Oral Answers to Questions

Cat Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

My hon. Friend and constituency neighbour is right. Support for Cheshire science goes across the county, and it particularly supports the brilliant work being done in Macclesfield and Alderley Park not just by AstraZeneca but by many new companies that have come to that estate. It is something that I know he champions.

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

T10. When does the Chancellor expect the UK to regain its triple A credit rating?

[Mr Osborne]

As the hon. Lady knows—she has asked me about this before—we have a triple A credit rating with one credit rating agency, and we will let the others make their own decisions.

Spending Review and Autumn Statement

Cat Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 25th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

My hon. Friend is a great champion of his Poole and Dorset constituents. The enterprise zone is going to be a great success in Dorset, and the funding formula will of course help schools in Dorset.

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

I thank the Chancellor for clarifying that the £15 million raised from the tampon tax will go to domestic violence charities as well as to women’s health charities. Given that women have gone from paying a luxury tax to what is in effect an insurance payment in case they have to flee violence, will he, in the interests of equality, consider a tax on lads mags to fund prostate cancer, or do only women have to pay for the price of their own services?

[Mr Osborne]

I think the hon. Lady should be fair about the situation that the United Kingdom finds itself facing. When she was Chief Secretary to the Treasury, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) gave a very clear explanation of why, because of EU rules, the United Kingdom cannot reduce VAT on sanitary products below 5%. It is no good just standing up and asserting that we can do this, when Labour Ministers have stood at the Dispatch Box and explained why it is not possible. We will continue to campaign, as the previous Labour Government did, to get rid of that tax in the EU, but in the meantime, we are doing something they did not do, which is to take the money and put it into a fund. I ask the hon. Lady to come forward with some good causes that help both women who suffer from domestic violence and women’s health charities so that they can be funded from that pot.

The Economy

Cat Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 18th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

I want to speak briefly about the reference in the motion to 85% of the money saved from tax and benefit changes coming out of the pockets of women. Women and children are hit especially hard by the choices that the Government have made. With 4.1 million children now living in absolute poverty—an increase of 500,000 since 2009-10—and the Resolution Foundation projecting that a further 200,000 families will fall into poverty by 2020, it is clear that those who are paying the price of the economic crash in 2008 are not those who caused it.

My hon. Friends have pointed out that working families will be, on average, £1,300 a year worse off because of the tax credit changes. Young workers are also paying a high price. The so-called living wage does not kick in until someone is 25. Does it cost those who are under 25 less to buy a loaf of bread or a pint of milk? Does a landlord charge less rent because someone is under 25? A living wage should be enough to live on, and people under 25 have many of same living costs as those of us who are over 25. A worker who is under 25, has one child and works a 35-hour week on the national minimum wage will not get the £910 a year pay increase next April, but will still lose £1,754.20 because of the tax credit changes. Housing benefit is no longer paid until people are 21, and with one in four homeless people being lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, that is hitting hardest those who identify as LGBT.

According to today’s figures from the Office for National Statistics, the gender pay gap has fallen by 0.2% to 9.4% in the full-time median gender pay gap category. I welcome that fall, but progress is painfully slow. We are looking at another 50 years before we achieve gender pay equality. Our pay gap is well above the European average. That has to do with many things—the segregated workforce, women working predominately in part-time jobs, women balancing caring responsibilities and the fact that maternity discrimination costs women £1,200 for an employment tribunal. It was not women, children or young people who caused the financial crisis, but they are absolutely paying the price for it.

The Chancellor has not closed the deficit, as he said he would. Borrowing is £200 billion higher than he planned in 2010, the productivity gap is widening and housing investment is falling. It gives me great pleasure to support the motion.

Finance Bill

Cat Smith Excerpts

Monday 26th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Jess Phillips]

I feel the need to make all sorts of declarations of interest in this debate, having used sanitary products pretty much all my life.

I wish to pay credit to a number of women who have brought this subject to the House over the years. Without women in this place, I am certain that this issue would never have been raised, although I am delighted that so many men interested in Europe are in the Chamber to talk about it. Dawn Primarolo, a working-class woman brave enough to dare to speak up in Parliament about the taboo subject of women’s periods back in the year 2000, should be commended.

Today, when such topics are far easier for us to discuss, I have already received a number of sideways glances from colleagues around the estate on speaking about the subject and there is a certain desire among Conservative Members to say the word “products” instead of tampons. I know from speaking to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) today that, at the time, it was considered vulgar and even shameful that Ms Primarolo brought forward the subject. She was brave. Today, our brave woman prize goes to my hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury (Paula Sherriff). Regardless of what has been said on the other side of the House, doing nothing achieves nothing.

