Budget Resolutions

Stella Creasy Excerpts

1st reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 28th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is always interesting to follow the hon. Member for Hertsmere (Oliver Dowden), who makes a wonderful case for why this country needs not just an Opposition, but an alternative. Let us give him that alternative today. It was a privilege to attend this morning’s commendation service for my local police. I heard extraordinary stories of police constables and their bravery, but those PCs are facing an uncertain future. That is the test for this Budget. How did we get to a place where people who have tackled rapists, run into burning buildings and taken countless criminals off our streets face potential redundancy, while the Government are throwing billions of pounds into the mess that Brexit is creating?

This Budget speaks volumes not only about this Government’s priorities, but their performance. After seven years, the Chancellor boasted of “peaking” the debt, when they said that they would balance the books. Another year or more has been added to the austerity timetable. Our constituents yet again face wage stagnation. Our public services have been cut to the bone. Universal credit has been made more complicated to administer and more difficult for people to understand. The stamp duty exemption will push up prices and do nothing for the millions of people with no deposit who are renting. Personal debt is at record levels. Home ownership is at a 30-year low, yet one in 10 people now have a second home—it is all right for some, but not enough. Growth has slowed. Inflation is rising. Our teachers are buying basic supplies for their schools. Our nurses cannot afford to feed themselves.

The most terrible travesty of this Budget is that there is money to be raised. Buried away is the Government’s agreement to close the tax loophole on commercial property sales for foreign companies. I welcome that U-turn. Britain desperately needs that magic money tree. However, it is indicative of this Government’s capability that they cannot even get that right. They think that they will raise only half a billion pounds a year, when they should be raising £6 billion a year.

This debate is about productivity. I am worried about the productivity of our Ministers. I was deeply disappointed by the Government’s response to my parliamentary questions and their belief that double taxation treaties mean that the tax would be paid. They do not seem to understand that the Luxembourg treaties will override that and that many real estate companies are based in Luxembourg, so will be exempt from this very tax and from our magic money tree, as will anybody who acquires new real estate and puts it in a Luxembourg holding company before the rule comes into force.

Those are not new problems, but I put them on the record because, clearly, the Ministers with responsibility for HMRC have not even bothered to read the Paradise papers, which set out such deals in great detail. It is little wonder that this Government do not really care about evidence or data and do not want to know the real impact of their policies on the people they represent.

There is clear and explicit evidence of the link between gender equality and global competitiveness. Productivity is a massive challenge in our economy, yet this Government have absolutely no interest in understanding the impact of their policies on addressing inequality.

In the time left to me, I put the Government on notice. As a country, we cannot afford for them to ignore these matters any more, just as they have failed to get to grips with Brexit, failed to deal properly with tax loopholes and failed to pay our public sector workers properly. The Opposition refuse to let the Government’s poor performance, poor priorities and, indeed, poor people skills condemn the future of this country. They say this Budget is about being fit for the future, but they are not fit for office and it is time they left.

Finance (No. 2) Bill

Stella Creasy Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 11th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mel Stride]

I am afraid I have to dissent from that view. The simple fact is that the International Monetary Fund has identified the tax gap measure as one of the most robust measures of its kind in the world. At 6%, our gap is among the lowest in the world, and it is the lowest we have had in our history since we have been measuring the tax gap. If we had the same tax gap today as we had under the previous Labour Government, we would be out of pocket to the tune of £12.5 billion a year—enough to fund every policeman and policewoman in England and Wales.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

On the subject of tax avoidance, the Minister will know of my support for the Government’s willingness to close the tax loophole on the sales of commercial property by overseas companies. As my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame Morris) said, the Paradise papers show some of the ways in which tax is being avoided, including through holding companies in Luxembourg. When I asked the Minister about that before, he did not seem to know about the Luxembourg treaty and how it could affect this policy. What are his plans to address the problems created by the Luxembourg treaty, which could see us losing out on £5.5 billion a year of the tax collected through his changes?

[Mel Stride]

As the hon. Lady will know, a number of the measures coming out of the OECD’s base erosion and profit shifting project, which we have been in the vanguard of—including common reporting standards and access by our tax authorities to a variety of information in real time in overseas tax jurisdictions—are essential to bearing down on exactly the issues that she mentions. There are further measures in the Bill to deal with those who place their moneys in trusts, typically those coming under our non-dom reforms. By abolishing permanent non-dom status, which Labour failed to do in its 13 years in office, we have made sure that when individuals have assets that are protected while in trusts, those moneys fall due to tax in our country as soon as they are brought out of those trusts, even if people cycle them through third parties and other approaches. That means that we are securing more than £12 billion a year more for our public services than would have been the case had the tax gap remained at its peak of nearly 8%, which it reached under Labour.

The autumn Budget continued that work with a package of measures forecast to raise £4.8 billion by 2022-23, some of which are included in the Bill. It is important to note that the provisions in the Bill form part of a broader anti-avoidance and evasion agenda dating back to 2010. Since then, the Government have worked tirelessly and carefully to introduce an ambitious raft of anti-avoidance and evasion legislation. That commitment is borne out again in this Finance Bill, which implements several measures, including provisions cracking down on online VAT evasion to make online marketplaces more responsible for the unpaid VAT of their sellers; closing loopholes in the anti-avoidance legislation on offshore trusts, as I mentioned; tackling disguised remuneration schemes used by close companies; preventing companies from claiming unfair tax relief on their intellectual property; ensuring that companies are not able to claim relief for losses on the disposal of shares that do not reflect losses incurred by the wider group; closing a loophole in the double taxation relief rules for companies; and tackling waste crime by extending landfill tax to illegal waste sites. Those measures will help to raise vital revenue and ensure that individuals and corporations all pay their fair share.

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[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr Jack), because I am going to enjoy setting out for him why I believe he is mistaken in considering this Finance Bill to be the best that we can do for this country. I hope he was here to hear the remarks of my Front-Bench colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd), who set out some strong ideas about alternative ways to manage the public finances, and the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow West (Gareth Thomas), a fellow member of the Co-operative party, who set out how the Co-operative’s approach to public finances is different.

