LIBOR (FSA Investigation)
Glenda Jackson Excerpts(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Osborne
My hon. Friend is right to point out that under the current arrangements, these fines, including the one that Barclays is paying, will be used to reduce the levy that the rest of the banking industry pays to the Financial Services Authority, so the rest of the banking industry will be the beneficiary of the fines. I do not think that that is right and that is why we are making the changes. We are making them retrospective from the beginning of April to ensure that the fine paid by Barclays will be available to be used for the benefit for the public, and I am sure that we will have a lively debate about how that money should be spent.
Glenda Jackson (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)
I welcome the Chancellor’s commitment to broad-ranging and hard regulation for the British banking system—a position eschewed like the plague by his colleagues when they were in opposition. Will he guarantee that the powers given to the FCA will ensure that it is genuinely what many of my constituents have campaigned for for some time: a banking watchdog, not a lapdog?
Mr Osborne
I can certainly tell the hon. Lady what we want the new regulators to be. We want them to be tough, independent regulators who hold the banking industry to account. However, it is frankly pretty pathetic for Labour MPs, including former Ministers in the Labour Government, to get up and blame the then Conservative Opposition for what happened when they were in office. Why do they not take some responsibility for what they did?
Living Standards
Glenda Jackson Excerpts(12 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr Gauke
I want to make a bit more progress.
That is also why we increased the child tax credit by £135, in line with inflation, which means that, by this April, it will have increased by £390 since May 2010. It is telling that the Opposition motion makes no mention of this Government’s plans to increase the personal allowance, no doubt because their last contribution to the debate on income tax for the low paid was the 10p debacle.
Glenda Jackson
Will the Minister tell us how his Government are helping the poorest in our society? Hundreds of families in my constituency are going to lose working family tax credit and will not be able to increase their hours. They are facing the possibility of losing their homes because of the cap on housing benefit, and of losing services because of the cuts to local authorities. The people who are most dependent on such services are inevitably the poorest in our society, yet his Government seem quite deliberately to be attacking them, perhaps because they believe that there are no votes in that part of the country.
Mr Gauke
We believe there are a lot of votes in the hon. Lady’s constituency.
I was going through the things we have done to help the poor, but let me continue. What we have done with the personal allowance is a big step—helping working people, ensuring that work pays and lifting living standards for those on low incomes. That is why this Government have made increasing the personal allowance one of our key priorities in supporting low and middle-income families across the UK. In April 2012, we will make a £630 increase in the personal allowance, taking it £8,105, which, taken with the £1,000 increase in April 2011, will benefit 25 million taxpayers, taking 1.1 million low-income individuals out of income tax altogether. We note that the shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury expressed her opposition to that policy just a few minutes ago.
Comprehensive Spending Review
Glenda Jackson Excerpts(13 years, 6 months ago)
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Stephen Williams
I am running out of time, so I will not be able to.
The Chief Secretary announced that the comprehensive spending review was designed to achieve three things. The first of those was growth, and today’s statement by the Business Secretary certainly builds on that. I welcome the £1.4 billion for the regional growth fund and the local enterprise partnerships that have been set up to replace the regional development agencies. In Bristol, the South West Regional Development Agency will not be missed, and I look forward to working with our local enterprise partnership for Bristol and the west of England. I welcome the fact that the science budget has been protected in cash terms, and the fact that £250 million extra is being put into apprenticeships—something that I spoke about repeatedly in the last Parliament, when I led for my party on these issues.
I also welcome the moves towards a low-carbon economy to ensure that we have stable and sustainable growth in future, with the green investment bank and the first investment in carbon capture and storage, which the previous Government pulled out of.
I welcome, too, the transport schemes that have been announced so far this week, but I look forward to confirmation next week, when we have the announcements on rail, that the electrification of the great western main line from Paddington to Bristol and to south Wales should go ahead in order to support growth and stability in Swindon, Bristol, the west of England and south Wales.
The second theme of the CSR is reform to the welfare system, which is absolutely essential. The need for that was recognised by the last Labour Government, but now Lord Freud is a Minister in the coalition Government and Lord Hutton is advising the coalition Government on how to achieve what the previous Government recognised but failed to tackle. It is a key principle that work should always pay: it should be clear to everybody that if one is in work one should be better off. However, the welfare system is a social contract between all of us, and, in addition, taxpayers must think it is fair for them to pay for it.
