National Insurance Contributions (Rate Ceilings) Bill

Stewart Hosie Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)]

As the Minister said, the Bill will prevent any increase in the current rates of class 1, class 1A and class 1B national insurance contributions paid by employees and employers for the duration of the current Parliament. It will also provide that, for each year, the annual upper earnings limit cannot exceed the higher-rate threshold, which is the sum of the personal allowance and the income tax basic rate. All that is very sensible. There is nothing wrong, in principle, with any Government’s providing certainty in the tax code for the duration of their term in office. However, we clearly do not need legislation to do that.

As has already been said—so I shall say it only once—the Bill is a gimmick. It also demonstrates, in many ways, a lack of confidence. I shall say more about that shortly, but the key point is that placing such an arbitrary and unnecessary restriction on the Government’s ability to respond to unforeseen events may yet come back to haunt them.

The Bill results from the Finance Bill, which was published in July, and which provides for the tax lock on national insurance contributions, income tax and VAT. As was said earlier, it is intended to apply to a tax year that comes after the date of the Bill’s Royal Assent and before the first general election after that date. The time scope is therefore rather limited. There is also a technical issue. This is a separate Bill; the measures are not in the Finance Bill because statutory provisions for NI cannot be included in it.

However, none of this should be any surprise to us. The Conservative manifesto said that in government the Tories would not increase the rate of VAT, income tax or NICs in this Parliament. That should have been enough; the legislation is not required. In a speech ahead of the general election the Prime Minister confirmed that the tax lock also meant there would be no extension to the scope of VAT or any increase in the ceiling set for the main rate of NICs for employees.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

The hon. Gentleman mentioned VAT and the lock that the Government propose. Does he agree it would have been more impressive if they had had that lock before they raised VAT from 15% to 20% rather than after?

[Stewart Hosie]

That is the kind of thing any Opposition politician should say about any set of Tory policy decisions that ends up with the kind of outcomes the hon. Gentleman describes.

The Government also committed to legislating within 100 days of the election to rule out increases in the rates, which is what we are seeing today, but of course serious unintended consequences for spending and for other taxes may flow from this measure. Let me explain. The Government laid out in the summer Budget discretionary consolidation—that is, cuts and tax rises to you and me—amounting to £97 billion in this Parliament. Of that, new draconian cuts to welfare amounted to a full third—£33 billion—but the entire spending plan was predicated on, among other things, NICs bringing in £115 billion this year, £126 billion next year, rising to almost £152 billion in 2021. That is a forecast rise in revenue yield from NICs of 9.6% this year to next, 4.3% the year after, 4.7% in 2017-18 to 20118-19, and a rise of over one third—£37 billion—between last year and the end of the forecast period.

One of the questions the Minister has to answer today is this: given the arbitrary freeze on NICs and some other rates, should the forecast yield be significantly less than expected, will other taxes rise and if so, which ones; and will the Chancellor take the axe to yet further spending, perhaps on pensions, or will borrowing rise and deficit reduction forecasts simply be abandoned, delivering exactly the same failure on debt and deficit we saw in the last Parliament?

[Mr MacNeil]

Of the options my hon. Friend has given, may I go for option three, which means the Government will borrow? As every schoolboy in Scotland who has been paying attention knows, the UK has not paid its way since 2001; it has borrowed each and every year since then. I would go for option 3 for the UK: in debt, with a black hole.

[Stewart Hosie]

My hon. Friend is right. Harking back to 2009 and the Fiscal Responsibility Bill, the then Chancellor made great play of legislation to bring down the debt and deficit, and what was the sanction should he fail? “We would just change the targets,” he said. I suspect the current situation is rather similar, and I may come to what the current Chancellor said about that particular legislation shortly.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman must be vying for the 2015 Caledonian brass neck award. On the arc of prosperity of Iceland, Ireland and Scotland, if we are talking about black holes, would he care to enlighten the House about the £8 billion black hole predicated on the dwindling price of oil, which means that if the Scottish people had made a different decision the country and the constituency he represents would be bankrupt?

[Stewart Hosie]

The £1.5 trillion black hole, which is the UK national debt, is of rather more significance than any cyclical deficit any country may have, but then I suspect the hon. Gentleman probably knew that already.

Returning to the scope of the Bill, it is important that the Minister says what will happen should the yield forecasts be less than planned. That is important for his Government, too, because their rationale, as stated in their manifesto, was focused on

“reducing wasteful spending, making savings in welfare and continuing to crack down on tax evasion and aggressive avoidance.”

That allowed them to commit to no increases in VAT, income tax or NICs. They argued:

“Tax rises on working people would harm our economy, reduce living standards and cost jobs.”

I have no problem with tackling genuinely wasteful spending, such as Trident, or clamping down on tax evasion, but it is this Government’s attack on welfare which is harming the economy, reducing standards of living and threatening the growth needed to ensure the forecast yield from NICs is maintained in the way the Red Book forecasts suggest.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

I have a great deal of sympathy with what the hon. Gentleman has been saying. He mentioned the tax rises that have taken place which have brought the Government considerable increases in revenue, but does he agree that those taxes tend to be regressive and the one thing the Government are protecting is the progressive tax, which is much fairer, called income tax, which they have sought to reduce for high income earners?

[Stewart Hosie]

It is certainly the case that during the downturn the decision to remove the 50p rate of tax was wrong. We would certainly argue that in the current climate that 50p rate should have been maintained. In that respect at least, I agree with the hon. Gentleman.