I was struck by what the hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway and several other Government Members said about their pride in how light and narrow the Bill is. Look at the country’s economic challenges; it sums up the Government perfectly that they should boast about how little they have to offer to tackle those challenges. They admit that this country has a productivity challenge—a long-overdue admission—but they have so little to offer to address it. They seem pleased to tell us that they are peaking their borrowing, rather than meeting the commitments made in 2010, when we all sat here and listened to the previous Chancellor tell us that austerity was the only way forward. Well, what a myth that has turned out to be. The Government are presiding over stagnating wages, meaning that my constituents will be lucky to see a pay rise within the next 10 years. Decades of austerity mean that we are a nation up to our eyeballs in personal debt—not by accident, but through this Government’s choices. We have not even begun to talk about the black hole of Brexit that is sucking both time and money from our Exchequer.

A light Finance Bill is not something to be proud of; it is indicative of a Government who are not serving the British public. The Government try to tell us that they are doing something about the massive housing crisis, but it is clear that their stamp duty proposals will simply push up house prices and do little for our constituents who have no savings and cannot get a deposit together to even begin to consider buying a property and paying stamp duty. The Bill will do nothing about the crisis in our private rented sector that is the cause of so much personal debt. People in our communities are now putting their mortgage or their rent on their credit cards in a desperate attempt to keep a roof above their head this Christmas.

People have the spectre of universal credit hovering over them, sucking out their time and energy as they try to make ends meet, because there is just too much month at the end of their money. We have not even begun to talk about the impact of the cuts on our public sector. My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow West ably pointed out the lack of police on our streets; we will lose 3,000 in London alone due to this Budget. Teachers are having to buy resources for their pupils. People need us to manage the public finances properly, which is what this Bill would do if it was meatier contribution to Britain’s future, but it is not.

I know what Government Members will say to Opposition Members: “Where would you find the money?”. I want to answer that question, say what this Bill could have done for the British public, and set out why the Government need to move from policy-based evidence making to evidence-based policy making by using impact assessments. These assessments are not necessarily popular, as we have seen from the Brexit Secretary, but they are absolutely the way forward when it comes to understanding what could be done for this country.

Let me turn first to one of the places where we could be saving money as a society. I know that Members on both sides of the House are worried about the private finance initiative, and all of us have seen its impact on the public finances. Governments of all colours have used private finance contracts; indeed, they continue to be used through private finance 2 schemes. We know that £1 billion of the money that should be going into our NHS will be leeched out in profits by private finance companies. That money could have built hospitals several times over, and could certainly deal with the crisis in NHS recruitment and the lack of resources in healthcare. I have called on the Government to learn the lessons of the Paradise papers and introduce a moratorium on public sector contracts going to such companies until we are clear about where their tax liabilities lie. However, I am disappointed that, yet again, Ministers have missed that opportunity.

As Ministers have pointed out, we will only get one such Bill a year in future through which to tackle how these companies operate. A small number of companies are leeching so much money out of our public services through the high costs of private finance contracts, and their high rates of returns and interest rates. Government Members can look at them as hire purchase agreements for the public sector. The Bill could have been the opportunity to set a clear red line for those companies, and to tell them that, instead of continuing to rip off our schools and our hospitals, we want them to come to the table to renegotiate contracts. The Bill could have been the opportunity to set up that moratorium, or to use the banking levy as a model for a windfall tax on such companies—a tax that could claim back the excessive profits that they are clearly making from the public sector. This is money that could have properly funded our police or gone towards ensuring that we pay our public sector workers properly, but we will all end up paying for that omission from this Bill. With the PF2 contracts coming online, it is clear that the Government have not learned the lessons about the cost of public sector borrowing that would have informed the Bill.

This Bill is being considered in the context of the Government having agreed to close the tax loophole whereby overseas-based companies sold UK commercial property without having to pay capital gains tax—what we called the magic money tree—but it has sadly become apparent since the Budget that the Government have not got to grips with the loophole. They think that they are going to raise only half a billion pounds, but it is clear, given the sums involved in commercial property sales in the UK, that we could be looking at £5 billion or £6 billion.

With this Bill, the Government could have learned the lessons of the Paradise papers, particularly as regards the loophole for companies that register properties in Luxembourg, because the Luxembourg treaties will allow those companies to avoid capital gains tax. I have repeatedly raised that with Ministers, because we know that our public sector desperately needs the £5.5 billion extra a year that properly closing the tax loophole could represent, yet Ministers seem not to care. They tell me that the Government’s policy is that

“all double taxation treaties should permit gains on the direct and indirect disposal of UK immovable property to be taxed in the UK.”

However, from their consultation document, I can see that they recognise that there is a loophole within their loophole. Paragraph 4.36 admits that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs understands that there is a problem if the properties are registered in Luxembourg. The Bill could have been the opportunity to address that and to state, “When we say we are going to close a tax loophole, we close it properly.” We know that £5.5 billion could make such a difference—but it will not. That is indicative of a Government who do not seem to do their homework.

That brings me on to why impact assessments matter so much, and why so many Members from Labour and other parties have been speaking about their importance, particularly when it comes to gender. One of the Minister’s colleagues actually suggested to me that the debate about gender impact assessments was a bit like the debate around foxhunting. Perhaps he confused fair game with the fairer sex; I am not quite sure. As a colloquialism, we have been calling this the lady data campaign, because it is about what happens when we start to identify the impact of policies on particular people.

There will be some, particularly on social media, who will roll their eyes at yet another one of those feminists getting up to bang on about women and all the special treatment they want. Let me be very clear: the point about lady data is a cold, hard economic argument. Bridging the UK gender pay gap has the potential to create an extra £150 billion a year in GDP by 2025, which is a 5% to 8% increase in GDP for all our regions. This should be a no-brainer for all concerned, but to be able to do that, we need better to understand where inequality lies in our society, and where individual policies help or hinder us in tackling it.

