Finance (No. 2) Bill
Debate between Chris Leslie and Andrew Love(9 years, 2 months ago)
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Chris Leslie
This is always the dilemma. Do Government Members not understand—is it just a question of ignorance?—or have they just turned a blind eye? My hon. Friend has been a diligent campaigner against the bedroom tax and has managed to articulate very successfully the harm and difficulties that people have encountered, particularly those with disabilities who need the extra space in the house. Again, that should have been covered in the Bill.
Chris Leslie
Many studies suggest that it costs more than has been raised. Of course, the Government knew how unpopular the bedroom tax would be and came up with their “discretionary fund” to allow local authorities to ameliorate the impact, but it has not been enough and has certainly not been extended to many people who need it. My hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Mike Kane) will also note that there has been no guarantee that the fund will continue into future years. The Government are hoping that this will go away and that nobody will notice, but our constituents will notice.
Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill
Debate between Chris Leslie and Andrew Love(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Chris Leslie
Funnily enough, divorce has already come up a couple of times in our proceedings, and I am sure that Mrs Leslie will be watching them.
Mr Andrew Love (Edmonton) (Lab/Co-op)
The reality is that the seven-day switching service must be matched against increases in the level of switching of current accounts if we are to increase competition. All the evidence from countries like the Netherlands, where such a service has been introduced, shows that it has the trust of customers but does not increase switching levels, although that is the rationale for account portability.
Chris Leslie
Absolutely. Sir John Vickers pointed out in his report that a typical customer is likely to move current accounts every 26 years, on average, and it is estimated that about 6% of personal current accounts will be switched this year. All sorts of statistics prove that this is not a particularly active area, although there is a growing consensus among members of the commission, and even some of the banks, that portability might be an idea whose time has come.
Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill
Debate between Chris Leslie and Andrew Love(10 years, 11 months ago)
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Chris Leslie
It probably will, particularly if there is a change of Administration, but we will come to that in a couple of years’ time.
Mr Love
Some very eminent members of the commission are in the House of Lords, and I have absolutely no doubt that they will do a magnificent job of scrutinising the Bill. However, this is the democratically elected Chamber where most of the debate should take place, and it is incumbent on the Government to make time available for those at this end of Parliament to scrutinise it.
Chris Leslie
My hon. Friend is 100% correct, and we have made our point; I now want to move on to issues of substance. There is a lack of time and we have to finish debating this group of amendments by 7 o’clock. It is ridiculous that the commission spent hours on these matters but only a tiny amount of time has been allocated to debating them today.
Government amendments 1 to 4 seem to be generally welcome with regard to the extension of the regulatory perimeter and the definitions of the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority. It is intriguing that amendment 4 centres on clarifying the definition of “failure”. It is very tempting to ask if they know what failure is, especially given their weak response to the parliamentary commission today, but I will move swiftly on.
Government amendments 7 to 10 also seem to be fairly unobjectionable, although there appears to be a drafting error in amendment 8. Why has the Minister decided that the proposed subsection (3) should be inserted ahead of subsection (2) of FSMA? Something seems to be amiss, but that is only a minor point.
More importantly, will the Minister talk about the tribunal to which a lot of the issues will be referred? What sort of tribunal will it be and where will it be situated? Will its work add to the functions of an existing tribunal? That is a small point, but I would be grateful if the Minister would address it.
Government amendments 11 to 13 seem to focus on drafting issues. I cannot really see what will be achieved by changing “subsidiary” to “body”, but I do not have anything to say about those smaller, drafting amendments.
The first main issue of substance relates to our amendment 17 on the need for a thorough review process of the ring-fencing of retail banks, such that it augments what ought to be the electrification of the ring fence. We suggested this in Committee and it was a clear recommendation of the commission. It would be better to have a proper and independent review of the adequacy of ring-fencing every two years. We think that a more robust review process would be better than the Government’s PRA-led approach. It would be inadequate for the regulators to lead the process. We need a broader and more substantial review process to ensure successive ring-fencing.
