Beer Taxation and Pubs

Lord Brennan of Canton Excerpts

Thursday 28th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered beer taxation and pubs.

I am delighted to have secured this important debate, alongside the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Ruth Smeeth) and my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans), and I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for allocating us this time.

In the short time that I have available, I hope to set out a compelling case as to why the Minister should recommend to the Chancellor that he cut beer duty in future Budgets, reform business rates and continue to look at new ways of reducing the disproportionate tax burden on pubs and breweries. Representing a Black Country constituency as I do, and as chair of the all-party parliamentary beer group—the largest Back-Bench all-party group in this House—I know what an important issue this is for many of our constituents. My own Dudley South constituency is home to three very distinct and individual brewers: Bathams, dating back to the 1860s; Black Country Ales, which is a much more recent and fast-growing brewery; and Ma Pardoes, one of the original Campaign for Real Ale breweries.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his great work as chair of the all-party parliamentary beer group, of which—like many other hon. Members—I am a member. Does he agree that, although it is very welcome that the Government extended rates relief to pubs, it is disappointing that they did not also extend it to small music venues, where people often also drink the occasional beer?

[Mike Wood]

Of course, the business rates relief extension was part of the support for high streets and community pubs in particular. I think there is a particular value to that, but I certainly would not be opposed to the kind of measures to which the hon. Gentleman has referred.

When we last debated beer duty in this House—in Westminster Hall in October 2017—I said that there were 75 pubs in my constituency. I am afraid that there are now only 73, despite my very best efforts.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Brennan of Canton Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

The points my hon. Friend makes are well made, and of course this is about getting the balance right. The Government recognise that plastic packaging can play an important role, but we want to reduce the environmental impact of single-use plastic waste and encourage more sustainable forms of plastic packaging that can be recycled. The packaging tax will encourage businesses to use more recycled plastic in the production of packaging and will therefore drive a more sustainable packaging industry.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

My 10-year-old constituent Emily Haines wrote to me about this issue, and she assured me she had not just copied and pasted. Indeed, when I wrote back to her by hand, her father emailed me to say that he had no idea that his daughter had written to me on this subject. So may I ask the Chancellor not to listen to those who say that he should in any way dilute what he is doing on single-use plastics? Indeed, he should do more and do as Emily says: introduce “tough new taxes” to make sure that we deal with this environmental scourge.

[Mr Hammond]

That is what we are doing. This will be the world’s first plastic tax and it is carefully designed to go with the grain of the market: to incentivise manufacturers to use more recycled plastic in their packaging. Because of that, it creates an effective market for packaging and, together with the producer responsibility note system, will transform the way in which plastic packaging enters the circular economy in this country.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Brennan of Canton Excerpts

Tuesday 29th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Philip Hammond]

I agree with my hon. Friend on this. Forecasting has had a bit of a bad rap in this House over the past couple of years, but this report was interesting, because it showed that economic forecasts in fact have a good track record of delivering, and we should pay attention to what the experts are telling us.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

T6. It is Independent Venue Week. Such venues are the research and development to a £4.5 billion music industry, but a third of them have closed in the past decade. Why is the Chancellor, who has Runnymede Jazz Club in his constituency, giving a rates discount to pubs but not to music venues? Will he look at that again?

[Mr Speaker]

Let us hear about the jazz situation in Runnymede.

Finance (No. 3) Bill

Lord Brennan of Canton Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 8th January 2019 Commons Chamber

There has been some suggestion that the Government might accept amendment 7 at some point today in order to avoid defeat. Usually the Opposition would welcome that, but unfortunately, if that capitulation comes, it will show that the Government have absolutely no strategy for anything other than surviving until the end of each day. I have begun to think that they will accept almost any amendment to a Finance Bill to avoid defeat, regardless of what it proposes or of how incoherent it would make the legislation, because that is the only objective they seem able to pursue. That is no strategy for delivering the most important decision this country has taken for 70 years. That is why the Opposition have tabled new clauses 3 and 7 and amendment 1 to address some other serious issues in the Bill.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

Given that the Business Secretary said in the House earlier that no deal should not be contemplated, and that my hon. Friend is outlining the possibility of the Government accepting amendment 7, would it not be right for the Government to say clearly at the end of business today that they are ruling out no deal because it would be so damaging to this country?