[Luke Graham (Ochil and South Perthshire) (Con)]

I support any measure to try to close the gap in gender equality of income. Does the hon. Lady welcome the moves made by this Government to introduce gender pay gap reporting, and to make it a legal obligation for all companies with more than 250 employees by April 2018?

[Stella Creasy]

I am so glad a new Member has raised one of the legacies of having an amazing feminist MP like my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) in Government, fighting for gender pay gap reporting in the Equality Act 2010. I am glad to see the hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Luke Graham) nodding, because it is wonderful to see the feminist soul of so many Government Members coming through. I hope we can tempt them to support these measures.

The reality is that if the Government do not measure something, they cannot be held to account on what they are doing about it. That is the challenge we have. Good data keeps Governments honest and on track. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not suggesting that inequality in British society is about one single issue, or indeed about one single group. It is about understanding where inequality lies and where individual and collective policies will make a difference. That is why it matters. We do not live in an equal society, so particular policy measures, such as those that this Finance Bill introduces, will have a differential impact.

We might have the Equal Pay Act 1970 and the Equality Act, but equal pay is stagnating in Britain. Indeed, the figures for the past couple of years suggest that the gap is widening, not narrowing—crucially, among not just older women, but younger women. Among black and ethnic minority women, the gap is 26% for Pakistani and Bangladeshi women, and 24% for black African women. Women are twice as likely as men to receive the lowest pay. Only 36% of older women receive the full state pension. Therefore any finance measure that affects the tax and benefits situation in our country will have a differential impact.

Thankfully, organisations such as the Women’s Budget Group, the Fawcett Society, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Runnymede Trust have done what this Government have failed to do and started to identify the impact, so that we can understand just what the consequences are. Their research does not make happy reading for anybody who recognises that equality is one of the biggest economic motors we could have, and one of the best ways we could address the productivity gap in our society. Their figures show that this Government’s Budget will mean that women lose 10 times as much as they gain, with black and ethnic minority women losing 12 times as much.

What does that mean in practice? Forty-three per cent. of people do not earn enough to reach the tax threshold as it is—66% of them are women, and 41% of them have dependent children. When the Government raise the higher rate threshold, 73% of the beneficiaries are men. When we change corporation tax, we have to recognise that we do it in an environment in which shareholders, business owners and managers are disproportionately men. Men benefit more.

This is not about being a victim. This is not about pleading for special treatment. This is about understanding what measures the Government are introducing and how they are making it harder for us to unlock the potential of 51% of our society. It is about having a better economy and a better society, because there is a link between diversity and prosperity.

I am tired of people who eye-roll at this, and of Government Members who see this as being like foxhunting. Frankly, even if they do not get the strong economic or social case for this, they are legally required to do it. The public sector equality duty was introduced in 2011, and it means that the Government have to not just manage these things but do something about them. That includes being able to track the difference they are making, yet this Government have still failed to do any equality impact assessment, let alone a cumulative one. The only equality impact assessments that are published are in the tax information and impact notes, which have a sentence or two buried away in line 324b saying that most of the Government’s policies have little impact at all, or denying any impact. There has certainly been no impact assessment on things like alcohol excise duty rates or fuel duty giveaways—two policies that, again, have a differential impact on men and women.

We have not even begun to talk about the public sector pay cap, and Members on both sides of the House recognise that, when two thirds of our public sector workforce are women, a failure to pay the public sector properly clearly pushes more women into poverty. We can argue about the underlying inequalities that might cause the environment in which these policies operate, and we can argue about the policies’ impact, but we cannot let this Government get away either with saying that they cannot do these calculations when others such as the IFS have, or with arguing that any inequality caused by policies in a Finance Bill will be offset by spending in another Bill. It simply does not make sense. If they cannot measure it, how can they decide it is being offset by something else? That is why it is time that we had this data. [Interruption.]

I understand that the Government Whip, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart), would like me to sit down. I am sorry to disappoint him, but 51% of this population are being held back by a Government who do not even know what damage they are doing, and 100% of us deserve better. The way we do that is by holding this Government to account on the public sector equality duty, which says that the Government have a legal duty before making any decisions. It is not enough to consider the impact on equality afterwards. The duty is ongoing, and it is about not just a buried report once in a while, but consistent impact assessments. The duty also says it cannot be delegated—that Ministers cannot leave it to somebody else to figure out what damage they are doing. It also says that, when a problem has been identified, the Government have to act, and that a lack of resources—having just set out where the Government can get some resources, I do not accept there is a lack of them—is not an excuse.

These are examples of how this Budget and this Finance Bill are failing this country. We are in denial of some of the major challenges we face on productivity. This is about having the information so that we can understand how we can make better choices, and about how we have a Government who seem unconcerned that they are breaching the public sector equality duty. That is indicative of a wider problem facing the British public. They have a Government who, right now, have run out of ideas, who are lacking in leadership and who are struggling under the weight of Brexit, but we all know who is going to pay. It is the men and women in our communities who are struggling with debt—the men and women in households who are being disproportionately hit by Government policy.

Inequality is expensive for us all. All of Britain is held back when talent is held back because it is living in poverty. I hope I have shown that there is money to be found and data to be collected if there is a political will. The Brexit Secretary says that he does not have to be very clever to do his job, but I believe the British public do need competency. If they cannot get it from the Government Benches, they can certainly find it on the Labour Benches.

Finance (No. 2) Bill

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 19th December 2017 Commons Chamber

I am immensely proud of Labour’s manifesto commitment to gender audit all our policies and legislate for their impact on women before their implementation. It is shameful that we have to keep challenging the Government to do their legal duty and ensure that their policies are not disproportionately impacting one particular group. There is virtually no one on the Tory Benches at the moment—and not one woman—so I have to question whether the Government are serious about equality. But if they are serious about equality, and economic equality in particular, they must take action. The simplest way for them to do that would be to support new clauses 6 and 7.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I rise to make my case to the five Conservative MPs on the Government Benches today. Inequality is an incredibly expensive business for everyone. I am pleased to see five fellow feminists sitting among the many of us on these Benches—

[Mel Stride]

Eight.