Ultimately, as the commission itself has said, the jury is out on whether ring-fencing will work. It is fine in theory, but in order to keep a close eye on things—especially as these issues fall out of the media spotlight, as they inevitably will in the years to come—we must have a process in place that makes sure that we test, watch and scrutinise what happens.
The commission was right to be disappointed with the Government’s response. It noted that
“the Government did not accept our recommendation on potential ‘electrification’ with respect to the sector as a whole. As our First Report noted, crucial doubts remain about whether all the intended reforms can be put in place and, even if they are, whether this will be enough to prevent the Government from having to step in next time a crisis hits. In particular, we identified the possibility that the partial separation of a ring-fence may prove insufficient.”
That is why we feel that a more rigorous and thorough review process that involves the commissioning of independent members to produce, together with the Chair of the Treasury Committee, a report for Parliament would be far more effective. I do not want to take words out of the mouth of the hon. Member for Chichester, but he is right to say that if we leave it to the PRA to do this job and do not have a proper and more thorough process, there is a danger that the regulators will simply end up marking their own exam paper.
Finance (No. 2) Bill
Debate between Chris Leslie and Andrew Love(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Chris Leslie
I do not think it is because the Chancellor does not realise, or is ignorant about the policy options available to him; it is a deliberate choice not to pull those particular levers, and we need to debate that in a wider context.
However, for the purpose of completing some analysis of the Help to Buy scheme, the specific question that we have anxieties about is whether the underwrite scheme will provide unintended support for those wishing to buy second homes—in other words the taxpayer, the hard-pressed taxpayer, subsidising an element of activity that really should not be a priority for the taxpayer at this moment. If people want to take equity out of their property or remortgage, they may do so using traditional solutions provided in the market at large; we have nothing against home owners remortgaging in the traditional way. But the scheme seeks to extend taxpayer guarantees unnecessarily. Effectively, Ministers are saying that if people have a spare room in a social home, they must pay the bedroom tax, but if they want a spare home and can afford it, the Government will help them to buy one. No wonder people are calling this the spare home subsidy.
Mr Andrew Love (Edmonton) (Lab/Co-op)
When the Chancellor was asked to clarify whether help would be available to second home owners, he chose not to do so. Is it not incumbent on Ministers here today to tell the House very clearly whether the scheme can be used for the purchase of second homes?
Chris Leslie
It is absolutely incumbent on Ministers, but this is a Government who just cannot think things through properly. They have set off down the road with a particular design. We have been asking questions for weeks and weeks. My hon. Friends will remember that the Chief Secretary to the Treasury astonished the House when he still could not rule out that the scheme would be used for supporting second home purchase, and there might be a number of reasons for that. For example, if the scheme is supporting remortgages, and a household decides to remortgage, how can the Government have a covenant on how any equity withdrawn from that remortgage process will be used by that home purchaser? That is presumably the obstacle that Ministers are banging their heads against now, and they probably have to look at various covenants and all sorts of legal arrangements for those participating in the schemes.
There are other anomalies in the process. Perhaps the Minister would elaborate on this point: can foreign buyers be subsidised by the UK taxpayer for the purchase of second homes—not just other EU residents, but non-EU residents as well? What is the exclusion in the scheme? Will he clarify that?
Mr Love
Normally, when Ministers are silent, one can trust the Treasury to clarify matters. In this case the Treasury has not clarified matters. I read in the newspapers that buy-to-let investors will be excluded, but in other newspapers there seems to be ambiguity about that. Can we not have a clear statement from Ministers this afternoon about who is in and who is out of the scheme?
Chris Leslie
In, out, in, out, shake it all about—who knows what is going on in the minds of Treasury Ministers? It is impossible to tell, sometimes, just by looking at them.
