South Worcestershire Development Plan

Debate between Robin Walker and Stephen Williams

Wednesday 20th November 2013 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Williams]

I will press on for just a moment.

A balance must be struck between applying a fixed methodology and the need to give flexibility to adjust for local circumstances. One methodology is unlikely to suit all circumstances. We favour local flexibility, underpinned by robust evidence of local circumstances.

My hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire mentioned C2 accommodation and extra care homes in particular. The planning Minister is certainly aware of that issue. He fully supports the need to ensure that housing for elderly people is properly planned and provided. My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester said that he too wants to see that in his area.

[Mr Robin Walker]

In Worcester, we have a lot of extra care planned. Does the Minister agree, in principle, that where extra care enables people to vacate homes for families, it can be valuable in dealing with the overall housing shortage as well as the housing shortage for elderly people?

[Stephen Williams]

I agree with my hon. Friend, and would extrapolate from that across the Government’s welfare reform policies. One planning decision certainly can have the beneficial effects elsewhere that we are trying to achieve.

The planning Minister is considering whether clarity can be afforded on extra care housing and housing supply in forthcoming planning guidance. The message to my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire is that there are revisions and new guidance in the pipeline. Perhaps the planning Minister will write to her with a timetable on when the guidance will be issued.

The thrust of what my hon. Friend was saying concerned the time taken to put the South Worcestershire development plan in place. Clearly, we all want plans to be put in place as quickly as possible. However, the length of time taken at an examination depends on many factors, including the complexity of the issues and the level of objection. It is quicker in the long run for the inspector to give the council an opportunity to revisit evidence. The alternative is withdrawal from examination, which will leave councils without a plan for a longer period.

My hon. Friend asked some questions about what weight should be given to emerging plans. I cannot comment on the individual cases and areas she mentioned, but I can say that Government policy sets out the fact that plans become more robust as they evolve through the plan-making process. Decision makers, whether they are councils or inspectors, can consider whether they should give weight to emerging policies in local plans. That weight will increase as the plan evolves.

We need to strike the right balance. We cannot have a situation where development decisions are put on hold whenever a plan is in preparation. It would not be sensible to have some form of moratorium on development during that period. It would not be advisable to give draft plans the same weight as an adopted plan. Applying such weight to a draft plan would allow councils to postpone examination, perhaps indefinitely, leaving uncertainty for all concerned. Our draft planning guidance sets out what we think is an appropriate way forward. It establishes the exceptional circumstances under which applications should be considered, but we need to consider carefully the comments made on the draft guidance before reaching a final view.

My hon. Friend mentioned neighbourhood planning, and I am glad that she said that she loves neighbourhood planning. Before I became a Minister in this Department, I was involved with the preparation of the Old Market neighbourhood plan in my constituency of Bristol West—even writing its foreword. I share her enthusiasm for neighbourhood planning, a major reform introduced by the coalition Government in the Localism Act 2011. There is a growing momentum behind neighbourhood plans. I think there are more than 700 plans at the beginning of their journey. At the moment, four have gone all the way to the end—to a referendum.

I asked one of my officials in the Department to show me the voting figures in those referendums. Interestingly, even when the referendum was coterminous—on the same day—with a local government election, the turnout in the referendums was higher than in the election of a councillor for the same area. That shows the enthusiasm of local people in engaging with the process. That is what the Government are all about in this area: trying to grow organic, grass-roots activity to get people involved in shaping their own community.

Finance (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Robin Walker and Stephen Williams

Thursday 18th April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Walker]

I take the hon. Gentleman’s point. I had thought that his party was in favour of progressive taxation. Certainly, I believe that raising the income tax threshold and taking many people out of tax is one of the coalition Government’s great achievements. It was a Liberal Democrat policy at the general election, and on this occasion I will admit that they had an excellent idea.

The coalition Government are right to recognise that it is vital to make work pay and that that cannot be done through welfare reforms alone. By also ensuring that people can keep more of the money they earn, we will stimulate the economy, reward work and alter the balance between dependency and opportunity.

I am delighted that Ministers have been able to bring forward planned changes to the income tax threshold by a year so that workers at the lower end of the wage spectrum will not have to wait until 2015 to pay less tax. As a result of the changes announced in the Budget, more than 34,000 people in Worcester will receive a tax cut and 3,370 people who would have been paying income tax in 2010 will pay none at all. That will not only reward those people, but directly stimulate our local economy—we have heard from Labour Members about the importance of people having money in their pockets to spend in the shops. In four years, the threshold at which people have to pay tax will have been raised by 50%, which is good news for millions of part-time workers who have been taken out of the tax system altogether and full-time workers on average earnings who benefit from a reduced burden of income tax.