I wish to raise at this point the Conservatives’ future plans to replace national insurance because that is pertinent to the measure under discussion. In July, the Financial Secretary commissioned the Office of Tax Simplification to review the interplay between income tax and NICs. He said:

“I would like the Office of Tax Simplification to look at what the impacts, costs and benefits of closer alignment would be and to set out what the necessary steps would be to achieve closer alignment. We believe greater integration of the two systems has the potential to remove economic distortions, reduce burdens on business, and improve fairness across individual earners.”

These are all sensible objectives, and I assume this is still a longer-term Government objective, so let me ask the Minister how this Bill assists in the delivery of that aim.

I said earlier in my contribution, and also in a debate on the financial statement in July, that the Chancellor promised a tax lock but that legislation to stop tax rises was

“just a gimmick and no one is going to buy it”—[Official Report, 8 July 2015; Vol. 598, c. 348.]

Indeed my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard) made the same point:

“If these provisions are included in what”

is now this Bill today

“it will only take a clause”

in future legislation

“to overturn them. They are therefore literally not worth the paper on which they are written.”—[Official Report, 21 July 2015; Vol. 598, c. 1441.]

He was right, of course, and that ties in with what I said earlier about a lack of confidence.

Of the Bill that became the Labour Government’s Fiscal Responsibility Act 2010, where levels of debt and deficit were planned but there was no sanction if they were broken, the current Chancellor said that it would achieve

“a constitutional first of imposing no legal sanction on the person who is likely to break it. No other Chancellor in the long history of the office has felt the need to pass a law in order to convince people that he has the political will to implement his own Budget”—[Official Report, 26 November 2009; Vol. 501, c. 708.]—

until now.

Let me reprise that for this Bill. This is a constitutional second. Only one other Chancellor has felt it necessary to bring legislation before this House in order to convince people that he has the confidence to implement his own Budget. We saw Gordon Brown go from Joseph Stalin to Mr Bean; I fear the First Secretary may be reverting to a rather rusty clunking fist.

As has been said, a large number of stakeholders have contributed to this debate, and key from our point of view are the words of Howard Archer, chief European and UK economist at IHS Economics, who said that such a move would restrict the Chancellor’s ability to achieve his targets:

“In particular, if the public finances fall markedly short of their targets, the chancellor would have to face making even more spending cuts and/or raising other taxes. Or just accepting the missed targets. There really still needs to be a lot more clarity on the whole Conservative fiscal policy”.

That is absolutely right.

It is also worth noting the comments of Jonathan Portes from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. He said the pledge not to increase the main taxes

“considerably reduces our flexibility if things turn out different from expected. This is why I have absolutely no doubt that Treasury and Bank of England officials were tearing their hair out at this.”

What discussions, if any, have the Minister, the Chancellor or the Treasury had with the central bank about these proposals and the inherent lack of flexibility that they generate?

Let me turn now to some of my final questions. I ask Members to bear with me as I describe some of the complexity of the current NICs regime. Employees pay NICs on their earnings if they exceed the lower earnings limit, which is set at £112 a week. A zero rate of NICs is charged on earnings between the lower earnings limit and the primary threshold of £155 a week. Earnings above the primary threshold are charged NICs at a rate of 12%, subject to a cap on the upper earnings limit, which is set at £815 a week. Earnings above that are set at 2%.

Employers pay NICs on employee earnings at a rate of 13.8% on earnings above the secondary threshold, which, at £156 a week, is a difference of £1 from the primary threshold for employers. There is no ceiling on secondary class 1 NICs.

As everyone in the Chamber knows, self-employed people pay a weekly flat rate class 2 NIC. They may apply for an exemption from paying class 2 contributions if there are no profits, or if their profits are less than, or expected to be less than, £5,965 for the year. This replaced a small earnings exemption from April this year. In addition, they may be liable for separate class 4 earnings, and on it goes.

Tax simplification is a great idea, and we can see precisely why. Will the Minister explain how these proposals will make the NICs regime more straightforward? In addition to those categories, individuals may be entitled to make voluntary class 3 contributions to avoid or fill gaps in their NI record to ensure that they qualify for basic retirement pension and bereavement benefits. Does the Minister expect more or fewer people to make additional voluntary contributions as a result of the tax lock to the NICs described in the Bill, and will there be any encouragement for them to do so?

The majority of NICs receipts are paid into the national insurance fund, which is separate from all other revenue raised by taxation. The fund is used exclusively to pay for contributory benefits. If the revenue yield from national insurance does not rise in the planned heroic way that I described earlier, can we expect to see cuts directed at the contributory benefits that people have already paid for? There is often unintended consequence from any legislative change—and sometimes perfectly foreseeable behavioural change that may affect yield forecasts. That is an argument that Treasury Ministers have, from time immemorial, fallen back on when they are implementing bad decisions. What assessment have the Government undertaken to predict whether any negative behavioural change is likely to result from these measures, particularly given the differential in rates and thresholds between employee, employer and self-employed national insurance contributions?

Finally—this is really my most important question and at the heart of our disquiet over a legislative attempt to provide certainty over this Parliament—as the majority of NICs receipts are paid into the national insurance fund and that fund is used exclusively to pay for contributory benefits, may we have a cast-iron guarantee from the Minister today that this Bill is not and will not be the start of an attack on, or an erosion of, the contributory principle that applies to national insurance contributions?