[Stella Creasy]

Goodness! The Minister says eight, but I can assure him that we have a good many more than eight feminists in total on this side of the House if he would ever like to test us. Our policies and our manifesto certainly speak to that fact.

The case that I want to make to the five men on the Tory Benches, given that gender inequality and equality impact assessments can sometimes be seen as special-interest issues, is that everything we are doing today is in everyone’s interest. Inequality costs us all dear. It holds everybody back in our society. Indeed, feminism is not about women; it is about the fact that power is unequally balanced in society so that 51% of those in our communities miss out on achieving their potential. That is what is behind new clauses 6 and 7. Good data help to drive good decisions. It is also good for Governments to follow their own policies. We have a public sector equality duty in this country, but the fact that the Government are not following it themselves makes it much harder for them to force other people to do so. Ultimately, we are here today to make the case that Britain will be better when we know more about the conditions that we face and about what impact policies are having.

Let me start with that cold, hard economic argument, because I am sure that the Minister, who once proclaimed his feminist credentials, already knows this, but I am not sure whether it has yet been put on the record. Bridging the gender gap would generate £150 billion in GDP by 2025. The economy has been struggling with a productivity problem for decades, and there is nothing stronger or faster that we could do to address that than to ensure that everybody in our society is able to realise their potential, but we should do more to help women in particular. We need to tackle the barriers and the discrimination they face that means they do not have that level playing field. Indeed, studies show the strong correlation between diversity and economic growth, so those who think that this is special pleading do not understand the maths behind the case Labour is making today. I would argue that the reason why they do not understand the maths is that we do not do the calculations, which is why it is so important to get the data.

Data is a good thing. It leads to difficult conversations. It makes us ask why, after the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970, we still do not have equal pay in this country. I was born after that Act came into effect, but if the current policy continues, I will be dead before we have parity. That harms us all, because the 14% pay gap between men and women is not stagnating, but growing. There will be women in our constituencies who are missing out on equal pay because we are not acting as a country. Having this kind of data helps us to ask why that is and whether Government policy is helping to minimise the gap or exacerbate it.

This is not just about gender. The gap is much worse for women from ethic minority communities. The pay gap is 26% for Pakistani and Bangladeshi women and 24% for black African women. This is also not just about ethnicity, because the same applies for disability and age. Only 36% of women in the constituencies of the Conservative male Members here will be getting their full state pension. When those women come to see those Members about the Women Against State Pension Inequality Campaign, they are coming because they have been living with poverty for decades. They are asking for help to make things right, because they do not want to be dependent on the state. They want a level playing field, but historical inequality in our society has held them back, and it is holding us back now. Having the data helps us to understand where that is happening and why. It would show us whether Government policies—individual Budgets—are going to make it easier to tackle that inequality, so that fewer women will come to constituency surgeries asking for a referral to a food bank, or whether they will make things worse.

If the Government want to tackle inequality, they need to know that data also tells us that this Budget, and the Budgets of previous years, are causing more problems. I do not doubt the sincerity of the five Conservative Members here or that they do want to tackle inequality in our society, but when I look at this Budget I do doubt whether they are going to be able to do that. This Budget will hit women 10 times as hard as it will hit men—13 times for women from an ethnic minority background. Going back to the equal pay issue, 43% of people in society do not earn enough to benefit from raising the personal income tax threshold, and 66% are women. We have unequal pay in our society, so 73% of the people who will benefit from changing the higher rate threshold will be male. Having the data and then looking at what is being done with tax and benefit policies will help us to understand just how much further this Budget is moving the goalposts for women and ethnic minorities. This applies to other policies, too. Corporation tax changes disproportionately benefit men, because we still do not have parity in the boardroom, in enterprise or in the number of women shareholders.

The lack of data also leads to bad decision making. As my colleagues have already set out, this Government have not done any equality impact assessments to understand just how far the goalposts are moving in getting to this House’s shared aim of an equal society. Tax information and information notes dismiss the issue and do not help Ministers to make good decisions. I am sure that the Minister, with his feminist soul, wants to make good decisions, but those assessments claim that there is little or no impact. Indeed, we do not even have TINs for all the policies that we know have a differential impact such as excise duty rates or fuel duty giveaways, because we live in an unequal society.

The lack of data also means that Ministers simply cannot come to the Dispatch Box and tell us that any concerns we may have about the differential impact of individual tax and benefit changes can be offset by the impact of other policies. If we do not know the impact of one policy, how can it be said that that can be offset by another? Even if we are concerned that men have received a windfall from Budgets for several years, it is simply not good enough for Ministers to try to tell us that women are being compensated through public services, because they cannot provide the analysis to show us that either case is true. Indeed, when we look at the impact of public service cuts—surprise, surprise—women, ethnic minorities and the disabled tend to be disproportionately hit again.

As I said at the start, it is also a matter of following our own laws. The public sector equality duty came into force in this country in 2011. It is a legal requirement, and it has driven some of these difficult conversations, whether in the Bank of England or in the BBC. It helps us to challenge everyone to do more to unlock the potential of every member of our society by reducing barriers and breaking down the discrimination that means, 40-plus years on, we still do not have equal pay.

If the Government themselves are not upholding their duties, what hope do we have in asking other organisations to do so? It is important to recognise that the legal duty is not passive. It is a duty not just to manage inequality but to do something about it. It is a duty to know the numbers before we make a decision so that we do not make things worse, as this Budget clearly does, and it is an ongoing duty that cannot be delegated. Ministers cannot leave it to a civil servant in the back office; they have to take direct responsibility. Crucially, it is a duty that, once a problem has been identified, the Government have to act, and not having the resources is no excuse for not acting.

