Building Safety

Debate between Robert Jenrick and Lyn Brown

Wednesday 10th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. We all believe in home ownership. We want to get more people on to the housing ladder, and we know that owning a home of your own is one of the most special achievements in life. But we also know that, in recent years, some of our developers—and some of our most prominent ones, too—have built homes that are to a poor standard; they have admitted it in some cases. We need to make sure that that is corrected, so that the quality of homes in this country is high and members of the public can have confidence when making that life-changing investment.

It cannot be right that buying a home affords someone less protection than buying a mobile phone or many other things we do in our daily lives. We want to see a major change in the culture of the industry, so that homeowners get the product—the brilliant, beautiful, high-quality home—that they deserve. We have set up a new homes ombudsman, which will be passed into law as part of the building safety regulator. The new regulatory regime, which is already in existence in shadow form, will be put into permanent form through the passing of the Building Safety Bill. For higher-rise buildings—those over 18 metres—that will create a very strict, world-class regulatory regime.

[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab) [V]]

I agree with everything my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire) said, with knobs on. My constituents will not be reassured by what they have heard. Loans for leaseholders still are not off the table. The Secretary of State has avoided talking about non-cladding costs, and there is still no guarantee that my constituents will not be left with large associated bills for problems they did not create. A number of institutions are profiteering from this crisis, including parts of the insurance industry and others, with eye-watering premiums. Why are we still waiting for the Secretary of State to get a grip on this crisis?

[Robert Jenrick]

I am disappointed by the tone of the hon. Lady’s remarks. She has followed this issue closely and has fought for her constituents, and I praise her and recognise her for that hard work, but this Government have done a huge amount, and I entirely reject her accusations. We have brought forward the public inquiry. We have planned and are now legislating for a new building safety regulator—a world-class regulatory regime. We have brought in people to ensure that the unsafe cladding on ACM-clad high-rise buildings is remediated, and that work has progressed a great deal over the course of the year. As I said earlier, many Labour politicians, including the Mayor of London, opposed that initially, at the height of the pandemic. We have done a great deal, but there is more to be done.

I do not know what the hon. Lady’s proposition is with respect to other materials beyond cladding. All the expert opinion says, “Focus on cladding. That is the primary risk here—that is the focus that Government should have.” I will keep following expert advice. If the Labour party’s position is that we should not follow that, and that in fact the Chancellor should write a blank cheque and say that absolutely any building safety defect on any building of any height should be paid for by the taxpayer, that is a very substantial cost, and I would be interested to know how she intends to fund that. With respect to the insurance companies, I do now expect them to step up and ensure that their premiums are proportionate and risk-based, because I think some of them have been exploiting leaseholders in a very difficult position.

Provisional Local Government Finance Settlement

Debate between Robert Jenrick and Lyn Brown

Thursday 17th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I join my hon. Friend in praising her local council, and in particular the excellent local council leader she is lucky to have, Elizabeth Campbell, whom it has been my pleasure to work with this year on many different issues.

My hon. Friend is right to say that business rates are a challenge. Of course, this year the Chancellor has provided a business rates holiday, which so many businesses on our local high streets have benefited from. It will be for him to decide whether or in what form that should continue into the next financial year, and no doubt he will bring forward further details on that next year. There will be a fundamental review of the future of business rates, and I am sure she will contribute to that in due course.

[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab) [V]]

Merry Christmas, Madam Deputy Speaker. As the Secretary of State knows full well, Newham has the highest level of homelessness in the country and the second worst level of child poverty in the country, and more than half of Newham residents are either on furlough or out of work. The crisis is getting worse. Our food banks have never known times this bad, and despite fantastic work by local charities, many of our children will be going without this Christmas. Our council has suffered drastic cuts over the past 10 years and has even been underfunded for covid impacts by about £20 million. Can he assure me that the settlement will right that wrong, and if not, will he meet me and my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) to discuss?