It is completely ridiculous that women are taxed, even at a 5% rate, for a product which, in my experience, is more than essential. The fact that we still have the tax is probably down in no small part to the fact that most of the people in the House and in our sister Parliaments all across the EU do not have wombs. The reason why we must force the Government to have a conversation with our European partners is that, without force, I fear that they will be too squeamish to talk about women’s periods. But they should not be: every person in the House exists only because their mother had a period. Today, with half term, Parliament has been teeming with children—my own have been on the slides in Portcullis House—who all exist only because their mothers had periods. It is nothing to be scared of, and nor should any man or woman ever feel that we should not talk about periods.

Such a revision in taxation may seem a marginal change, but it would make a huge difference to the women in this country. Having worked in a women’s refuge, I know that the things we had to stock up on the most—because they presented a challenge to the budgets of the women in our care—were nappies, tampons and sanitary towels.

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that VAT is a very unequal tax and that it hits the poorest women in our communities hardest?

--- Later in debate ---

[Wes Streeting]

This debate is in great contrast to that taking place in the House of Lords. Here we are debating a cut to inheritance tax, while the unelected House is championing the interests of working people by doing something that many more Government Members should have done: put their consciences in their feet and marched through the correct Lobby.

We know from evidence already debated that the changes to inheritance tax will effectively cost the Exchequer £940 million by 2020-21. As the great Nye Bevan once said,

“the language of priorities is the religion of socialism”.

To Government Members who ask where our priorities lie, I say: they will always be in championing the interests of hard-working people and trying to improve the lot of the low-paid. For this reason, new clause 9 would delete the Government’s proposed changes to inheritance tax. That says exactly where our priorities are and where they should be. It is humiliating for the Chancellor and Prime Minister, having claimed at the recent Conservative party conference to be these great centrist modernisers, that it is in fact the House of Lords that has had to do what the elected House of Commons should have done last week, and still has the opportunity to do in debates taking place tomorrow and on Thursday.

The “Conservative modernisation project mark 2” is now dead in the water, but let us remind Tory Members of “modernisation project mark 1”. We remember the Prime Minister promising “the greenest Government ever” when he was running with the huskies and hugging hoodies, yet here we see clause 45 of the Finance Bill, which will remove the exemption from the climate change levy for electricity produced by renewable sources from 1 August this year—it will be backdated. Conservative Members need to decide whether they are going to be the “true blue” Conservatives that we have seen represented in the unlikely forum of a debate on tampons and sanitary products, or whether they are the party of the centre ground and the working man and woman.

[Cat Smith]

My hon. Friend mentions his environmental credentials, which I share, and also mentions sanitary products such as tampons and sanitary towels. Does he recognise that menstrual cups and moon cups are more environmentally friendly sanitary products and should also be included in this debate?

[Wes Streeting]

In this as in other respects, I have always favoured a woman’s right to choose. It is, of course, for women to decide which is the appropriate form of sanitary product. My hon. Friend is quite right that the moon cup does indeed have the environmental benefits that she mentions. I was glad to add my name in support of new clause 7 proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury (Paula Sherriff), which would tackle this issue. I am glad to see so much cross-party support, but I am disappointed to hear some of the language used this evening about our partners in Europe.

Apparently, according to the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin), this is the most iniquitous measure that the European Union has put in place. No wonder there is such representation in the Chamber. I hope that the Out campaign is not going to be predicated on VAT on sanitary products, as proponents are likely to find it a struggle to get wider traction. I find it objectionable that so many Conservative Members talk about negotiating with our European partners as “begging”. It is no different from our constituents coming to lobby us and having a reasonable conversation with us. If this is how the renegotiation strategy is going to work, we really are in trouble as a country.

Productivity

Cat Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 17th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Chris Leslie]

Labour Members have consistently supported proper and sustained capital allowances for business investment. One of the errors in the previous Parliament was that the Chancellor reduced them so rapidly before he then saw the error of his ways and returned them to the level at which they are now. That chopping-and-changing, stop-start approach is anathema to good, proper, long-term business planning.

We would not know it from the Chancellor’s complacency, but UK economic productivity is stuck in the slow lane. According to the Office for National Statistics, the stagnation of productivity growth is “unprecedented” in post-war Britain. Earlier this month, the OECD said that weak labour productivity remains a problem and that

“the sustainability of economic expansion and further progress in living standards rest on boosting productivity growth”.

The Bank of England has emphasised the “extremely and uncharacteristically weak” growth in UK productivity and said that there is still

“great uncertainty about how productivity might evolve”

and how that could affect the economy.

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

Why does my hon. Friend think that productivity has been so stagnant for the past three years in particular?

[Chris Leslie]

The evidence is very clear that we have had persistently poor productivity in recent years. I will talk about the impact of Government investment on infrastructure and tackling the skills challenge that we need to address. The issue has been very much kicked into the long grass in recent years, and that is not good enough.