Finance (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Tom Tugendhat and Peter Dowd

2nd reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 18th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)]

Plausibility ran through every sentence in the Minister’s speech. Plausibility ran riot, but plausibility I do not accept.

Who would have thought that a general election would be called on the day we were in this Chamber, which is packed-out, for this scintillating debate? I do not think anyone would have thought that. Only a few weeks have passed since the Chancellor’s shambolic Budget U-turn, yet today the Prime Minister has announced a U-turn in relation to the general election. We all thought the lady was not for turning, as she has led us to believe on at least seven occasions, and of course we were wrong. [Interruption.] Apparently the Prime Minister did not want an election, and clearly in the last few days she has had some sort of damascene conversion—a damascene conversion to democracy, apparently. We had the Brexit referendum last year which gave authority to push on with Brexit, but we now find that the Prime Minister says she wants even more authority. I thought we had been getting the Brexit vote pushed on us time after time, but clearly that has not been enough. The Prime Minister might possibly be feeling slightly insecure; I really do not know, but we are where we are.

As the Finance Bill is a product of the Budget, it is only right that we start this debate by offering a reminder of its contents. Notwithstanding what the Minister has just said, the Budget continued the Government’s programme of tax cuts for multinational corporations and the super rich: by the end of 2021 they would have received £70 billion-worth of tax breaks, paid for by those on middle and low incomes and of course the self-employed. [Interruption.] That is a fact; it is clear from the Office for Budget Responsibility’s figures and the Government figures.

The Budget failed, however, to address adequately the social care crisis, and we are now seeing 900 adult social workers in England leaving the profession every day—and goodness knows how many GPs getting their pension statements are ready for moving on as well. It also did little to support small and medium-sized business owners, who are the lifeblood of the economy and increasingly feeling the pressure as the economy slows and inflation rises.

More importantly, the Budget demonstrates that this Government are willing to break their manifesto commitments at the drop of a hat. Despite the Chancellor’s bravado, the Government’s economic ineptitude after seven years is clear for all to see. His Government have presided over the slowest recovery since the 1920s, with growth and average earnings downgraded yet again. The Chief Secretary said in his Budget speech that the Government do not believe in “spending and promising” what they “cannot deliver” and agreed that that is an important barometer by which to judge the Government’s record. Let us look, therefore, at what the Government have promised over the past seven years and what they have actually delivered.

On coming to power, the Conservatives committed to balancing the books by 2015—a Conservative broken promise. They said that would be pushed back to 2019-20—another Conservative broken promise. Instead, by 2020 they plan to be borrowing an eye-watering £21.4 billion. Some 10 of the Government’s 14 Budget and autumn statements since 2010 have seen an increase in forecasted borrowing. This Government’s record on borrowing has been missed target after missed target, with constant upward revision. The Government pledged that debt as a percentage of GDP would start to fall in 2015; instead it continues to grow—another Conservative broken promise.

The Government’s record on growth has been one of epic failure. The OBR has now revised down economic growth for 2018 and for every remaining year of the Parliament, notwithstanding the comments made before about the OECD. The British people wait to see any benefits of growth, but the only growth they can expect to see is in the size of the Government’s Finance Bills; this one is a whopper, coming in at 762 pages, longer than any previous Finance Bill and one of the largest pieces of proposed legislation ever presented to this House. Those 762 pages are hardly riveting reading, I have to say. [Interruption.] I have read every single syllable of it, several times.

We would need to search long and hard through those hundreds of pages for anything that helps ordinary taxpayers. Instead it is replete with ever-more complex giveaways to corporations and the super-rich. But even those hundreds of pages are not enough to contain the Government’s giveaways to the rich. This mammoth Bill will be supplemented by an unprecedented number of statutory instruments, on the back of the Treasury’s already unheard of use of SIs. There were 90 in the last Session, and there have already been 88 in this one. We have heard about Henry VIII edicts, but this makes the Chancellor look like a committed parliamentarian.

The growth in the size of the legislation is matched only by the growth in the number of broken Conservative promises. Are this Government doing anything to deliver growth that benefits the average household? The Chancellor has consistently pledged action to tackle the UK’s productivity gap, but under this Government, this country’s productivity gap with the G7 has grown by a fifth, and we now have the largest gap since 1991. The Conservatives were in government at that time as well.

