Mark Garnier
Main Page: Mark Garnier (Conservative - Wyre Forest)Department Debates - View all Mark Garnier's debates with the HM Treasury
(11 years ago)
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Chris Leslie
I do not recognise that figure. [Interruption.] The Minister is making various projections about the bonus pool, but even if the changes meant that we did not manage in years to come to yield what we now feel we can yield—he could equally make the argument that said, “Well, the European Union is making changes to limit bonuses,” which would obviously mean changes to salaries and elsewhere—what we are proposing would add considerably to the bank levy revenues that he has managed to generate. As we have set out in the amendment before the Committee, we need to incorporate a repeat of the bank payroll tax. It is important to recognise that, although I am happy for the Treasury to commission further research on the issue. If the Government are interested in this agenda and are starting to move in that direction, that might be useful.
Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)
I am slightly confused about one thing. Is the hon. Gentleman trying to reduce profligacy and excesses in bankers’ bonuses or is he trying to raise revenue? The problem is that if he gets rid of bonuses or drives them down—a great many of us, and certainly the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, have said that we do not like this at all—he will not get the payroll taxes, namely national insurance and income tax, on those bonuses, so the revenue will go down. I am not too sure what position he is trying to get to.
Chris Leslie
Of course that argument could be made about any demerit activity or level of taxation. People have been making that argument about cigarette taxes over the years, saying “Well, if people give up smoking, will the Treasury not lose a lot of money from it?” I do not want to divert too much into the wider principle, but I would say that a very considerable tax cut has been given to bankers by reducing the 50p rate of income tax to 45p—a cut that is providing a very significant bonus to those individuals in this year. The hon. Gentleman need not worry too much about these poor maligned executives in the banking system. I know that things must be very difficult for them—they may even have to defer the purchase of their yachts for that little bit longer—but we must start capturing and getting a grip on this issue in a way that the bank levy has not worked to achieve so far.
Mark Garnier
The hon. Gentleman speaks from the heart about the 50p tax rate and I can understand why Labour Members do so, because during 13 years they spent 12 years and 11 months thinking deeply about introducing it.
Mark Garnier
It would have been wonderful if it had been brought it in earlier because it would have shown more resolve from the Labour party.
Will the hon. Gentleman enlighten the Committee about what is behind the proposal? Is the intention of the levy to reduce the risk of perverse incentives through what can be an obscene bonus system, or is it to generate revenue? One or the other, which is it?
Geraint Davies
I will come to that point. In his preliminary commentary, the hon. Gentleman asked why the Labour party failed to bring in the 50p tax rate, and indeed the Prime Minister boasts that he is taxing the rich more than Labour ever did, and that is great. The Labour party does not exist to introduce high taxes; it exists to give people opportunity and employment. Higher levels of employment bring prosperity and opportunity, so there is enough tax yield from a lower tax rate to fund public services. Between 1997 and 2008, the economy grew by 40%.
If one is concerned, as I am—as we all are—about the debt to GDP ratio, which is the total debt divided by the value of the economy, there are two ways to get it down. The first is to cut the debt directly, cutting most from the poorest as the Tories do. The other is to increase the size of the economy. In 2010, after we had gone through the financial tsunami, but luckily on the back of 10 years of unparalleled increase in growth under Labour, the debt to GDP ratio was 55%; now the forecast is 85%. The reason is not just that the Tories are keen on cutting money for the poorest and getting money from people who do not have it, but that they cannot get their act together strategically to generate a growth strategy that reduces the ratio so that we do not need higher tax rates. We do not want people who are making obscene bonuses to pay higher taxes for the sake of it; we want people in work.
Mark Garnier
Is not the biggest inequity that it is not Government debt that is the real problem, but household debt? In the period from 1997 to 2008, household debt as a percentage of household income went from 80% to 140%, and the boom in the economy was paid for by a colossal bubble of household debt. That is the real problem.
Geraint Davies
That simply is not the case. I was at the Bank of England relatively recently looking at the profile of debt in the run-up to 2008 and from 2010. From 2010, the ratio of the debt between the Government and the banking community was 1:2. Two thirds of the debt was that of the banking community. Do not misunderstand me: there has been a problem with the general public ratcheting up more private debt through the availability of low interest rates, which in themselves are a good thing, thanks to the fact that my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) introduced Bank of England independence and all the rest of it, and thanks to a feeling that there would be a continuation of growth. People were investing in houses and they were growing in price and so on.
Since 2010, when the Chancellor said, “We will have half a million people unemployed in the public services” and did not say who they were or when they would lose their jobs, there has been a sharp rise in savings rates and a fall-off in consumer demand. We have seen consumer demand basically flatlining, which underlines the reason why we do not have growth, which is why we do not have a reduction in the debt to GDP ratio.
We need confidence to get back on a growth path so that people can spend in the knowledge that they will have jobs in the future. Part of that is to re-engineer the financial world in such a way that money is channelled into productive capacity. Although, allegedly, we have an extra million people in work, overall output is the same. Average production has fallen and average productivity is down, which is very worrying. So we need to think how to ensure that the banking community pays its fair share and how to direct money, in a meaningful way, into job creation and public and private assets.