Finance (No. 2) Bill
Debate between Chris Leslie and Andrew Love(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Chris Leslie
It is the politics of shooting oneself in the foot. The difficulty is that the Chancellor does not even understand that his strategy is making his task far harder in the long run. It is not just the fact that people on lower and middle incomes are suffering as a result; it is the unfairness when they compare it with what the Government are doing for those parts of the economy and of society that they favour. The banks are still getting away with not paying their fair share. A tiny corner of the country is doing very well out of the Chancellor. The banks, whose actions created the deficit, are not contributing their fair share towards repairing it. In fact, astonishingly, they are benefiting from the Chancellor’s generosity. This Bill fails to get a grip on the contribution the banks ought to be making. It is still too weak on the very institutions that had to be bailed out by the taxpayer because of their perilous self-indulgence. We have debated in the past, and we will do so again, the fact that Ministers have failed lamentably when it comes to tackling bonuses. In opposition, the Prime Minister promised:
“Where the taxpayer owns a large stake in a bank, we are saying that no employee shall be paid a bonus of over £2,000”.
My hon. Friends probably remember that comment. However, when I express my dismay about the Bill’s weakness, I am not just talking about the lack of a bank bonuses tax. The Government said that the bank levy, as a charge on bank balance sheets, was their answer to clawing back some of the costs for the taxpayer.
The Prime Minister said in 2011 that once the levy was “fully up and running” it would raise £2.5 billion each year—in fact, he said that it would raise £9 billion over the spending review period. We now see that the Government have totally failed to live up to their promise and that the banks have swerved to avoid the bank levy; they have not paid anything like the amount mentioned. In fact, the Chancellor has raised nearly £2 billion less from the banks since the Prime Minister made that promise just two years ago. Those are not my figures, but the latest figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility and HMRC.
The Government repeatedly claim—the Minister did it again today—that the bank levy will raise £2.5 billion a year and that the cuts in corporation tax will not benefit the banks; the Minister said that those corporation tax cuts would be offset by increases in the levy. However, the OBR figures, published alongside the Budget, estimate that in the financial year that has just ended, 2012-13, the bank levy will raise just £1.6 billion—a massive shortfall. We have then to deduct a further £200 million because of the generous corporation tax cut. All in all, the banks have paid £1.1 billion less than Ministers promised. That is even worse than in the previous financial year of 2011-12, when the combined shortfall was £800 million less than the Minister promised.
What on earth is going on? Why cannot the Minister get a grip of the issue? The bank levy strategy is haemorrhaging money when it should be boosting the Exchequer far more significantly. I ask my hon. Friends to think of what that nearly £2 billion could have achieved in the past two years. This is the third or fourth attempt by the Government to get the issue right, but each time they have failed to raise what they promised. The Minister has to go back to the drawing board now and come up with a policy that will actually work, rather than something designed to pass a press release test.
The Chancellor is making bad decisions because he is getting deeper into difficulty, proving time and again that saving his own skin comes before getting the judgment right. It did not take long for the world to see, for example, that the Government had not properly thought through their flagship Help to Buy scheme after it was announced in the Budget. That was hailed as the boost that we needed for housing, but focusing only on demand without any corresponding action to supply more affordable homes is only a half-policy partially thought through.
I hope that the scheme succeeds, but why on earth cannot the Government ensure that funds are not siphoned off for second-home purchases? By contorting the scheme so that it does not count against the deficit figures, do they not realise that they have added complexity that might hinder take-up? After all, the Government promised that 100,000 people would have used last year’s NewBuy scheme by now, but only 1,500 people have become involved so far.
Chris Leslie
We will undoubtedly be able to judge the success of these issues, but there are some deeper flaws in the design of the Help to Buy scheme; we will debate that issue in more detail this week. It all reeks of a policy that has not been thought through properly—designed in haste and yet again not having the intended effect.
Understanding what the Government have put into the Finance Bill requires an understanding of what they have not put in. This was the Budget and the Finance Bill that were supposed to learn the lessons of the 2012 omnishambles Budget and Finance Bill—the pasty tax, the granny tax and the caravan tax. Here is the product of all the Government’s care and vigilance this year; I am sure that the Minister’s officials will be proud of him. The Government have painstakingly avoided anything that will have a positive and significant impact on growth, meticulously evaded any measures that might stimulate job creation and sidestepped anything that might repair the mess that they are making of the public finances.
In fact, the only real aspiration in the Bill is to get through it without any more U-turns. But by avoiding the bold action that we need to stimulate the economy, the Government have created a Bill bereft of the major reforms we need. So many measures are conspicuous by their absence. The Government have cut public investment, and now they are cutting back on policies, too.