The arguments Ministers are making against calculating the figures are not just about the practicalities, but they are completely surmountable. As the Women’s Budget Group, the Fawcett Society and the Institute for Fiscal Studies have shown, it is perfectly possible to make these calculations, and it is worth doing because it would help the Government to make better decisions. That it is possible to do it both for individuals and for households is important because, as my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) said, single parents, who tend to be women, are disproportionately hit by these changes. Even if the Minister were to quibble about calculating the figures across households, we could certainly see the impact we are having on some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

The reason why we have called it “lady data” is to try to help Ministers understand what they are missing and why it matters, but in truth this is everyone’s data. Getting this right and having that information would help us to make better decisions and would help us to understand why it will take us 100 years from today to have parity, so that women who are still struggling with unequal pay—including women in the communities of the Members to whom I have referred—can have some confidence that they may still live to see that wonderful day when everyone in this society is treated equally and so that people from ethnic minority backgrounds and disabled people living in poverty, and a poverty that is getting worse, can have some confidence that the Government are not ignoring them but understand where the challenges are and are considering a Budget that will do something about it.

Frankly, when we see the analyses that are being done, we know why the Government oppose new clauses 6 and 7. They do not want to do the maths because the figures tell the ugly truth about the inequality we have in Britain and its stubborn supporters, who unfortunately sit on the Government Benches. Jane Addams said:

“Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.”

We cannot take the journey to a more prosperous, more successful and more egalitarian Britain if we do not know the direction of travel. The numbers will give us the direction of travel, but it is the political will that will give us the way forward.

Ministers should not dismiss this case as special pleading but should look at the economic argument for why tackling gender inequality matters and vote accordingly today to put Britain on a better path, because everyone will be richer for it.

[Laura Pidcock (North West Durham) (Lab)]

As my hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central (Dawn Butler), Labour's shadow Minister for Women and Equalities, said, new clause 6 would require the Chancellor to carry out and publish a review of the Bill’s effect on equality. In short, it touches on the fundamental difference between the Labour party and this failing Government, whose policies work for only the richest few. New clause 6 seeks to shed light on the truth of who benefits from Government choices and who does not.

In order to change society, we must understand society; and in order to have a fully functioning democracy, we need transparency. People in my constituency deserve to know what is going on, not least because this Government are failing the country on so many levels that it is hard to know where to start.

New clause 6 refers to equality in relation to

“households at different levels of income”.

Real pay has fallen and is now lower than it was in 2010. Too many jobs that have been created are insecure and entrench poverty through low pay. These employment models fuel inequality, and certain parts of the country, particularly in my north-east region and my constituency, have a disproportionate number of workers on these contracts, where there has been a long-term move towards casualisation. This poverty is not just about worklessness; 60% of people in poverty live in a UK household where someone is in work. Many professionals have joined the queues at food banks, where, nationally, 1.4 million emergency food parcels were handed out last year—that has to be a perfect symbol of a failed state, does it not?—yet the Government just don’t get it.

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[Bim Afolami]

Whether it is in respect of the Bill, the new clause or what we are discussing now, the important thing is that it is of course the Government’s intention to create more better-paying jobs. That is what the Treasury team and everybody across Government strive to do every single day. That is not to say that every single person in this country is currently at the level of prosperity we would like, but that is the aim of all the activity that is coming out of the Bill and out of the Treasury.

[Stella Creasy]

If that is the aim, what data are the Government collecting to be sure that they are achieving it and to find out whether there are any variations? That is what we are talking about. The issue is not the policy, but whether it is having an impact and whether we can understand that impact. Does the hon. Gentleman understand that?

[Bim Afolami]

I do indeed understand that. There is currently so much data, much of which has already been talked about by Opposition Members, on regional disparities, and on disparities of race and age, and between urban and rural areas. There is so much data, so Government policy must aim to bear it all in mind, which is what Ministers do.

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[Bim Afolami]

I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman is mistaken. It is not celebrating low pay to say that people who are currently earning lower amounts should take home more of their money. That is not a celebration; it is about making their lives, every day and every week, that bit easier. It is worth saying that taking the lowest paid people out of tax and raising the national living wage is having significant benefits for many of the people—

[Stella Creasy]

The hon. Gentleman is being very generous with his time. I think he may have missed one of the points that we are making. For example, when the Government raise the tax threshold, 66% of the people who do not benefit—because they do not earn enough—are women. Seventy three per cent. of the people who benefit from a rise in the higher income rate threshold are men. What he is talking about and what we are talking about are two different things. We are talking about the differential impact of policy, and asking the Government to do the sums that are currently being done in the charitable sector, so that we can make better policy. Surely he wants those sorts of policies to have an equal benefit, but at the moment they do not, because we do not have equal pay.

[Bim Afolami]

I believe that all policy in this area, or, frankly, in any area, should be set to make sure that we are trying to generate as innovative, dynamic and successful an economy as possible. The hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) mentioned cutting corporation tax in her speech. She thought that that effectively benefited more men than women because men are more likely to be shareholders than women. The way we should deal with that, in my view, is to encourage more women to be entrepreneurs. We should work to make sure that women have access to being shareholders and that women have more ability to reap the benefits of that—

[Bim Afolami]

If I may, I would like to make a bit of progress.

As the evidence has shown, cutting corporation tax increases, rather than decreases, the tax take going to the Exchequer. If that shows this country to be a better and more dynamic place in which to set up and start a business, that will benefit all people in this country. That is the approach that the Government should take. If we want to improve the performance of the British economy and if there happen to be more men than women who are shareholders, it is no answer to say that we should therefore not take action to improve the activity of the British economy.

[Stella Creasy]

I have a very simple question for the hon. Gentleman, although I appreciate that he is getting some assistance from the hon. Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng): can he produce the data to prove that men and women will benefit equally from the changes to corporation tax?

[Bim Afolami]

I do not have the data now to be able to respond to the hon. Lady. What I do know is that Conservative Members will never take lectures from the Labour party; we have our second female Prime Minister, the gender pay gap is the lowest on record, and this Government have done more for childcare and support for families than the Labour Government ever did. The idea that this Government should take lectures on this issue from Labour Members is disgraceful.