I was not in the Chamber for the previous debate, but part of that thought process would be, how to encourage the banking community, not in a high-risk way, to start helping people to build desperately needed housing—to get people who have been out of work, many of them in the construction industry, back into work to provide social houses.
Sammy Wilson
The hon. Gentleman brings me to my next point. Even some within the banking industry would say that there is no economic rationale for the obscene bonuses that are given at the top of the industry, and that there is no necessity for those bonuses to make it work efficiently. On a weekly basis, businesses and individuals come to me and say that if anything is strangling growth and the potential for it, in the economy today, it is the performance of the banking industry. When I hear about of some of these bonuses, I wonder what they are being paid for. They are certainly not being paid because the banking industry is performing well in helping to grow the economy and lift us out of recession.
Mark Garnier
The hon. Gentleman is making a very powerful point. However, that is exactly why some of us have spent the past nine months on the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards examining the problems he is talking about. It is why the Government introduced the Financial Services Act 2012 in order to repair the regulatory environment and to establish the Financial Policy Committee to look at the instability in the system that can come about as a result of perverse incentives from bonuses. It is why the Government are currently taking the Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill through Parliament. A huge amount is being done for exactly the reasons he mentions.
Sammy Wilson
Yet the situation continues. Despite all that, we do not see any change.
Some of the arguments advanced by Government Members, mainly through interventions, as to why the proposal is a bad idea, have become increasingly desperate as the debate has progressed. I believe that this should be done, first, on the basis of fairness, and secondly, because it has some potential for changing behaviour, and that ought to be given serious consideration.
The first argument was to say, “If we do this, we will be taking money out of the economy.” What do these people who get the bonuses do with them? Are they generating additional expenditure in the economy? If someone gets a bonus of £1 million, are they likely to spend it? We all know, and it is well evidenced in economic theory, that the more money we get, the higher the proportion of that additional income we tend to save—it does not contribute to the economy. During the Budget, the Chancellor said that the poor performance in the economy was because consumer spending had been suppressed and was not what had been anticipated. When I hear the argument that discouraging these bonuses, or taking them back in the form of tax, removes spending power from the economy, I find it rather bizarre.
Sammy Wilson
Although saving is, of course, good in any economy, the important question at the moment is: how do we generate spending? The hon. Lady has reinforced the point that if money goes to unemployed people they are likely to spend 100% of that income, but someone who gets a £1 million bonus is likely to save 90% of it—perhaps more—so it will not be injected into the economy. I do not think that the argument that the amendment would remove money from the economy and, somehow or other, deflate it stands up to scrutiny.
The second argument, which was made by the hon. Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke)—he tried to promote it in a couple of interventions on the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie)—is that all this levy would do is make finance either pricier or less available. As has been said, that implies that the only part of bank spending that is sacrosanct is the amount of money spent on bonuses. Making an activity more expensive tends to direct people away from it, and I cannot see how the banks would be any different. If we make it more expensive and more costly for them to give bonuses, they will be driven away from using those funds in that way and it would create a behavioural change. If that change did not happen, however, and bonuses continued to be paid and the tax on them recouped from customers, the alternative would be regulation. The customer should not have to pay for them—if banks do not change their behaviour, we should ensure that the taxes cannot be passed on to customers.
The third argument—I found this one bizarre, especially with regard to the bank levy—is that since we cannot be sure how much money will be raised, we should not pursue it. If that were true, we probably would not tax anything. How often do we hear the Government predict the amount that will be raised in tax revenue, only then to revise the figure within six months, either because behaviours have changed and the expected amount has not been raised, or because the economy performed in a different way than expected?
The hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier) made that argument, but on that basis we would not have the bank levy, which was supposed to raise £2.5 billion this year, and raised only £1.1 billion. I do not know why that revenue was not raised—perhaps there was some change in the economy—but whatever the reason the bank levy did not raise the money intended. Moreover, the Government made spending plans on the assumption that that revenue would be available. I do not think that the amendment can be argued down on the basis that it may not raise the money and therefore no commitment should be made.
Mark Garnier
On that point, the hon. Gentleman does not seem to have read the amendment, the whole point of which is to raise money specifically to be invested in creating new jobs and tackling unemployment. If the Opposition want to invest a specific amount, they need to know how much money they will raise.
Sammy Wilson
The hon. Gentleman has missed my point; perhaps I did not make it very well. When the Chancellor declares what taxes he intends to levy in the Budget, that announcement is accompanied by what he intends to spend that tax revenue on. Sometimes that revenue materialises and sometimes it does not.
The only requirement that I would make of an amendment of this nature is that it does not throw out a reckless figure and say, “We will make £x billion from this provision and spend it.” The Minister was right to ask on what basis the amendment’s calculation was made, but it cannot be argued that, because there is a degree of uncertainty, this is not a good proposition. I would have been very unhappy had the amendment said, “Let’s raise the money and then we’ll see what we will do with it.” It is much easier to make an argument on the grounds of fairness: “Let’s raise the money and this is what we will do with it.” Knowing where the money comes from, the purposes for which it was being used and the purposes for which it will be used once collected would enable us to judge whether the proposition is fair. It is not possible to divorce how the money is raised from what will be done with it.