I had hoped that the Chief Secretary to the Treasury would be here today; normally, he would open the debate on the Finance Bill. I do not know whether his not being here is a deliberate strategy or whether he has a decent reason; the shadow Chief Secretary has a decent reason for not being here, but that could not apply to the Chief Secretary.
We had hoped, before the Budget, that the Liberal Democrats would stick to one pledge—their pledge to support a mansion tax. We even tabled a one-line motion for Lib Dems to vote for, but they did not want to offend the Conservatives. But they should not worry because we will give them another chance to support their own policy later in the week—a mansion tax on properties worth over £2 million to deliver a tax cut for lower and middle-income households. We favour a 10p starting rate of income tax as the best way to do that and we think that should be in the Bill.
Why have the Government not legislated for their child care voucher extension, which has been pencilled in vaguely for some time after the general election? Where is the national insurance help for small businesses that we have been calling for and which the Chancellor should be acting on sooner? Why is that not in the Bill? It is not good enough for such provisions to be in black and white in a Budget book; it needs to be in the Bill. There have been so many promises in the media, but they have not been seen through in the Finance Bill.
The Finance Bill could be the moment when the Government change their mind on the bedroom tax, and it should be the legislation that repeals their lovely gift of an average £100,000 tax cut for Britain’s lucky millionaires through the cut to the 50p tax rate. As I have said before, it seems that with this Government there is one rule for the rich, but only one room for the poor.
Where do the Government get such a gratuitously unfair sense of priorities? The language used to validate a cruel, harsh, selfish approach is breathtaking—they insist on the caricature of the “spare room subsidy” and bristle at the term “bedroom tax” because they know that the public can see the policy for the disaster it is proving to be. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury, who is not here, wrote in The Sun on Easter weekend that he wanted to tackle the “bedroom blockers”—that from a Liberal Democrat Chief Secretary who could and should have blocked the bedroom tax in the first place.
Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill
Debate between Chris Leslie and Andrew Love(11 years, 2 months ago)
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Chris Leslie
I will make a bit of progress and give way in a minute.
There is not enough in the proposed legislation on the safety of the banking system, not enough to rebuild consumer confidence, not enough to reform the high-risk banking culture and not enough to support growth and create a banking system that serves the needs of our economy. Too often, Ministers sound as though they are acting like shop stewards for banking executives desperate to retain bonuses that are many multiples of their salaries. Instead, Ministers should roll up their sleeves and put the taxpayer, the consumer and the UK economy first.
I want to address some of the issues the Minister raised about the detail of the Bill. First, on banking safety and protections for the taxpayer, Labour believes that a reserve power for full separation is needed, not just the firm-by-firm approach that the Government have conceded. Stopping short on backstop powers will reduce the chances that ring-fencing will succeed. Ministers are ignoring the commission’s conclusions, claiming that it would be wrong to give the regulators full separation powers, but the commission is scathing in its report today, saying:
“The Government has erected a straw man which it has then successfully demolished, because we made no such recommendation”
in the first place.
It is clear that the commission wants a full separation power only after a full review and decision by Government and Parliament—perhaps it was being inadvertently misrepresented by the Treasury—so it would be far more sensible to legislate now, not just if one or two individual banks misbehave, but in case ring-fencing as a whole fails across the sector. Indeed, we see cross-sector failings, as LIBOR illustrates, so it is not enough to have a half-done backstop. Stopping short will deliver only half the backstop measures that we need and will have corporate lawyers across the City rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of litigation against regulators who might want to intervene on a case-by-case basis. However, given the possible views of the other place, I suspect that the Government will eventually be forced to change their mind.