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[Jim McMahon]

That is a fair point.

[Stella Creasy]

Obviously, having had two women Prime Ministers, that is quite enough women earning a serious level of income—the 33 million other women in this country do not deserve equal care and attention. This data would help us to find out just how much inequality there is and what we could do about it. Does my hon. Friend agree that facts should override fiction?

[Jim McMahon]

I think that where the hon. Gentleman was trying to get to—I will be generous—was that these things are symbolic and that symbolism in politics is quite important. However, to me, it is more symbolic that 46% of women have to skip a meal so that their children can eat. It is quite symbolic that women continue to be underpaid compared with men, and it is symbolic that the decisions the Government are taking disproportionately affect women on low incomes—the people who are trying to keep households together and who are raising the next generation of young people, who, because of this Government, will not have better life chances than the generation that went before them.

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[Stella Creasy]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. Whether Members on either side of the House agree with the policies, having good data to enable us to understand their impact helps us to make or dispute an argument. I am struggling to understand why any MP would be against having the facts about the impact of policy, which is all that the new clauses will do. If we had that information, Government Members could confidently tell us what great proposals they are making to improve the country’s prosperity, rather than using anecdotes—or two women.

[Jim McMahon]

I believe it comes down to priorities. If the Government were determined to do something about this, having the evidence base would be of great benefit to them. They do not want to do anything about it, so the evidence base is a hindrance because the Opposition can use it to attack the Government about the fact that progress just is not being made. That is the real reason why the Government are not making progress, and why they are determined not to support the new clauses. It would be far better for the country if the Government were to step up, to be honest and to recognise that the country has some really ingrained challenges that we need to face. Understanding the scale of the challenge from day one is important in making sure that we get into a better position.

My challenge is this: why not? If the Government believe that they are doing the right thing, and that by virtue of their second female Prime Minister they are the party of gender equality and the champions of all that is equal, now is the time to prove it. Members have two choices: they can go through one or other of the voting Lobbies. Perhaps they have a third choice, which is to stay away completely. They can get behind the new clauses and support our request for the data set, which will inform decisions; they can shirk responsibility entirely and stay away from both voting Lobbies; or they can keep their heads down and maintain their own position on the Government Benches, and vote against new clause 6 because it happens to have come from the Opposition. I would say that that is not putting the interests of the country first.

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[Mel Stride]

It applies to a large number of people and there is the national minimum wage as well. My point is that the 4.4% increase in April will be well above inflation, and will disproportionately assist women and those from ethnic minority communities.

[Stella Creasy]

I thank the Minister for giving way and I am listening to the case he is making. If he is so confident that the Government’s policies promote equality, why is he against having an independent Office for Budget Responsibility equality impact assessment to tell us all the good news?

[Mel Stride]

I ask the hon. Lady to be a little bit patient, because I am coming to those very points shortly.

On assessments, we are required, under the Equality Act 2010, to take due regard of protected characteristics, but it is not just for that reason that we do so. It is not just for that reason that I and my fellow Ministers took those issues into account at every stage; it is because we believe it is the right thing to do and we wish so to do.

To come to the hon. Lady’s intervention, a number of reports are already out there. We have heard about tax information and impact notes. I do not think the Opposition should dismiss them. They did not mention the distributional analysis the Treasury provides and publishes at the time of the Budget, or the public expenditure statistical analysis, which looks at how expenditure affects different protected characteristics and runs to hundreds of pages in length. What the Opposition are calling for is fundamentally impractical. That is the heart of the matter and the answer to the hon. Lady’s question. Such analyses almost invariably focus on the static situation. They focus on the effect of tax and income changes on individuals without considering the behavioural changes they induce and the implications of changes in the wider economy, such as the level of employment. They are selective and tend to avoid focusing on those who benefit from public services or are affected by taxation. For example, the provision of childcare, social care and health services is normally exempt from such analyses.

The final point, which has been raised already and which the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) indeed recognised, is that where an individual’s income changes, that individual will almost invariably live within a household with other individuals. She said that the personal allowance increase for taxation disproportionately benefited men, but of course men often live in households with women, and income is distributed across the household. The same is true, of course, where a woman benefits and brings income into a household in which men are also present.

[Stella Creasy]

It is extraordinary that the Minister does not understand the concept of doing both individual and household analyses, or indeed behavioural alongside static analyses. There are many different ways the Government could be doing equality impact assessments. The problem is that they are not doing any.

[Mel Stride]

The hon. Lady is right: there are many ways it can be done, and the Government are indeed doing it in many ways. She need not only look to me for the observations I have made; the IFS has recognised my very point about household income. We will, however, continue to look at how we provide information and assess policies, and we will work with the ONS, as the Chancellor set out in the recent Budget.

In conclusion, the Government have a vision for a society that is equal, not in terms of levelling people down, but in terms of giving people the opportunity to go up. In yesterday’s debate on the Bill, the Labour party chose to vote against a measure to encourage young people to get a foot on the housing ladder. That is not acceptable, and that is an example of what we will do to promote equality of wealth and opportunity at every turn. I urge the Committee to reject new clauses 6 and 7.

Finance (No. 2) Bill

Stella Creasy Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Wednesday 21st February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Helen Whately]

I thank my hon. Friend for making such an important point. This Government have given thousands of young people the opportunity to have a job. It was not that long ago that everyone was always talking about NEETs—the big debate was about all those young people not in education, employment or training. Those numbers have now shrunk phenomenally under this Government’s leadership.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Lady has mentioned the power of numbers to be able to track progress. Obviously, new clause 9 is about the power of numbers to be able to track progress in tackling inequality. If she thinks that those numbers were so important in the battle to ensure that we did not leave young people behind, why does she not think the same when it comes to women and ethnic minorities?

[Helen Whately]

I am not surprised by the hon. Lady’s intervention. The point is that there is a thorough impact analysis of the Budget. Where does it get us if we endlessly go around these things, again and again?