[Robert Jenrick]

I certainly can give the hon. Member that assurance, but equally, I would be more than happy to meet her and her right hon. Friend. She raises a number of different points. Her local council has received a great deal of money from the Government over the course of this year. It has received almost £50 million in covid-19 expenditure alone so far, in addition to the schemes I have already referred to, which will no doubt amount to many further millions of pounds. The Government have provided the council with £56 million to support 4,000 of her local businesses. She also mentions homelessness and rough sleeping, on which we have worked very closely with Newham Council—I visited a brilliant move-on accommodation site in her constituency earlier this year with the mayor—and we will be providing it with further funding next year, thanks to the £750 million that we are investing in our campaign to end rough sleeping.

Local Government Finance (England)

Debate between Robert Jenrick and Lyn Brown

Monday 24th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I am absolutely delighted to agree with my hon. Friend. Serving on a parish council is an important role in local democracy. I give my praise, along with hers, to all those who serve on parish councils—including in my own constituency, where a number of communities were flooded very seriously over the past week—for the work that they have done to support their local communities as they begin to recover from the very serious floods.

It is because those individuals and the communities they represent matter to this country that today we are backing them with the best local government funding settlement for a decade. The settlement delivers a 4.4% real-terms increase in spending power for councils—£2.9 billion extra. It has been widely welcomed by the sector. It injects significant new resources into adult and children’s social care. It places councils on a stronger financial footing from which to build. It achieves all of that while protecting people from excessive council tax rises—the kind of regressive tax increases that we saw hurting working people year after year under the last Labour Government, during whose time in office council tax doubled.

[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

I am staggered, to be honest, because I think that council tax is a regressive tax. Each adult in Newham has lost 50% of the grant that was given by the Government, in an area where more than 50% of our children live in poverty, in order to give to the Tory shires. Does the Secretary of State honestly think that is a fair settlement?

[Robert Jenrick]

If the hon. Lady is concerned about funding for local public services, she will join me and my colleagues in supporting the best local government settlement we have seen for a decade. She says that council tax is regressive, so what happened under the last Labour Government, when council tax doubled? Under this Government council tax has fallen by 6% in real terms, while we have continued to deliver important public services.

I was determined to champion local government in September’s spending review. I want to thank those who responded so constructively to the two consultations we ran at the end of last year. We can be proud of what we have achieved, and particularly of how the settlement delivers for the most vulnerable in society. It secures £1 billion of new Government funding for social care, alongside the extra £410 million that we invested last year. That is a major new injection of funding that will help local authorities to meet the undoubted rising pressures on the care system, which we all see in our communities and in our own lives.

We will also be maintaining all funding going into the improved better care fund, at the same time as the NHS contribution to the better care fund rises by 3.4% above inflation to over £4 billion, in line with the broader NHS settlement. Alongside this, I am allowing local authorities responsible for adult social care to raise council tax by an additional 2% above the core referendum principle. That is a necessary step that is specifically targeted to meet demand and ensure that vulnerable people are supported.

Value Added Tax Bill

Debate between Robert Jenrick and Lyn Brown

Friday 8th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Lyn Brown]

They are not anywhere today.

After considering these matters of history, let me touch on the question of which goods and services VAT is applied to. The choice of which goods and services we apply reduced rates to is political, not just technical. It is an example of the priorities we have as a society. We see that in some of the items that are exempt from VAT, such as sports activities because we want to encourage physical and mental health, and admission charges to museums, art exhibitions and education services because we think that that sort of thing is good for the education and mental health of our nation. There has been much discussion—I thank hon. Members in all parts of the House for this—about the imposition of VAT on sanitary products. When the rate was reduced by the last Labour Government, it was the lowest rate permissible under European legislation. On the other hand, my party unveiled plans ahead of the 2017 general election to charge VAT on private school fees. The money we raised could have been used to pay for free school meals for all primary school children—a policy that has already been implemented at local level by some really insightful Labour councils, including my own in Newham.

The current Chancellor was reportedly considering copying the idea—if newspapers are ever to be believed.

[The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (Robert Jenrick)]

No.

[Lyn Brown]

I hear that.

We are told that the Chancellor was forced into ditching the policy only because Conservative Members were up in arms. It seems quite clear, therefore, that there are political rather than technical reasons for what we choose to exempt and not to exempt from VAT.

