Income tax (charge)

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Grant Shapps]

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that the principle should be that, as far as we can make it work, people—individuals and companies—are in the same position when we come out of this situation. I feel that we will be in a somewhat changed world and changed environment on the other side of it, but good organisations should not be going bust. It will be hugely challenging. We will require a lot of different responses and mechanisms to get there, including, on occasion, organisations being run by the public sector, which we have already seen in the case of trains for a completely different reason.

Turning to trains, it makes no sense for us to run empty trains. As fewer people will be travelling following last night’s advice and guidance from the Government and the Prime Minister, timetables may be altered in the short to medium term to ensure that we do not effectively run ghost trains. We are also determined to ensure that companies are left in as strong a position as possible so that they can continue to operate afterwards. Despite the immensely challenging situation in which we find ourselves, we will work in partnership with the transport industry to keep essential services running for the public and for those who need to get to work, who have essential business and who will therefore still be travelling.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

On the proposal to reduce the number of trains, buses and tubes that are running, given that so many of them are so crowded at the moment, would it not make sense to keep many more of them running so that those essential workers who still have to get to work have more space?

[Grant Shapps]

The right hon. Lady makes an excellent point, as ever. The reality is that, because of social distancing, it might well be desirable to have more space between people so that they can keep some distance. Yes, that absolutely needs to be taken into account as we consider the timetabling.

We will get through this crisis together as a nation. Working in this great national effort, we will ensure that we come through on the other side and provide hope for all our citizens. The Budget shows that we are serious about the pledges we have made and about the trust that the electorate put in us only three months ago. We intend to deliver on those infrastructure pledges.

The Department for Transport has already been working hard to deliver on those pledges. For example, in recent weeks we have taken decisive action to improve journeys for millions of Northern rail commuters by putting the franchise into the operator of last resort. We have announced plans to extend discounted train travel to more than 830,000 veterans. The Minister of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris), has kickstarted work on reversing the Beeching cuts, which have so blighted the nation in decades past and prevented people from being interconnected. In January we announced the preferred route for the east-west rail link that will connect Oxford and Cambridge, which will increase access to jobs and make it easier and cheaper to travel, creating a region that has been dubbed the UK’s silicon valley. We are not only making journeys more efficient and easier; we are also making them cleaner. We are consulting on bringing forward the end of fossil fuel cars and vans to 2035, or earlier if practical. We are taking enormous steps forward.

The Chancellor has delivered a Budget that includes some of the most ambitious infrastructure programmes seen since the 1950s. It will help to level up this country. Infrastructure that is unreliable, overcrowded and no longer fit for purpose acts as a drag anchor on our entire economy. When it is efficient and gets people where they need to be, it can turn around the fortunes of our towns and cities. With interest rates at an historic low, now is the time to get Britain building.

--- Later in debate ---

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

We have seen nothing like this in our lifetimes. We are in a situation where six days after hearing the Budget, it is already out of date. We are at a time when, across the world, aeroplanes are being grounded, borders are being closed, people are staying at home, health services are gearing up, and workplaces are being frozen down. Just two months ago, we had barely heard of covid-19, and since then 6,500 people across the world have died from it.

In China, hundreds of millions of children are being educated at home—some online. In Italy, people are building makeshift hospitals, even tents, to treat the sick. France has imposed a two-week lockdown, and Ireland has closed all its schools. The scale of the action that countries are having to take to deal with this global crisis feels overwhelming, and we are just at the start. Nothing will be normal for very many months, and all of us will have to face up to that in our communities, in our workplaces, and in families across the country. That means that, right now, many people are feeling very worried. Parents are worried about whether to send their kids to school. Pensioners are worried about whether they should be going to the shops. Their sons and daughters are worried about whether they should be visiting them. Cinema and pub staff are just worried about whether they are about to lose their jobs, and many will be facing exactly that fear this week. Self-employed contractors are at a loss because their business is drying up and small businesses fear that their life’s work and savings are about to be lost. Commuters are worried about travelling by bus, train or tube. Doctors, nurses and NHS staff and social care staff are in distress about the life-and-death decisions they know they may have to make on our behalf.

The immediate challenge for Government in the face of this is to provide some urgent answers, urgent interventions, and urgent reassurances so that we can stop the anxiety, the panic and the hardship growing, and so that we can stop a national crisis becoming millions of separate family crises across the country. We can rise to that challenge, but we need to do so now. That means answering some very practical questions. For example, people have contacted me following the advice that was given yesterday, asking, “What should people do if someone in the family has serious health conditions, but they are doing a job that cannot be done from home?” Those jobs may be in distribution, in retail, in education, or working in schools. They may be in policing, or they may be doing countless important jobs across the country. Should they go to work? Should they send their kids to school?

I have been contacted by one mum who is suffering from cancer and who wants to be able to keep her daughter at home. She and others need support and advice. What are the plans to deliver care, food and supplies for those who are going to be at home? Crucially, we will need urgent assurances that no one will lose their home, and that everyone will be able to pay their bills to feed their kids and to keep their families going. We look forward to the response from the Chancellor later today so that we can know that, whatever the changes in our lives that are going to be needed, we can strain every sinew to keep important services going. That means getting some immediate commitments for substantial financial support for families. We all know that the current system of universal credit, of statutory sick pay or of any of those tinkering measures just will not cut it. If the Government try to use them, all they will do is expose even further the weaknesses and failings in our welfare system and our social insurance system that are already causing huge hardship. Quite simply, those systems will not be able to take the strain. There needs to be substantial, unconditional support, so that people can pay their rents, their mortgages and their bills, because food banks will not be able to fill those gaps.