This Government have done little to tackle the scandal of chronic low pay and insecure work. Despite falling unemployment, workers are currently suffering their worst decade for pay in 70 years. Rising inflation is now outstripping wage growth and, according to the Resolution Foundation, real-terms pay is now falling for around 40% of the UK workforce. The Government’s promise of a £9 national living wage has been consistently revised downwards—first to £8.80 and now to £8.75—while rising inflation results in the cost of living going up for everyone. It is clear that when it comes to introducing a wage that working people can live on, only a Labour Government will deliver. This Finance Bill does little to address the crisis in living standards that many of our constituents are currently feeling. Nor does it offer support for small and medium-sized businesses, which are facing rising costs and a lack of investment due to the Government’s hard Brexit strategy—if you can call it a strategy.

[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is making some interesting points, but I hope he will forgive me for saying that they seem to run contrary to the facts as I see them. I see businesses coming to Britain, I see investment moving to Britain, and I see opportunity starting in Britain. This all seems to run contrary to his argument, and I wonder whether he can explain why businesses see Britain as a land of opportunity and growth when he clearly does not do so.

[Peter Dowd]

If that is what the hon. Gentleman sees, I suggest that he needs to take off his rose-tinted spectacles.

We are all aware that the only Conservative idea for the shape of a post-Brexit economy is to turn our once pride-worthy economy into a bargain basement tax haven. That is what the Conservatives want. We have had seven years of slogans from this Government, but we still have no evidence that their negotiations on Europe amount to anything more than something written on the back of a fag packet. They are non-existent, and they have been non-existent for the two or three years since the announcement of the referendum, other than their preparation to sell us down the river to tax avoiders and dodgy dealers across the globe.

The Government make great claims on tackling tax avoidance in the Bill—we heard the Minister talk about this earlier—but it is a charter for tax avoiders, and no amount of smokescreens and bluffing can hide that fact. The Chancellor wants us to believe that measures to bring some non-doms into tax will really tackle the problem, but throughout the Bill we see measures to preserve the special status of non-doms and to privilege that group over domiciled taxpayers. Even the Government’s headline “deeming” measure is undermined because they have chosen to preserve the non-dom status of offshore trusts. How on earth is this going to get more taxes paid if non-doms are being forewarned that they can simply hide their money away in a trust and still keep it beyond the Revenue’s grasp? When is closing a loophole not closing a loophole? When it is hidden in a magic spreadsheet.

The Bill fails to introduce any meaningful measures to tackle tax avoidance and evasion, which even this Government admit are costing at least £36 billion a year. In short, this Finance Bill continues to push our country towards a low-tax and low-pay economy in which a small minority of the rich can get wealthier at the expense of everybody else.

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[Tom Tugendhat]

It is very kind of the hon. Gentleman to give way again. As he has brought up the NHS, I feel that it is only right for us to ask how Labour is doing on the NHS. We have to look to Wales to see how Labour is doing—not well, is the answer. The statistics from the NHS in Wales indicate that treatment is poorer, waiting lists are longer and people are less satisfied than they are in England or, indeed, in Scotland, where the SNP has, sadly, also delivered worse results.

[Peter Dowd]

I draw the hon. Gentleman’s attention to waiting lists in England, where an estimated 3.8 million people are waiting for treatment. I suggest that he should be more concerned about those 3.8 million people in England than he is about Wales.

--- Later in debate ---

[Peter Dowd]

A million people in employment are on zero-hours contracts. Millions of people are in insecure work. Of course I welcome employment, but it has to be secure, well-paid, reasonable, sensible employment that allows people to sustain their families. Under this Government, millions of people are unable to sustain an ordinary life with the wages they receive. That is the reality.

[Tom Tugendhat]

The hon. Gentleman is being generous in giving way. Does he understand that his pledge further to increase taxes runs directly contrary to his hope for better employment? Increasing taxes and increasing the burden of the state on companies around our country would lead to employment falling, not rising. Welfare cases would rise, not fall. It would be generally bad for our entire economy.

[Peter Dowd]

I do not know which speech the hon. Gentleman has been listening to, but I did not refer to raising taxes.

[Tom Tugendhat]

You did!

[Peter Dowd]

No, I did not. I was asked earlier how I would pay for the changes, and I indicated that I would start with corporations. In effect, corporations receive £70 billion in relief over a five-year to six-year period through banking levy reductions and so on. That is the starting point for us. As far as I am concerned, the Bill takes us no closer to knowing when the Conservatives will finally meet their target of closing the deficit. A series of failures has led them to borrow more than any other Government in history, and far more than every Labour Government combined. That is the fact of the matter.