Finance (No. 2) Bill

Rob Marris Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 25th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Rob Marris (Wolverhampton South West) (Lab)]

During the coalition Government, fiscal policy was unnecessarily tight and our constituents paid the price. After seven years, we have moved to a position where, despite the Prime Minister in her election campaign saying that taxes will be lower under a Conservative Government—she has not actually said lower than what—this year, on projections which of course may or may not come to pass, taxation as a percentage of national income is likely to be at its highest ever level in peacetime. That is not exactly a low-tax Government.

For the Government to try to pretend that they are a low-tax Government is unfortunate during a general election. It also leads to an unfortunate trend on both sides of the House to talk about taxation as if it were an evil in and of itself. Taxation pays for public services, which all our constituents enjoy. I have no problem with taxation that is fair and sustainable—the Minister talked about that—and if we clamp down on tax avoidance. I only wish that the outgoing Government and the incoming Government, whoever they are, were more forceful on the public register of beneficial ownership of offshore-held accounts and funds, particularly since about half the amount around the world, as far as we can tell, is held in British overseas territories. The UK therefore has a huge role to play. I salute the role the Conservative Government have thus far played, but there is further to go. I hope that an incoming Labour Government on 9 June will take it a lot further.

I have done seven or eight Finance Bills in my time in this House. As some right hon. and hon. Members know, this will be my final speech to the House, as I am retiring at the general election. I will be putting my feet up in the garden and watching the rest of you work. One has to try, as the right hon. Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie) always tried—he has rightly been praised in this debate—to be realistic about what is going on. What is going on is that, under the coalition Government and the Conservative Government of the past two years, inequality of income has fallen—that is true on the Gini coefficient—and unemployment has fallen fantastically. In round terms, employment is up by 2.75 million. That is a fantastic achievement. About one in five of those new jobs is a zero-hours contract and not all zero-hours contracts are decried by those who have them. The proportion of workers who are working part time has hardly changed in seven years. There will be some who are working part time who would prefer to work full time, but many of those who are working part time, including within that 2.75 million, choose to do so and they should have the flexibility to do so.

The achievement on falling unemployment has, however, been bought on a sea of debt. The national debt in the past seven years has gone up by almost 70%. That is an enormous amount in peace time in seven years. The deficit, I have to say to this outgoing Government, is a bit like Gordon Brown’s golden rule—another can that kept getting kicked down the road—that Government borrowing should, on the economic cycle, be balanced. Gordon Brown, as Chancellor and Prime Minister, kept redefining what the economic cycle was to try to make his figures work out.

With this Government and the previous Government, the annual deficit, which is still enormous, is always going to be sorted out in five years’ time. I am not sure how many of my constituents believe that any more, particularly in a year when, I think I am right in saying, the Government of Greece, through measures that every Labour Member and many Government Member would find far too painful, socially disruptive and unacceptable—measures forced on them by the troika and the International Monetary Fund—are due to record a surplus on their current account.

Here we are, in the wealthy United Kingdom, with a Government who are saying, as did their predecessor Government over the preceding five years, “We want to get the deficit down, and we will get it down in five years”—it is always mañana, always another five years—but who, on that measure, are doing far, far worse than the Government of Greece. It is an indictment of seven years of Conservative-led Government. My constituents have had the pain but not the gain. Inequality of wealth, in contradistinction to inequality of income, has increased very markedly in the past seven years. Not only do I find that distasteful as a socialist; as a citizen of the UK, I find it worrying, because if a society becomes too unequal, it carries a severe risk of social fracture.

We see that in the housing market. On current trends, many people will never have affordable housing. Those in the next generation who have it often have it because their parents or grandparents did as well and they have inherited a deposit or house from earlier generations in their family who owned property. That trend will lock in inequality into our society. Both sides of the House profess to decry and wish to address such inequality, but it will be locked in through the housing market because in the past 10 years, in particular, we have not built or created nearly enough housing units in the UK. It will have huge social implications when that trend creates rigid inequality that cannot be overcome, regardless of what we do on schooling, because it is locked in. Does someone inherit or not inherit a down payment on a house? That is very sad for a society in which average earnings—average incomes have risen because pensioner incomes have risen thanks to the triple lock—are still below what they were nine years ago before the crash.