Let me turn to leverage and the risk-weighting of assets, which has been introduced as an antidote by regulators to the high-risk, high-reward culture that was pervasive in banks before the crisis. However, the risk-weighting process has been partial and, in some cases, self-defining by the banks, and in the EU the zero risk-weighting attributed to some palpably risky sovereign debts has brought the system into some disrepute. The Basel committee published new evidence in January highlighting the major variants between jurisdictions and banks on this issue. Regulators and the Bank of England need to get a grip of this, but as a counter-balance we also need protections against the over-extended vulnerability of bank balance sheets. That is why the leverage ratio powers need to be clearly set out in the Bill and phased in ahead of the European Union plans for the end of this decade, which is one of the main recommendations and conclusions of the Vickers report.
Mr Love
Vickers was absolutely clear in his evidence to the commission about the need for a higher leverage ratio, as were the current Governor of the Bank of England and the forthcoming Governor. With such evidence presented to the commission, we wonder why the Government simply refuse to listen.
Chris Leslie
My hon. Friend is spot on. A bank’s leverage is the ratio of its assets to its equity capital. Its equity is equal to the value of its assets minus the value of its liabilities. A higher leverage ratio magnifies returns because any growth in the assets will be proportionally greater if equity is thin. The corollary, however, is that any losses are also magnified if leverage is greater. Such a bank’s equity can be wiped out by a smaller shock than would wipe out the equity of a less leveraged institution.
Vickers recommended a 25:1 leverage ratio for systemically important banks—in other words, 4% of equity capital—but the Chancellor has dismissed that proposal. The parliamentary commission says that it is “not convinced” by the Government’s decision to reject Vickers’ recommendation to limit leverage in that way, and that it
“considers it essential that the ring-fence should be supported by a higher leverage ratio, and would expect the leverage ratio to be set substantially higher than the 3% minimum required under Basel III.”
Finance (No. 3) Bill
Debate between Chris Leslie and Andrew Love(13 years, 1 month ago)
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Chris Leslie
We find ourselves in the Committee stage of the Finance Bill, a rather large two-volume measure that, over the coming two days on the Floor of the House, we will no doubt explore in some detail. The Bill will then progress upstairs to Committee, where more detailed scrutiny will take place.
It is a peculiarity of Ways and Means resolutions and of the way in which proposed finance legislation is scrutinised in the House of Commons that hon. Members who are not Ministers may not table amendments to Finance Bills that would have the effect of raising the level of taxation. That was news to me, perhaps because I was in government and did not think about tabling such amendments, but the rules of order are as they are, so the amendment does not propose—because we cannot—an increase in the rate of the bank levy. Instead, it calls for a review of the rate and the general approach to bank taxation adopted by the Treasury. It seeks to look into the rationale behind the rate that the Treasury has chosen for the bank levy and why a number of other choices were made.
Mr Andrew Love (Edmonton) (Lab/Co-op)
Does my hon. Friend agree that in setting the rate the Government missed an opportunity? The bank levy could have raised significant sums to help with the other policies that we hoped they might pursue.
Chris Leslie
Indeed. Were it possible under the rules of order for the Opposition to table an amendment to increase the bank levy rate, we probably would have done so. However, we were unable to do so because of the slightly arcane rules of order. We need to examine the rationale behind the rate chosen by the Minister and understand why the Government moved from a threshold approach to triggering the bank levy, to a tax-free allowance of a certain amount before which banks would pay against the chargeable liabilities of the bank levy.
We also need to understand whether the bank levy is, as my hon. Friend suggests, an adequate step when considered in the context of the wider economy and public finances. Ultimately, we need to understand whether the Treasury is being straight with the public and honest about the taxes that the banks will pay over the years ahead. We have debated the Government’s approach to the banking sector before, and we look forward to the final report of the Vickers commission on the state of competition and regulation of the banks so that never again can these institutions take such extreme risks and gambles that land in the lap of the taxpayer when the going gets tough, as they did before the credit crunch.
