Disabled People

Debate between Tom Clarke and Sheila Gilmore

Wednesday 10th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Even if there were sufficient accommodation for this huge change to take place, the trauma that people with disabilities, and in many cases their carers, will be asked to go through is simply unacceptable.

Each of the people I have described stands to lose a minimum of £401 a year. At a time of rising fuel costs and rising prices in the shops, that £401 can be the difference between having electricity or not, having a warm home or not, or having three meals a day or not. The bedroom tax is creating fear and despair among the most vulnerable in my constituency and the country.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

Is it not the point that, according to the Government’s forward budgets, they expect to make a saving from the bedroom tax, but if the people affected moved there would not be a saving? That is how cynical the policy is.

[Mr Clarke]

Again, that is a good point. I think of a constituent whose case I raised with the Prime Minister. I visited her the day after our exchange. Her house has been adapted because she is in a wheelchair, which she has to use upstairs as well as downstairs, so she needed a lift. That lift was provided in one of the rooms of her house. Are we to believe that it would help society for that woman to move to a smaller house, which would also have to be adapted? Where is the sanity of that, far less the decency?

Amendment of the Law

Debate between Tom Clarke and Sheila Gilmore

Thursday 22nd March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Sheila Gilmore]

It definitely does.

Of course, that may not have been what people were cheering. They may have been cheering in relief at not having to do tiresome tax avoidance planning all the time. If the HMRC’s calculations are correct, high-paid employees are a bit like highway robbers who are holding a musket up to the rest of us and saying, “If you tax us, we are going to take our ball away and not play any more.”

[Mr Tom Clarke]

Is my hon. Friend as concerned as I am that the Government seem to pay little attention to HMRC’s informed views?

[Sheila Gilmore]

Clearly, the Government see tax planning as a perfectly rational and sensible reaction to tax changes. However, if a working couple who are about to lose £3,000 in tax credits make a sensible and rational decision to stop work because that will make them better off, will they be seen as merely making a sensible and rational decision, or will they be seen as lazy, as scroungers, and as people who prefer to watch daytime television than hold down a job? If they make that decision, which is rational for them, the outcome will be wholly irrational for the Government, because it will cost the Government more if that family stop work.

I have still not had a satisfactory response from the Government to a question I asked in an earlier intervention. I also asked it of the Deputy Prime Minister earlier this week, because he is fond of telling us that Government can do two things at once. Why can we not retain the 50p tax rate and deal with tax avoidance? Apparently, in the previous year, when people were expecting more tax, they brought their income forward, so presumably this year, knowing that the measure has only a year to run, they will be able to put their income back to the following year so that they do not have to pay more. If we know that such things are happening, why are we unable to find a means of stopping it? Perhaps people’s incomes should be looked at over two or three years to ensure that they cannot engage in these blatant tax avoidance games, which many people on lower incomes cannot do.

When we had the discussions some months ago about bankers’ bonuses and executive pay, the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills told us, “Well, these people are paying 50% tax.” Either they are paying it or they are not. One moment we are told that we do not need to bother doing more about bonuses and high pay because the tax rate is dealing with it and the next we are told, “It’s not bringing anything in, so we shouldn’t bother.” There is a lot of smoke and mirrors.

It is clear from the Red Book and it is even clear from the Daily Mail—I am hardly a friend of that paper—that the Exchequer plans to forgo £3 billion in making this change to the tax rate. It hopes to get that back through people willingly paying more tax in various ways and through the relatively small amount that is expected from the changes in stamp duty.

Since May 2010, we have been told regularly by the Government that the way to achieve economic growth is to cut the public sector, which has been stifling the private sector, and then the private sector will spring to life and replace the jobs that are lost. Two years on, we are still asking where those jobs are. Yesterday at Prime Minister’s questions, the Prime Minister told us yet again how good it is that so many private sector jobs have been created. The figure that he used was 600,000, which was repeated a few minutes ago by the hon. Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman).

More than a year ago, we were told that 500,000 jobs had been created since the election. Many commentators have made it clear that most of those jobs were created in the first six months of the financial year that started in 2010, and that the likeliest cause for their creation was the previous Government’s economic stimulus. The Government cannot keep recycling the figures. The number of times that the Prime Minister has talked about those 500,000 jobs is incredible. I accept that it has gone up slightly and he is now talking about 600,000 jobs. He should get a prize for recycling, even if he does not get a prize for job creation. If those jobs were created as a result of the economic stimulus, the Government should look again at whether they should continue to rule out such a stimulus.

Do we even know that those private sector jobs are completely new jobs? In my city, there has been a lot of outsourcing and people have moved positions through tendering processes. For example, 2,000 care workers in Edinburgh will now be in the private sector because of the decisions that the council has taken. No doubt those jobs will move from the public sector side of the equation to the private sector side, but they are not new jobs that are driving economic growth. Once again, this is smoke and mirrors and there is no economic growth. That is the important point. If we do not get jobs and growth, we will not get out of the recession.