That is not all the fault of the Government, who have taken some good steps, but they have not gone far enough on what they now call the national living wage. They are converts—the Conservative party opposed the minimum wage on principle when we introduced the legislation in 1998—and with the zeal of converts, they have gone a lot further than I and many Labour Members expected in terms of a statutory minimum wage and national living wage, but they still have not gone far enough. That is bad for social cohesion and poverty in this country and bad for economic growth, because in a capitalist society, one way to drive productivity is through higher wages and a substitution of capital for labour. When we substitute capital for labour, very often—not in every case, but overall and very often—we get higher productivity.

We need to do more. The Government have taken some steps, but we on the Labour Benches do not think they have gone nearly far enough, on productivity as it relates to technical training and upskilling the workforce. The Conservatives have come late to that party. We now have the target of 3 million apprentices, which might or might not be met, but if it is met, one fears it will be through redefining as “apprenticeships” courses and training schemes that many of us would not regard as such, to make the figures work—that is always a danger with targets. It is laudable, however, that the Government want to take policies from Labour and increase training, particularly technical training, in our economy, and the Bill will help in that regard.

Over the past seven years—this is not addressed in the Bill—infrastructure spending has been insufficient, but we have also had, and are having, inappropriate infrastructure spending. Unless there is a change of course, as I hope there will be, we will be spending about £60 billion or more on the HS2 railway line, which is a very bad allocation of capital for transport spending. We are also on course to spend—indirect spending through much higher electricity prices, not direct spending by the Government—upwards of £18 billion on the Hinkley Point C nuclear reactor, which is to be built by a bankrupt French company, EDF, which is only still going because it is being bailed out by its state owners, the French Government, and using a design that has never worked anywhere in the world. It is being tried in Finland and Normandy, but those projects are years overdue and massively over-budget, yet it is part of the Government’s approach to infrastructure spending. We on the Labour Benches recognise that the Government have again started to borrow some of our policies, such as the possible cap on domestic energy prices, but they have not gone far enough on infrastructure spending and have lost their way on some of these big projects.

The final issue, mentioned by the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman), is Brexit, which looms over us all and all our constituents but, surprisingly, not over the Bill. Before the referendum last summer, the Treasury was keen to put out projections of what its officials thought would be the consequences of a Brexit vote. It was an entirely appropriate use of its resources by a Government whose official policy was to support the United Kingdom remaining in the EU. We had all those projections, but since 23 June things have gone quiet. I appreciate that the UK, in round terms, is still 100 weeks away from leaving the EU, which makes it more difficult to come up with projections of what is likely to happen with our economy—partly because we do not know what the Brexit package will be—but there are some signs of concern in the markets about Brexit that I do not think are adequately reflected in the financial measures proposed by the outgoing Government, including the measures in the Bill. If the Government are re-elected—in my view, that would be unfortunate—they will have to get their act together and be a bit more public about where they see the economy going with Brexit.

As I said, I appreciate that that cannot easily be done given that we do not know what the final package will look like or whether it will be a hard Brexit with no package at all, but to reassure the markets and—just as importantly—our constituents, whichever side of referendum they might have been on, the Government of the day, from 9 June, will have to be rather more open about the direction of travel and what they are doing to be proactive, rather than reactive, to the process of Brexit and its effect on the economy. That will be the case whatever the Government’s colour, because without that greater clarity the markets will be more concerned and more spooked, and our constituents will be more concerned and more worried, than they need to be. Of course nobody has a crystal ball, but it would help us all to have a few more projections than we hitherto have had.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.