will provide the young in my constituency with better opportunities and jobs in the future.
Finance (No. 4) Bill
Richard Graham Excerpts(12 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Gauke
The number affected is very clear. We have published it in the tax information impact note. It is 4.4 million people, as we have made clear throughout. But as I say, nobody loses out in cash terms, and the increase in the personal allowance is the largest increase ever.
Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
We heard from the Opposition some extraordinary statements which included the phrase “levelling down”. Will my hon. Friend confirm for the benefit of all Members of the House that the changes made to the tax-free element of income affect 24 million workers and take another 850,000 workers out of income tax altogether? That is called levelling up, not levelling down.
Mr Gauke
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. What we are seeing, and what we have seen over the past few years while this Government have been in office, are rapid increases in the personal allowance. The main personal allowance is rapidly catching up with the age-related allowance, which gives us this opportunity to make the simplification, as we are doing.
Those who are affected by the withdrawal of age-related allowances will still see the total amount of deductions that they pay reduce significantly compared to those under the age of 65, because we are retaining the exemption from national insurance contributions for those of state pension age. So, for example, even under the freeze, a 69-year-old with an income of £18,000 in 2013-14 will pay less than half as much in tax and national insurance contributions as someone aged 30 earning the same amount.
Mr Gauke
The Rooker-Wise amendment related to tax thresholds. As for indexation, we are using the higher of earnings or inflation or 2.5%. The plans we inherited were just earnings. That is an important point.
Despite difficult economic conditions, the Government continue to protect benefits for pensioners, including winter fuel payments, free bus passes and free prescriptions, to name but a few. Many pensioners are also benefiting from the Government’s decision to make funding available to local authorities to freeze council tax, and we also have the Warm Homes discount. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has submitted evidence to the Treasury Committee showing that pensioners are the group least affected by the tax and benefit changes implemented by the Government. It has given evidence that pensioners have benefited the most from the distributional impact of tax and benefit changes for some years. I assure the House that the Government are supporting, and will continue to support, pensioners.
Richard Graham
My hon. Friend raises some valid points about how much the Government have done for pensioners throughout the country, referring to all those crucial changes, such as the triple lock, the link back to earnings, and the retention of all the benefits that pensioners have. My constituents remember the sharp contrast between the rise in the basic state pension of 10% since the Government took office and the 75p offer from the previous Government, which, with collective amnesia, they seem to have entirely forgotten.
Mr Gauke
My hon. Friend is right to remind the Committee of that.
We must ask ourselves whether pensioners are disproportionately affected by Government policies. The answer is clearly no. The evidence is very clear on that. After the reforms, does the tax system treat pensioners unfairly? No. By definition, having one personal allowance across the board, regardless of age, is not unfair on pensioners. Is there a strong, principled case for different personal allowances based on age? We have not heard that case made today, other than the fact that Winston Churchill thought it was a good idea in 1925. The official Opposition’s policy is to tell everyone under 65 that they should have a lower personal allowance than those over 65.
Clause 4 supports the Government’s long-term aim of simplifying the tax system by creating a single personal allowance. It removes the complicated tapering system, making personal allowances easier to understand. In the longer term we will have a single, generous personal allowance for everyone while ensuring that no one is a cash loser. I ask the hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) to withdraw the amendment.
Finance (No. 4) Bill
Richard Graham Excerpts(12 years, 7 months ago)
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Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the churches and the cathedrals across the land play a vital role in regeneration, growing the economy and tourism, and contribute to our community in a number of different ways, which makes it essential that the Treasury looks on VAT for alterations with great compassion?
Nicholas Soames
They do all those things, but they are also places that represent the spirit of England down the centuries. To trifle with them in this way is really not a sensible thing to do, either for the nation at the moment or for the future.
I beg the Treasury Minister to consider whether it would not be worth while laying this measure aside and considering how better it might be to come up with a different scheme. As the right hon. Member for Exeter said, the listed places of worship grant scheme could not possibly compensate for the kind of money involved in imposing a 20% VAT rate on alterations. I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to view this issue with great care, to pay attention and to understand the feelings in this House and elsewhere in the country among people who give of themselves to keep such places going. They mind very much indeed, and their views should be heard and considered.