Chris Leslie
My hon. Friend makes an extremely prescient intervention, because the Chancellor, under pressure from the Opposition, had to cave in to a concession on corporation tax in the March Budget. The Government announced the bank levy last June, so we knew that they would be introducing this tax, yet the corporation tax cuts will clearly benefit the banks significantly. The Treasury claims that in the March Budget it offset the benefit that the banks will apparently get as a result of the reduction in corporation tax rates, but we will have to wait to see whether the slight increase in the bank levy—around £100 million—introduced in the Budget will be sufficient to offset the full corporation tax cuts that the banks will enjoy over the lifetime of this Parliament. I recall that the written answer to a question I tabled on the predicted benefits to the banks of the corporation tax reductions suggested that that would be about £100 million in year one, £200 million in year two, £300 million in year three, and so on, but that largely reflects the reductions in corporation tax rates. That is something of a moot point, because we contend that the design of the bank levy is insufficient. Today’s debate should provide an opportunity to seek proper redress for the crisis and ensure that we put the banks on a fair tax basis, but that is not what the Government are seeking with this pathetically small bank levy proposal.
Chris Leslie
Even the Swedish advocate a bank levy, and we must acknowledge that the alternative financial changes are being made in a number of jurisdictions across the world. Obviously, the more jurisdictions in which such measures are pursued, the better, because that will remove the argument on regulatory arbitrage.
However, it is worth looking at the pathology and history of the bank levy, and at how the Chancellor has tweaked the rate. The Government pull back from a higher rate when they think it is too much, but sometimes the Chancellor gets into hot water and feels the need to change that approach. On the fateful morning of 8 February, at 7.30, the Chancellor went on the “Today” programme and announced a mini-Budget. It just so happened, by pure coincidence, that that was on the day of Treasury questions, when he was struggling with the banks in the negotiations on the damp squib that was Project Merlin. While we are on Project Merlin, we should not let go the opportunity to note that borrowing is increasingly expensive for small and medium-sized enterprises, and that according to the most recent data, there is less and not more availability.
The Chancellor changed the rate again in the March Budget, when, as I said, the Government were forced into a U-turn in the face of criticism of the reductions in corporation tax. That would have been a massive cash-back bonanza for the banks—it could still turn out that way, but we must wait for the final figures. At no point during the design of the bank levy have the Government said why they are capping revenues at just £2.6 billion. What is their fixation with that yield?
Mr Love
Before my hon. Friend moves off the subject of Project Merlin, does he agree that it was more than pathetic that, after telling the banks that they would increase the banking levy unless the banks came up with the goods, the Government made a pipsqueak change which did not rise to the occasion?
Chris Leslie
Absolutely. I cannot figure out why the Government refused to go beyond that £2.5 billion or £2.6 billion. That is a strange way to design a tax. Normally, a Government would think about whether the rate set was fair and just, and about the requirement for revenue yield, and they might even analyse the effect of the levy in a regulatory impact assessment or whatever. However, at no point have the Government said why they are reluctant to go beyond that £2.6 billion. Perhaps there has been a deal behind the scenes between the Chancellor and the banks, but if there has been such a deal, it is probably the only one that he has been able to reach.
Chris Leslie
The Minister needs to answer that question. Hon. Members might care to turn to page 297 of the Bill. The steps might at first appear quite straightforward, but then we get to this odd provision in paragraph 7, with its proportions X, Y and Z of various different amounts and so on. I understand that that provision is triggered because the Treasury has to recoup retrospectively some of the money taken, since the Chancellor tweaked the levels of tax on 8 February and again in March. It therefore becomes incredibly complex and difficult to hold to account. The design of the bank levy has not been made easy by the Chancellor’s decisions.
Mr Love
On the intervention from my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), is it not rather strange, given that the Chancellor has set up an Office of Tax Simplification and announced as his first measure in the Budget that he wanted to put the principle of simplification at the forefront of tax consideration, that here we have something that is almost as complex as it gets?
Chris Leslie
As I said, the reason for the complexity is that all the variables in the design of the bank levy have to be amended because the Treasury wants to squash it around that figure of £2.5 billion or £2.6 billion of revenue. In other words, the whole of the bank levy is being driven by that particular sum, which is a very odd way of designing a tax.
Chris Leslie
Staffing at HM Revenue and Customs is under incredible pressures. Indeed, there have been a number of redundancies and posts lost. It has not been explained where the extra resources will come from to ensure that the bank levy, in all its complexity, can be enforced adequately. Again, the Minister needs to say what extra capacity HMRC will have to implement this increasingly complex bank levy.