Glenda Jackson
In the light of what the hon. Gentleman just told the House, does he support the cuts in housing benefit?
Stephen Williams
The cuts in housing benefit are an example of difficult decisions that have been made. However, I have to say to the hon. Lady—we represent similar constituencies, mine in Bristol and hers in central London—that £400 a week in housing benefit is not a miserly amount for someone to fund their accommodation.
Stephen Williams
Not again. I do not think that the coalition Government will be making people homeless on the scale that the hyperbole coming from the Opposition Benches suggests.
The third theme of the CSR is the need for fairness. In the last Parliament, I spoke many times about the importance of achieving social mobility. We know from the studies of those born in 1958 and those born in 1970 that social mobility has stagnated. There are many complicated reasons for that, not all of which can be laid at the door of the previous Government. I am sure that their intentions were good in many circumstances, but sadly after 13 years social mobility was still stuck and Britain was still the second least socially mobile country in the world after the United States. That is why I particularly welcome the fairness premium of £7.2 billion over the comprehensive spending review period that was confirmed in the review, and the £2.5 billion pupil premium, which is from additional funding from outside schools’ budgets and is being introduced to help the poorest children from around our country. I grew up being entitled to free school meals and know what it is like to make the journey from poverty to a career through work and effort. Many children need support from their schoolteachers and mentoring from other people to bring about that transformation. I am a liberal interventionist and make no apology for that. It is important that that support continues through to further and higher education, so I welcome the £150 million higher education scholarship as a basis of support for young people who access higher education for the first time.
This Government inherited a desperate situation. We have the worst deficit of all the major economies in the world, at 11% of our national income. It is not entirely the fault of the banks. The structural deficit was high before the bank bail-out and continued to increase after it, and the Labour Government spent recklessly in their last days. The current Government are acting to reduce the deficit, introduce reform, encourage growth and, most importantly, encourage fairness in our society and achieve it through social mobility.
Finance Bill
Glenda Jackson Excerpts(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Andrew George
I am very grateful to the hon. Lady, and we will have to compete on sentence lengths in future. Given her experience on the issue, it is worth while to quote once again the Save the Children briefing note that was circulated to the House, as the hon. Member for North Durham did. As the hon. Lady says, there is a cumulative effect, but if any amendments are tabled to the Finance Bill, they will be directly related to VAT and other matters will have to be considered in other ways, not necessarily under the Bill.
The Bill is rather narrowly set, and the Budget mentioned other measures, which must presumably come forward in another Finance Bill that will be presented to us in the autumn, so I assume that there will be a further opportunity for those issues to be examined, because only seven measures are contained in the 11 clauses of this rather narrowly drawn Bill.
I realise that I have just committed myself to another very long sentence with an enormous sub-clause in it, but I said that I would quote from the evidence presented to us by Save the Children, which is important. It states:
“Increasing VAT will simply widen inequalities and entrench the unfairness that exists in the tax system...It is also worth noting that data from the Office for National Statistics shows that, on average, the wealthiest households contain fewer children than poorer and middle income households, meaning that the unfairness of the tax system is weighted against children.”
Further to the point about whether the increase will have an impact on low-income households, Save the Children therefore rightly raises another issue. I should like the Treasury Ministers, in response to my questions and those that others will no doubt raise, to elucidate on that a little further.
What we need in this debate and in the further stages of scrutiny that the Bill will necessarily go through is a lot more information. I would describe the situation as a tribal mire in which there is translucent evidence, and that evidence needs to be much clearer.
Glenda Jackson (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)
I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way, and I admire his mea culpa—is it St Sebastian, the man who stands there with all the arrows? Certainly the hon. Gentleman has portrayed that for us this evening. However, with respect, the issue is not simply VAT. In his opening remarks he said he supported the Budget and the Finance Bill because we are all in this together, but we are not.
No one sitting in this Chamber or within the environs of this Chamber is in danger of losing their home because of the changes that his Government are bringing in with regard to housing benefit, but 303 of my constituents are in danger of losing precisely that. They are not alone in London or the country at large. The hon. Gentleman gave a very good mea culpa on VAT, but the complicity of his party with what the Conservatives are going to do to our country is not absolved, however long his sentence.
Mr Speaker
Order. May I just say to the hon. Lady that I could listen to her, almost without interruption, for some hours, but that shorter interventions would be helpful? It is always a pleasure to listen to her fantastic enunciation.