Those urgent assurances and interventions are essential if we are to address people’s anxieties and concerns, particularly in relation to family finances and family health. There is a much bigger task, which is to shift our shared mindset from anxiety to action to ensure that we are not just all overwhelmed by alarm when we have practical tasks ahead of us, and when we need to focus on the practical things that can be done and must be done to come through this together. There is little time for any of us to absorb or assimilate the scale of the changes that will be made in all of our lives this year, so that we can get through this, but we have to get on with it.

Incredible work is already under way. People have already paid tribute to NHS staff who are preparing for the task ahead. We should also pay tribute to emergency planners in our local councils, in social care services, in businesses, in food distribution systems and in voluntary groups across the country. They are already preparing and planning for the challenges that we face and those huge changes that we will need to make. It will need calm leadership, clear communication, frankness about how difficult some things are going to be, but firmness about our ability to come through this, about our resilience and strength, and about our ability to work together in extraordinary ways. In the end, we may be grateful that we are also the generation that now communicates so much online, and that has different ways to hold our families together, to communicate and to work. Some of those new technologies will make it easier to address new challenges than perhaps would have been the case 10 or 20 years ago. It also means that the Government must address the scale of the task, and it does not feel as if they are doing so yet. I do not blame Ministers for struggling to keep up with this, because in the early stages of the financial crisis it took time—often precious time—to realise the magnitude of what was happening and the scale of previously unthinkable things that had to be done to turn it round. We do not have that time now.

It is good that the Government seem to have shifted strategy in the light of evidence from Imperial College, which confirms what the WHO, epidemiologists and public health experts from other countries have been saying for some time, and which shows that the objective should be suppression of the virus, because the number of lives that would be lost by pursuing a mitigation or herd immunity strategy would be far too great. Again, it feels as if the Government still have to do more to shift to that new strategy in practice. For example, we are still only being advised to go to the pub—advised not to go to the pub. [Interruption.] If only! It feels as if we are only being advised, and it feels as if Ministers are being a little too squeamish to tell us what they need us to do, and to tell the pubs what they need to do. My message to Ministers is, frankly, “Get over it,” because there are an awful lot more things that they are going to have to tell us to do before the crisis is over.

It does not feel as if there is a proper strategy for testing yet—a proper plan massively to gear up the number of tests that we need. The chief scientific adviser has said that that is what he wants to see, but we need the same kind of national effort for which the Prime Minister has rightly called to produce ventilators across the country. We need a massive scaling up of testing. The World Health Organisation has said, “test, test, test” and

“You cannot fight a fire blindfolded”.

That is what we need. I have heard from consultants who say that in some hospitals three quarters of elderly care consultants are self-isolating and cannot gain access to tests to find out whether in fact they are fine and can get back to work, where they are urgently needed. If we rely on the information from hospitals to tell us what is happening on the scale of the spread we will be two weeks behind the curve. We cannot afford to do that. We need to learn from what South Korea did, with a massive mobilisation effort.

If the spread is accelerating, keeping schools running as normal is going to become impossible and seriously unwise. Given the reports from London hospitals about rising numbers of covid-19 cases coming in through A&E, and reports that we are three weeks behind Italy, we should ask ourselves what would Italy have done three weeks ago if it had known? That is what we have to face, and it means that we need urgent plans to be in place now on how to close or scale down schools while keeping parents and vital services in work; while stopping grandparents being drawn into childcare and being exposed to the virus; and while supporting families who depend on free school meals as well as those who have safeguarding risks. This is urgent.

The Budget was designed around the old strategy of mitigate and manage, or tinkering with sick pay and staff absence. We are way past that point. Entire sectors such as travel, leisure and hospitality cannot function at a social distance. There are 1.9 million jobs in catering, restaurants, pubs and coffee shops. There are more than half a million jobs in hotels and holiday accommodation. Those sectors are not sustainable, given the way in which we are going to have to operate and live our lives for at least the next few months. How we support those sectors and people who work in them is crucial.

Other sectors such as social care and food distribution need to grow and change to meet community needs. Communities will have to support one another, but we cannot just stand back and hope that the free market will solve the systemic challenges that we face. Emergency planning will be needed, as well as intervention and funding on a scale that the Government would never normally contemplate. I hope that as well as talking more about emergency funding for the NHS, the Chancellor will announce a big injection of emergency investment for local authorities so that they can support public health, emergency planning, housing, family support, social care and children’s services, which are now our crucial community actors, and which urgently need to take on more staff to deliver the changes needed. We need sectoral plans, to make sure that we still have something as simple as community pubs, which can open again when the crisis is over.

This will be a challenge. We all know and fear that those who are on the lowest incomes will be hardest hit, which will be a challenge for all of us. But we can do this, and we have the strength, resilience, ingenuity and ideas. We will have to pull everyone together, not push people apart. We will have to do things in new ways, including doing politics in different ways—pulling people together and facing up to the sheer scale of what needs to change. Politics has to stop being the art of the possible and become the art of the apparently impossible, so that we can come through this together.

[Several hon. Members rose—]