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[Rachel Maclean]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. As she says, the national living wage helps people from all sectors of society, including those with protected characteristics. Our record on these policies speaks for itself.

[Stella Creasy]

The hon. Lady is promoting the Government’s record. One reason why the Labour party wants to get explicit equality impact assessments—not the tax information and impact notes, which I think is what she has been told the Government do produce—is that the evidence is showing counter to what she suggests. For example, we know that the gender pay gap between women in their 20s and men in their 20s has actually started to grow under this Government. It is now five times what it was six years ago. I do not know where the hon. Gentleman from Scotland got his data. I got mine from the Office for National Statistics, if he wants to have a look. Can the hon. Lady account for that? Does she not understand that having the data—understanding where Government policy is either promoting or helping to deal with the situation—would help us all to make progress?

[Rachel Maclean]

The hon. Lady is a passionate advocate for addressing the gender pay gap. I will come to the issues she raises shortly.

[Rachel Maclean]

My hon. Friend really reinforces my point, which is that it is about putting pounds in the pockets of people up and down the country. That is what this Government have done, informed by fairness from the day that we came into office.

[Stella Creasy]

The hon. Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk), as ever, needs clarification. There is data that shows us that the gender pay gap is growing. We are asking for analyses of the impact of Government policy so that we can understand it. We are talking about two different things. I hope that clarifies, for him and for the hon. Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean), why the new clause matters.

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[Stephen McPartland]

I do agree with my right hon. and learned Friend. I have another colleague from Hertfordshire here as well—my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Bim Afolami). We have seen massive investment in our area. I am very proud of the number of primary schools that have been expanded and rebuilt in my constituency. A couple of secondary schools have also been rebuilt, creating great opportunities for the pupils. I am also very proud that all the primary schools in my constituency are rated “good” or “outstanding”. It is probably one of the few constituencies in the country where that is the case. Four of my six secondary schools are good, and the other two we are currently dealing with. I hope that by the time of the next election I will be one of the few Members of Parliament where every single child in my constituency will be in a good or outstanding school.

I do not believe that new clause 9 provides equality of opportunity and equality of aspiration. It will do nothing to help people in my constituency from disadvantaged—

[Stella Creasy]

We are all concerned to see good schools, I think. Does the hon. Gentleman recall a former Prime Minister who argued that sunlight was the best form of disinfectant? Having the numbers to track why, disproportionately, young men from black and ethnic minority backgrounds do worse in our schools, for example, and whether Government policies are influencing that, or whether their parents’ income might be an issue, would help him to understand how he gets those better schools.

[Stephen McPartland]

The hon. Lady and I agree on a lot of things and disagree on others. We have debated issues across this Chamber and in Committee Rooms. I do not think that figures will help those children. Figures are just retrospective and talk about what is possibly happening.

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[Mel Stride]

Yes. My right hon. and learned Friend makes a very important point. As I have already pointed out, around major fiscal events we have household distributional analysis, which covers welfare, taxation and public expenditure. It takes a cumulative approach to that information and it is often relied upon by Government to take subsequent decisions. We also have, on substantial individual tax and national insurance contribution measures, tax impact and information notes—the so-called TIINs—which were introduced in 2010 and were not there under the previous Labour Government. We are, therefore, doing a number of things, both in the context of major fiscal events and on a tax-by-tax, national insurance-by-national insurance change basis, which look to provide just the kind of information that informs decisions around equality.

The third part of new clause 9 relates to the taxes to which this analysis would apply. On income tax, as I have said, we are looking at impacts on households. We may raise the personal allowance, as we did in the last Budget. That is now up to £11,500. It could be argued that that disproportionately favours one sex over another, but when we look at the effect on the household, income is typically distributed within families, within households and within the family unit. That is extremely difficult—in fact, I would go as far as to say impossible—to capture.

[Stella Creasy]

The Minister made that point the last time we tried to discuss this issue. Forgive me, but he seems to be presuming that a household is a man and a woman. Has he managed to get his head around single person households and single women, because women’s incomes are disproportionately hit by Government policy? At the very least, could he manage to measure the women who are affected by his tax and policy changes who do not live with a man who might confuse him?

[Mel Stride]

If the hon. Lady can come up with a sure-fire way of identifying women who live with men who do not confuse them, we will probably make some progress. The point I am making is that this area is riddled with huge complexity, yet new clause 9 seeks to achieve the presentation of reports and assessments that have the imprimatur of Government and the Treasury upon them. They are relied upon to take very important decisions, yet the arguments I am prosecuting suggest that we would actually end up with an incomplete picture. In fact, I would go further than that and say that they could be misleading in a way that would be unhelpful to what I know the hon. Lady is seeking to achieve and indeed what the Government are also seeking to achieve.

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[Chris Philp]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. The fact that the tax gap is 6% rather than the 8% bequested to us by Gordon Brown sounds like a theoretical point, but that two percentage point difference, as she rightly says, amounts to billions of pounds funding the NHS and schools. In debating these avoidance measures, we are not talking about something theoretical and of academic interest: it is precisely these measures that fund our public services, and that is why they are so important.

Turning to the Opposition’s amendments and new clauses, I was rather surprised, on looking at the amendment paper earlier today, to see that new clause 6 once again calls for a review and analysis—analysis which, I am sure, is already conducted by the Treasury, as the Financial Secretary will no doubt point out. But there was an absence—a silence and a desert; tumbleweed was rolling across the amendment paper—where I would have expected to see an abundance of ideas that we might have adopted from the fertile mind of the shadow Chief Secretary. If he could not have proposed ideas in an amendment for some arcane parliamentary procedural reason, he might at least have done so in his speech.

The Financial Secretary to the Treasury is an extremely attentive and receptive Minister. Had the shadow Chief Secretary proposed some constructive ideas, I am sure that the Financial Secretary would have listened carefully. I am very disappointed that after all the noise and, I dare say, bluster—I hope that is not unparliamentary—that we heard in the shadow Chief Secretary’s speech, we did not hear any concrete ideas. We cry out for and are open to new ideas, yet we did not hear any in what was otherwise an amusing and entertaining speech. I am disappointed.

