Finance Bill (Third sitting)

Simon Hoare Excerpts

Tuesday 13th October 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Gauke]

I do not know if the hon. Gentleman is advocating reversal of the changes made in the previous Parliament to pensions for councillors. I would argue that there is a degree of consistency with those changes. Councillors do not perform a job in the normal sense of most people in employment, so we argued in the previous Parliament that for them to have the same pension provision as most employees would not be appropriate. It is right to have a special regime that is not the same as that applied to people in employment with regard to travel expenses, and that is why we have brought in this measure.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

Following on from the intervention by the hon. Member for Ilford North, I spent 11 years as a district councillor and several of those in cabinet. There always seemed an anomaly to me. I never joined the local government pension scheme and I always thought it was rather incorrect for councillors to be allowed to do so, because it equated their position with that of local government staff, rather than elected volunteers. The Government are to be congratulated. There were many in local government—possibly the silent majority—who welcomed that decision and had been rather embarrassed by being allowed to be members of that pension fund.

[Mr Gauke]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. It is not my purpose to reopen the debate on pensions and local councillors, however tempting that might be, but I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention.

The clause will support councillors in the vital constitutional role they perform by exempting travel expenses paid by their local authorities from liability to income tax, and I hope it will stand part of the Bill.