The Opposition have downplayed those changes and focused on changes to tax credits to argue that some working families will be worse off. In doing so, they show a profound misunderstanding of the pride people take in the money they earn and their desire to support themselves. It is far better for the individual and their family to earn their money, keep the fruits of their labour and be able to spend it as they see fit than for it to be taken away and for the individual to be dependent on the faceless benignity of an all-knowing state that might choose to hand a proportion of it back—might—but that, if Labour ever gets control of the Treasury again, might find itself without the means to do so.

To listen to some of the speeches we have heard from the Opposition over the past few weeks, one might be forgiven for believing that the tax credits system, as it currently stands, was a vital part of Attlee’s welfare state and a bastion of the post-war consensus; it is not and it was not. In its current form, it is the creation not of a Beveridge or a Bevan, but of the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), who so rarely graces the House with his presence. I am glad that that complex system, which takes money away from working people to feed it through the Government sausage machine and re-allocate some of it, is to be rolled into universal credit and reformed to ensure that work will always pay.

It is far better to remove the tax from thousands of hard-working people in my constituency, and millions across the country, so that they can keep the money they have earned for their needs, their homes and their families. If we are to support families, it is far better, as the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) has argued, to use public money to invest in early intervention than to use it to prop up a complex system of credits that fails properly to support work and has always failed to reach millions of the people who, in theory, are eligible for it.

The fact that the Government are increasing the tax threshold shows that we are rewarding work at the same time as simplifying the tax system. The fact that we have been able to bring forward those changes shows that there is a sense of urgency about delivering an unalloyed public benefit, which many Labour Members have supported today.

I would argue that the same sense of urgency should be brought to the issue of child care support for working families. The Prime Minister set out exciting policies on that before the Budget but my constituents are being asked to wait until 2015 for the support. I have heard from many constituents who are delighted to hear that it will be available through the tax system but are then devastated to realise that by the time it is implemented, their children will have grown out of the eligibility criteria.

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing now. I urge the bright and brilliant men and women of the Treasury to bend their backs to the task of bringing those valuable initiatives forward in the shortest possible time. While they are at it, I urge them to consider a proper transferable married person’s tax allowance to support the family.

I welcome many initiatives in the Budget and I hope that the Chair will not rule me out of order if I touch briefly on a few of the others that will make a real difference to people in Worcester. Freezing once again the duty on fuel is more than welcome and much appreciated. Removing the much loathed beer duty escalator will raise a toast in many of Worcester’s pubs. The employment allowance will help more small businesses to create vitally needed jobs.

Returning to my opening remarks and the matter under consideration, I make one suggestion for the future, and I sincerely hope that Treasury Ministers can take it on board. Raising the income tax threshold is and has been the right thing to do, and it remains so. It is wonderful that we have brought forward to 2014 the date at which the threshold will reach the magic number of £10,000. However, today we should open a debate about that number. The figure of £10,000 was not worked out by economists or in careful consultation with employers and workers, nor was it based on any reflection of financial reality; it was drawn up as a manifesto promise in a party conference on the eve of an election.

In my view, the Conservative party missed out by not making that promise ourselves. Today we should start to consider the level at which the threshold for income tax should be set in the future. I believe that it should be the same as the earnings of a full-time worker on the minimum wage.

[Stephen Williams]

I was hoping that my hon. Friend would make that point. He has already acknowledged the Liberal Democrat pledge on the £10,000 threshold at the last election. We have already decided that at the next general election we are going to link the income tax threshold to the national minimum wage, which is currently £12,071. If my hon. Friend is about to say that he endorses the Liberal Democrat position at the next general election, I will welcome that.

[Mr Walker]

I will certainly urge my party to adopt a similar position. Raising the threshold to £11,500 or £12,000 in future Budgets would help millions more people and provide further stimulus. That, along with other policies that my party supports, and which the Liberal Democrats do not always support, such as keeping a freeze on council tax, could make a real difference. Raising the threshold would extend the legacy of that valuable change and do even more to make work pay. I urge Ministers to consider it for the future and commend them on the difficult job that they are doing well.