If the Financial Secretary is in the market for new ideas on avoidance, as I am sure he is, one idea is that we could give some thought to ensuring that the Land Registry records the ultimate beneficial ownership of property and land. We discussed that yesterday in our debate on sanctions, and it was suggested by David Cameron a couple of years ago. When the ultimate beneficial ownership of those properties changed, we might then levy stamp duty on that change as though the physical property had been transferred. A lot of high-end residential property is held in non-UK corporate wrappers, and when the property is transferred, rather than selling it, as we would sell our properties, ownership of the company is transferred. There is no record of that in the UK and therefore no stamp duty is paid. That idea might well raise some more stamp duty. I could hardly criticise the shadow Chief Secretary for his lack of ideas without proposing at least one myself. I hope that Ministers will give some thought to that idea in due course.

In conclusion—[Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] I am glad I have said something that finds favour among Opposition Members. I must have set a record for the number of interventions taken, though there was only one from my own side. The action on the bank levy contemplated in the Bill is the right one. We are taxing banks more heavily than non-banks. We are raising more money than ever before, but we must be mindful of the risk of driving these companies or part of them overseas at a time when they contribute 9% of our total income.

On avoidance and evasion, I am proud that this Government have delivered the lowest tax gap in the world and improved by a quarter the position that they inherited. That pays for public services, as pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean). It is a good record, and I am proud of it. I look forward to supporting the Bill.

[Stella Creasy]

I rise to support the amendments tabled by the Opposition and to speak to my amendments 1 to 4.

I was into PFI before all the cool kids were. These amendments speak to a long-held concern of mine, which is that it is not enough for us as politicians to identify when something has gone wrong and to shrug our shoulders and say, “It’s complicated.” The consequences for the communities we represent and for this country’s public finances are so toxic that it is vital we act.

George Bernard Shaw said:

“Political necessities sometimes turn out to be political mistakes.”

Let me be clear that I am not seeking to blame anyone. Governments of all colours used PFI. It started in 1992 and has gone on to the present day. Absolutely, the last Labour Government used PFI to fund things, and it was not an ideological decision; it was a very simple one about keeping borrowing off the books.

However, we know now just how costly these decisions have been for this country. Every single school, hospital, street lighting system and motorway built was needed, but we know now that the consequence of these costs is that we may not be able to build such things in the future. I am in the Chamber today to propose a way in which Parliament can now act to get money back for our public services, because everyone of us has one of these projects in our constituencies.

We can talk about the numbers involved: £60 billion of capital building, on which we will pay back £200 billion. These companies are truly the legal loan sharks of the public sector, charging an excessive rate of interest in comparison with public sector borrowing for building and running services for us. Conservative Members may say that the cost I am talking about includes services, so it is worth breaking down the charges. Last year alone, this country paid out £10 billion in PFI repayments, over half of which was for interest and charges. The money we are paying for PFI is not paying for schools and hospitals to be run; it is paying the profits of the companies we borrowed from to be able to build them in the first place.

The National Audit Office has done absolutely sterling work uncovering just how bad a value-for-money calculation it was to go for PFI. On average, these projects are 2% to 4% more expensive than Government borrowing at the time. In total, with charges and fees included, they are now, on average, 40% more expensive than having worked with the public sector.

The interest rate matters because the costs are not necessarily about the management of a project; they are about the profits being made. Every single MP who is being lobbied about their schools and hospitals needs to recognise that 20% of the extra money the Government say they are giving to schools and hospitals will not touch the sides of emergency wards or go into the budgets of teachers to pay for the books and classes our schoolchildren need. It will go straight out of our public sector into pure profit for these companies.

The Centre for Health and the Public Interest has gone through the accounts of the few hundred companies running schools and hospitals to identify just how much money is involved. It found that they will get £1 billion in the form of pre-tax profit from NHS deals alone, which total just 125 of the 700 PFI projects. For example, the company holding the contract for University College London has, alone, made £190 million in the past decade out of the £725 million the NHS has paid out. In short, it has made enough in profits to build and run an entire hospital.

We have to talk about the human cost. I became interested in PFI when I saw the damage it was doing to my local hospital, Whipps Cross in Walthamstow, and to schools such as Frederick Bremer School in Walthamstow. Its headteacher is now desperately struggling to balance her budget in the face of this Government’s swingeing cuts to the schools budget, but the one repayment she cannot cut is the PFI one. Barts, the biggest PFI in our NHS—with a £1 billion capital build, and £7 billion repaid—is paying £150 million a year, of which £74 million is interest alone. It is no wonder that the hospital is in such persistent financial difficulty.

[Wes Streeting]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. Whipps Cross University Hospital also serves my constituents. To the east, the cost of PFI at Queen’s Hospital in Romford is such that it is creating enormous financial pressures on the Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust. Does she agree with me that that underpins the urgency of the need to tackle this issue? We should not stick to the ideological dogma of the past, but look at what has really happened and claw back some of that excessive greed to better fund our public services.

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[Stella Creasy]

My hon. Friend—my next-door neighbour MP—pre-empts my argument. My amendments relate specifically to the 700 existing contracts, because I believe—I am glad my Front Benchers support this—that we can and must do something urgently about the damage these 700 contracts are doing every single day in schools where headteachers are having to consider sacking people but cannot cut the repayments, and in hospitals that are having to cancel operations but cannot reduce the repayments to their lenders.

There is a sixth-form college in Haywards Heath with no sixth form, because nobody will take on the school’s PFI debt. We keep talking about Northamptonshire Council, which is selling its own buildings because it is going bankrupt. It will owe £240 million to just five PFI deals in the next two to five years, of which £77 million is interest payment. Surrey Council is also in financial difficulties. It has £386 million of PFI commitments that it will not be able to reduce, of which £51 million alone is interest.