Chris Leslie
In a moment, but I need to make some progress.
I understand that there is a difference between short-term and long-term liabilities. However, what will be the impact on businesses in the real economy if short-term liabilities are less attractive to major banks? For example, if a small firm has a bank deposit of over £100,000—to protect its cash flow or whatever—that happens to be above the level of the deposit guarantee scheme, what is to stop the banks raising their bank charges on SME deposit accounts to try to divest themselves of such short-term liabilities? That is an important point, because there will be consequences from the design of the bank levy. I would like the Minister to explain to the Committee why short-term liabilities and long-term liabilities have been divided in that way.
Can the Minister explain the position on the reported legal challenge under European Union law, which I understand many in the banking community are watching carefully? The Hungarian Government have introduced a levy on their energy and telecoms sectors. I understand that a case has been taken—or is due to be taken—to the European Court to claim that a levy on a specific sector of the economy is somehow unfair or not possible. To what extent is the Minister confident that the case will not have a bearing on the implementation of a banking levy here in the UK?
I would also be grateful if the Minister could answer the question about complexity and opacity in the bank levy accounting systems. As I understand it, overseas banks can sometimes not use IFRS—international financial reporting standards. If those banks do not use them, they will need to re-compute their chargeable equity and liabilities with reference to the UK’s GAAP—generally accepted accounting principles—or IFRS, in other words, by preparing a notional consolidation under those systems, including for branches. Is that anticipated to create a problem? What do the Government foresee as a solution to that level? Obviously we have banks that cross jurisdictions and use a series of different accounting platforms, so I would be grateful if the Minister could clarify some of the comments that have been made about that.
However, it is the Government’s general approach to banks and banking taxation that concerns many hon. Members—a general approach that, as we know, is quite woeful. Hon. Members have already raised their concerns about some of the bonuses that we have seen and the breathtaking behaviour that the banks have engaged in, even though they were the root cause of the credit crunch.
That makes the Government’s tax giveaway to the banks even more staggering. The post-Budget reaction last June, when the bank levy was announced, was indeed positive from the bankers themselves. They enjoyed the Government’s decisions on the bank levy. One commentator said:
“We’d expect most domestically-orientated banks…to be better off after four years than they were pre-Budget”,
and a City insider said that
“some banks will have a feeling of glee at the way this has worked out”.
Clearly, we need to advocate a bank bonus tax to raise £3.5 billion, as it did before. That deserves to be repeated this year. Even if it were to raise just £2 billion, that would make a massive difference to our society and our economy. For example, we have calculated that such an amount could be used to establish a youth jobs fund—using a similar model to the future jobs fund, which this Government have abolished—creating 90,000 new youth jobs at a time when youth unemployment is close to 1 million, with one in five young people on the dole.
That money could also help to construct 25,000 new homes for low-cost home ownership and affordable social renting. That would create tens of thousands of jobs in the construction industry and new apprenticeships alongside them. The money could also provide £200 million of funding for the regional growth fund, the Government’s rather lamentable replacement for the regional development agency funding. That could help to provide for regional projects and promote growth. The Government’s changes represent a two-thirds cut on the previous funding, and the first wave of £450 million in grants was several times oversubscribed with bids. We therefore need to revisit the regional growth fund, and a repeat of the bank bonus tax could support that.
The bonuses being paid are still vast; they remain at eye-watering levels. Despite the smoke and mirrors of Project Merlin, in which Ministers broke their promises to take action despite the warm words in the coalition agreement, the bonuses remain high. Let us just remind ourselves of what the coalition agreement promised. The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats said:
“We will bring forward detailed proposals for robust action to tackle unacceptable bonuses in the financial services sector; in developing these proposals, we will ensure they are effective in reducing risk.”
That is on page 9 of the agreement, right up front among the promises that the coalition made.
The Government could not even bring themselves to promote the basic transparency that we expect when it comes to bonuses and remuneration. The most that they could extract voluntarily from the banks in Project Merlin was an agreement to report anonymously on the total remuneration of the five highest paid senior executives of the bank, excluding board members. That is a weak and shameful compromise. The Government are not even forcing the banks to disclose all bonuses above £1 million, even though Labour’s legislation allows them to do so. That provision is already on the statute book.