We should also understand that fraud continues to be a serious issue for the Exchequer in relation to the collection of VAT. On Government estimates, VAT fraud currently costs the UK about half a billion pounds a year, with an extra £1.5 billion of uncollected debts and around £100 million of avoidance. VAT fraud was discussed at length during the Committee stage of the Finance Bill in October 2017, when the Government introduced a new clause to place new obligations on fulfilment houses to help tackle VAT fraud, which has worsened with the rise of online sellers who obtain goods through third-party vendors based abroad.

The Opposition believe that small businesses need more support in getting to grips with the tax if we are ever to close the VAT gap. The situation has been worsened by the Government’s disaster-struck attempts to transition to making tax digital, which have thankfully been delayed until next year to give businesses the chance to adapt.

Many of us spend a large proportion of our lives online, so it is unsurprising that more UK consumers than ever buy a larger proportion of their goods through online marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay and others. In 2016, 14.5% of UK retail sites were online—up from 2% in 2006. Just over 50% of these sales were through online marketplaces, rather than directly from the seller.

The Campaign Against VAT Fraud on eBay & Amazon in the UK—a snappy title, which was possibly created by accountants—estimated that online VAT fraud

“equates to £27 billion in lost sales revenue”

and

“additional taxes to UK businesses and the public purse in the last 3 years.”

Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has stated that it does not have data on online fraud and other losses before 2015-16.

Sadly, the slowness of HMRC in responding to growing fraud online has been criticised by the Public Accounts Committee, which first raised concerns in April 2013. It found that HMRC had only recently begun to tackle the problem seriously, despite the fact that such fraud leads to significant loss of revenue to the Exchequer. It found that HMRC, rather than trying to use its existing powers, waited until the introduction of new measures under the Finance Act 2016 before even attempting to hold online marketplaces responsible for the VAT fraudulently evaded by traders. HMRC has been too cautious in using these powers, and the Government have refused to name and shame complacent traders. To my knowledge, they have not prosecuted a single one for committing online VAT fraud.

As the UK leaves the protection of the EU VAT area, the possibility of VAT fraud will, arguably, rise. It is therefore logical that any new legislation on VAT should consider additional measures to tackle online VAT fraud. I understand from the Treasury Committee that HMRC believes there is a £3.5 billion VAT gap resulting from mistakes made by businesses when they submit their VAT returns. The overall VAT gap in 2016-17 was £11.7 billion. I am sure we can all agree that that is a high number and therefore probably requires some fairly urgent, radical action.

The Chartered Institute of Taxation has six recommendations to help address this gap. I want to focus on just one of them today, in the interests of time and sanity, which is

“resisting the temptation to introduce widespread changes that are disruptive to the majority of compliant businesses”.

Possibly, this connects to a concern about the clause we are addressing.

I am aware that there is something of a live debate on registration thresholds. There were several briefings ahead of last year’s Budget that moves were afoot to reduce the threshold and force more small businesses to register for VAT. There are, I honestly believe, arguments both in favour and against such an approach. I have actually debated this over my breakfast table with my husband, who just happens to be a small business owner. A concern about the threshold is not an argument for a particular threshold, because I think the only way to address such a concern would be to reduce the threshold to zero, which is something we certainly do not support. Conservative Members may claim that by setting the threshold too low we are disincentivising businesses. There are some who claim that the existence of health and safety legislation or, indeed, employment law is a disincentive to business—I know that to be true because I have done many Friday mornings—so we should be very careful where that argument takes us.

There is much in this Bill that I am sure the hon. Member for Christchurch would agree needs further consultation. First, I am not sure how the shift in threshold for registering taxable supplies in this Bill, from £85,000 to £104,000, has been worked out. It would be great if the hon. Gentleman, in his summing up, could let me know. It would also be useful to know how much consultation has gone into the exemptions for the use of coal, oil and gas as domestic fuel or power, because it is not clear to me that, as we seek to reduce fossil fuel emissions, the use of such fuels should be subsidised. I am sure he would agree that, again, this needs a broader consultation and consideration of how such a measure sits alongside other measures being taken, including by this Government—