[Jonathan Reynolds]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. We all know that several members of the Government take that view, even though they may not be able to say it on the record. They are quite clear as to what no deal would mean, and they would not contemplate going down that route. It would be far simpler and far better to get to a position where ruling out no deal was clearly the Government’s intent.

New clause 3 would oblige the Government to publish a review of the fiscal and economic effects of the exercise of the powers in clause 89, as well as the differences between exercising those powers in Great Britain and in Northern Ireland. As we edge closer to the reality of crashing out without a deal, clause 89 is not simply hypothetical. We are now just two and a half months away from the UK’s exit without an agreement. It is therefore of critical importance that we have a full and transparent view of the implications of a clause of this kind.

Business Banking Fraud

Lord Brennan of Canton Excerpts

Tuesday 9th October 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mr Wragg]

My hon. Friend hits the nail on the head. I pay tribute to the police and crime commissioner, but I also wish to pay tribute to a couple of people who I believe are here in the Gallery today. Instead of the authorities investigating, it was left to a couple of music producers from Cambridge, Paul and Nikki Turner, to crack the case. I hope they are here in Parliament. They are still fighting for compensation for other victims of the crime.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

I endorse what has been said about Anthony Stansfeld.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that this is not just about RBS, as some people seem to think? My constituent, Mike McGrath, went out of business because of his treatment by Lloyds bank.

[Mr Wragg]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely correct: it was systemic across the whole business lending sector. He is right to put that on the record.

The Turners’ reward for bringing the case to the bank’s attention back in 2007 was to be branded conspiracy theorists. The bank—first as HBOS, then as Lloyds—tried to evict them from their home 22 times, spending more on legal action than the value of the home itself. It sent a top partner from one of the country’s best regarded law firms to Cambridge county court to watch the hearings. The Turnbull report, which details a comprehensive cover-up of the fraud from within the bank, notes lawyers as saying that, once the Turners were out of their home, they would have to accept their fate. This was not the pursuit of justice but a witch hunt to silence whistleblowers.

The Turners approached the Financial Standards Authority, the Serious Fraud Office and the Treasury. Indeed, there was a debate in this very room in June 2009, during which Members urged the authorities to investigate. However, all they encountered was denials and deflection. As my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) pointed out, the case was eventually taken seriously only after Thames Valley police recognised that a crime had been committed. The investigation took seven years to complete and the resource of 151 officers and staff, and it cost £7 million, with only £2 million eventually recovered from the Home Office. Thames Valley police stated that they could have done it in half the time and for half the money, if only the bank had co-operated fully. Unfortunately, the scale and difficulty of investigating the fraud only serves as a warning to other cash-strapped police forces: “Investigate at your peril”.

The reality is that white-collar crimes such as this are expensive and difficult to prosecute, and the agencies responsible for fighting economic crime simply do not have the necessary resources to tackle complex, mid-tier banking fraud. The SFO takes on only a small number of very large cases and has a budget of £53 million. The National Crime Agency’s economic crime command has a budget of £10 million, and the newly established National Economic Crime Centre has a budget of just £6 million. Compared with the sheer scale of fraud in the United Kingdom, which is estimated at more than £190 billion a year, and given the potential for consequential losses, these investigative budgets are, frankly, insignificant.

For those who may think that this is a one-off, it is important to note that the processes employed by HBOS in this case—turnaround units, business valuations and the use of insolvency—are exactly the same tactics seen in the case of other complaints that the all-party parliamentary group on fair business banking has investigated. Such complaints were found to be commonplace, as the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) alluded to, across most financial institutions. The system is ripe for abuse, and we have serious concerns about it.

At this point, I pay tribute to the incredible dedication of the co-chairs of the all-party group, my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) and the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb). In addition, I thank the group’s officers and members for their significant work in running a thorough inquiry into how so many SMEs were abused by their banks, exposing the scale of the issue and the mechanisms by which the frauds were conducted. The APPG has produced an important report that identifies the shortcomings in the current investigative tools and bodies and makes vital recommendations as to how we might start to unpick this sorry mess.

I reiterate the APPG’s calls for a full public inquiry into the treatment of businesses by financial institutions. There are currently more than 10 different inquiries looking at different, isolated issues. It is time that we had a holistic approach and investigated the system as a whole.