Chris Leslie
“But surely that is a complete coincidence”, he said ironically! I do not know whether my hon. Friend was making the point that this is payback time, but the level of these bonuses is incredible.
Let me finish my point about Barclays. I was saying that £38 million in bonuses and salaries went to just the top five earners. That is enough money to pay the wages of more than 1,000 qualified nurses in our NHS. That gives some meaning to the scale—enough money to pay for 1,000 qualified nurses.
Chris Leslie
Absolutely; but, quite apart from the obscenity of the scale of some of those bonuses, there is a hard-headed economic rationale for more transparency. If shareholders cannot see what senior executives in the banking sector are being paid, that indicates a dysfunction in the corporate governance of the banks, and if the bonus pots of certain executives are being swelled by their behaviour—by the choices that they make and the risks that they are taking—perhaps those were some of the antecedents of the credit crunch. We need transparency to prevent us from repeating the problems that occurred in 2008.
Finance Bill
Debate between Chris Leslie and Andrew Love(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Chris Leslie
I could not agree more. It would not be in order to stray too far from the topic of corporation tax, but it is important that we see this change in context. It appears that the Chancellor press-released the fact that he was taking, in some brave measure, an amount of money from the banks through the banking levy, but failed to publicise that he was also giving that back with the other hand through the reduction in the corporation tax rate.
We are talking about significant and serious amounts of money, and the Minister ought not to be so careless with this revenue as it is needed to repair our deficit and to protect our public services. I am very surprised that the Treasury did not take action to plug this loss of revenue, but chose instead to apply the reduction in corporation tax across the board.
We must not forget that the banks have already benefited from an enormous amount of largesse from the taxpayer more widely. The Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group had £76 billion of their shares bought by the taxpayer. The Bank of England had to be indemnified against losses incurred in providing more than £200 billion of liquidity support. There have been guarantees of up to £250 billion of wholesale borrowing by the banks to strengthen liquidity. Also, £40 billion of loans and other funds were made to Bradford & Bingley and the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. There was insurance cover of more than £280 billion for bank assets as well. These changes were not unnecessary at the time; they were absolutely vital as a way of ensuring that our banking system—our credit system—did not collapse entirely.
Had the coalition parties been in power at that time they would have had to fulfil exactly those same commitments, assurances and undertakings to make sure that our banking system did not collapse. That is why it infuriates so many members of the public to hear Members on the Government Benches claiming that that was a partisan cause or that our spending such a large share of our national income on public services is the real cause of our deficit, when in fact responsibility lies squarely at the feet of our banking sector.
Mr Love
May I correct something my hon. Friend has said? Most of the measures the previous Government introduced to safeguard the financial system were in fact opposed at the time by the Conservative party, although it appears to have changed its mind. I also want to ask about the public concerns about the widespread reports from banking spokespersons in respect of this supposed levy. They are suggesting that there will be an opportunity during the consultation to weaken the legislation and reduce the amount of tax they pay. Does my hon. Friend deprecate such projects, and will he try to ensure that the Government stand firm against any such thing?
Chris Leslie
That is entirely so. Those with significant financial wherewithal—the corporate advisers, the consultants, the accountants—are always exceptionally adept at lobbying Ministers and making their points in their detailed ways, often with the general public entirely unaware that such measures are being put in place to their advantage. Clearly, the banks have been very aggressive in lobbying for these changes. It appears they may well have been successful in watering down the banking levy, while at the same time gaining benefit from this corporation tax change.
The Minister may argue, “Ah well, some of our banks made very significant losses in previous financial years, and because of the complexities of our corporation tax law, companies have certain rights to recoup some of those losses from the corporation tax they paid previously.” In my view, the banks should also be excluded from making such claims—or at least, their ability to do so should be lessened. I was unable to frame my amendment in that way—that takes a certain level of drafting—but we must ensure that the Treasury does not allow the exceptionally clever and highly paid advisers whom the banks can employ to find their way round the provisions and take even more money from the taxpayer.