Banking Misconduct and the FCA

Lord Brennan of Canton Excerpts

Thursday 10th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

This is an important debate and I congratulate all the hon. Members who have contributed to it so far. Banks occupy a very special and important position in our economy and society. Without them, the economy could not function efficiently. However, they also operate in such a way that they borrow short and lend long, and they always have done. As a result, banks hold a degree of responsibility and trust when they take people’s moneys into their care. I am afraid that over the past few decades, as other hon. Members have described, a culture has been allowed to develop under Governments of different colours to allow banks to basically follow the principle that “Greed is good,” as so well elucidated in 1980s film “Wall Street”. Ultimately, everything that has been described today—the disasters that have been brought upon our constituents—has been born out of the greed of bankers operating not in the interests of our constituents, but to line their own pockets.

[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my hon. Friend accept that the situation is 10 times worse when the bank no longer exists? I have constituents who are still trying to work through HBOS, which is now part of Lloyds, which has washed its hands of it.

[Kevin Brennan]

I absolutely accept that; it is completely the case. I want to mention briefly some of my constituents who have been affected by what has been described today and by other practices that should be incorporated in the public inquiry that other hon. Members have called for. By the way, RBS has today been fined $4.9 billion by the American authorities for its activities when it was expecting to pay something like $12 billion, so if there is concern in the Treasury about the cost of a public inquiry, we have $7.1 billion available, given the assumption that was made by RBS, that could be levied on just one of the banks that we are talking about today to cover the cost of any public inquiry. I hope that the Treasury boffins have taken notice of that statistic.

My constituent Mike McGrath was also a victim of the kind of asset stripping we have heard about today. He can show quite clearly that Lloyds bank lied to the Financial Ombudsman Service to obtain a favourable judgment for itself and so that my constituents’ complaint was not upheld. The decision arrived at by the Financial Ombudsman Service was based on the probability of the evidence, but that evidence was incomplete, inconclusive or contradictory because Lloyds bank did not provide all the evidence that it should have done to the Financial Ombudsman Service. There was detrimental evidence that would have allowed the adjudicator to find in favour of my constituent—as the law should require them to do. Customers should have the right to complain to the Financial Ombudsman Service and get it to adjudicate quickly, fairly and at little cost. That is why it exists, but Lloyds bank, and I believe others have done the same, has concealed detrimental evidence to prevent that from happening. This left my constituent with the only option of expensive court litigation, which he could little afford, having been ruined and bankrupted by his own bank.

This allowed Lloyds Wholesale Banking Recoveries in Bristol, with the aid of their appointed Law of Property Act receiver, Alder King, which we heard about earlier from my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff Central (Jo Stevens), to strip the customer’s assets, knowing that the customer had in fact given the true account of the facts to the FOS and would have had their complaint upheld had Lloyds bank been truthful. My constituent can show that this has happened on more than one occasion. He believes not only that there should be a public inquiry, but that the Treasury Committee should look at the wider issues that have been raised in this debate and by this scandal for all the people who have been affected by different banks’ actions when the banks were bailed out by the Government.

Banks are still engaged in other practices that should be part of any inquiry. That includes what a constituent, Mr Iqbal Hassan, came to see me about last week—the way that a bank can suddenly close down their customers’ bank accounts without any notice. In his case, he simply got a text message saying that there were insufficient funds in his bank account and that it had been frozen. He then showed me the letter of apology he received from the bank. The letter gave absolutely no explanation of why the bank—it was Barclays bank in this case— had shut down his bank account. In fact, it said that it did not know why it had happened, but then, a day after that, it closed it completely. Many practices of that kind are going on.

There is also the negligence of banks in relation to customers being defrauded, often over the telephone. They rely on the concept of gross negligence on the part of their customers, which is completely unacceptable. A constituent—I will not name them here, because it is very difficult when this happens—at first lost over £40,000 as a result of this kind of fraud. Fortunately, through the help that I was able to give and through the help of people like Richard Emery—I commend him for his work on this kind of banking fraud—we were able to recover most of my constituent’s money. However, there are many similar cases in which Members’ constituents are not being refunded money that has been transferred from their accounts to accounts in other banks, which are taking no responsibility for giving harbour to criminals by holding their accounts and paying out money that has been stolen from our constituents.

We should have a public inquiry, and I urge the Minister to talk to his Treasury Minister colleagues about it. I know that he may not be able to make an announcement during today’s debate, but I hope he will go away and talk to his colleagues about the requirement for a proper, fully empowered public inquiry to investigate this scandal.

Protection of Welsh Speakers from Defamation

Lord Brennan of Canton Excerpts

Tuesday 24th April 2018 Westminster Hall

[Liz Saville Roberts]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising something that I will raise anon. The two of us agree with the National Union of Journalists, which has raised that very point. Sadly, we live in a time when bigotry is increasingly acceptable. Hate words open the way to hate crimes.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady is being hugely generous in giving way. Does she agree that one way we could address this issue is by extending the use of the Welsh language in this place? It is currently restricted to the Welsh Grand Committee, but I wrote to the Leader of the House today to ask her to meet me to discuss permitting the use of Welsh in our debates in this Chamber and in the main Chamber. Does the hon. Lady think that that might be one way to raise the profile of the Welsh language and stop the bile of the bigots?

[Liz Saville Roberts]

Of course. We recently used Welsh for the first time in the Welsh Grand Committee, but allowing its use in the Chamber and here in Westminster Hall would be a clear statement about the status of the language.

IPSO acknowledges that hate crimes and hate words are connected by exhorting the media to avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual’s race, colour, religion, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation, or to any physical or mental illness or disability, but complaints to IPSO are turned down on the ground that the editors’ code does not apply to groups of people. As I mentioned, the NUJ has long campaigned for the press regulator to accept complaints about how specific groups are represented in the media, rather than confining its remit to comments relating to specific individuals.

The drip feed of mockery undermines the extraordinary success story of one minority language at a time when 97% of the world speaks around 4% of the world’s languages—mostly English, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Indonesian, Arabic, Swahili and Hindi—and only 3% speak the roughly 96% remaining languages. Wales’s Government have set a target of doubling the number of Welsh speakers to 1 million by 2050. The number of pupils in Welsh medium schools reached an all-time high last year of almost 106,000, and more than 1 million people learn Welsh on the language learning app Duolingo.

Business of the House

Lord Brennan of Canton Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard]

I can only applaud my hon. Friend’s dexterity in making his point. I know from experience that it often takes a long time for local councils to get details of the ownership of vacant houses, so he is right to raise the issue. I urge him to apply for a Westminster Hall debate to fully air the issue with Ministers.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

Has the temporary Deputy Leader of the House seen early-day motion 775?

[This House notes with concern that airlines are increasingly requiring musicians to purchase a seat for guitars, and other musical instruments of similar size, or requiring that they be placed in the aircraft hold where temperatures are very low and damage may occur during transit; further notes the campaign led by the Musicians Union to show more consideration to musicians travelling with their instruments; and calls on the airline industry to adopt a code of practice to give musicians travelling with their instruments greater consideration, fair and consistent treatment, and peace of mind.]

I declare my interest as a member of the Musicians Union. Airlines are increasingly making life difficult for musicians who have guitar-sized and smaller musical instruments. Is it not time for the Government to have a debate about this, or at least to call in the airlines to talk to them about setting up some kind of code of conduct to ensure that our very talented musicians are not impaired in this way?

[Paul Maynard]

I know the hon. Gentleman has raised this issue before on a number of occasions. I have not yet got to the stage of taking my EDM book home with me for bedtime reading, but perhaps I should go down that path. As he knows, we have Transport questions on Thursday, which is a perfect opportunity to speak to the new aviation Minister to see what they have to say about this important issue. I recognise that this can be a real challenge, particularly for those with larger instruments.

Public Sector Pay

Lord Brennan of Canton Excerpts

Monday 4th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Helen Jones]

My hon. Friend is right, and I will come to that issue later.

None of us could function day to day without, for instance, the people who sweep our streets and empty our bins. I mention them because their hard and unglamorous jobs—as many public sector jobs still are—often get overlooked when we talk about the public sector. We understandably see documentaries about hospitals and schools, but I would like to mention those people who are now officially refuse disposal operatives, but in my neck of the woods are the binnies. They do a grand job.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on the way in which she is introducing the debate. As Chair of the Petitions Committee, she always introduces these debates with great force and eloquence. In addition to the points she has made, does she agree that public sector workers are also consumers? It is essential that they are appropriately rewarded, as consumers, for their work so that they too can contribute to stimulating the economy, including the private sector.