amendment of the law

Neil Parish Excerpts

Tuesday 25th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Livingston (Graeme Morrice) although I disagreed with many aspects of what he said, in particular his comments about bankers’ bonuses. Under the previous Labour Government, £12 billion was spent on bonuses but that has dropped to £1.6 billion. That is still too much, but it is less than what Labour intends to spend on its various projects, which it spent many times over.

I welcome this Budget, and I congratulate the Chancellor and the Conservative-led Government on getting to a situation where, by the end of the year, we will have virtually halved the deficit that we inherited from the Labour Government. Let us not beat about the bush: we as a country were borrowing £120 billion, not to build infrastructure projects such as HS2 or anything like that, but just to cover the running costs of day-to-day government in this country such as local government spending and housing benefit. Those things have to be paid for, and we were borrowing the money for it.

Who will pay that money back? Not necessarily my generation, but that of my children and grandchildren, will be the ones who pay back the money borrowed by the last Labour Government. There is no great morality in borrowing more and more money, yet that is all we saw from the last Labour Government, and that is all we will see if—God help us!—there is a future Labour Government. I applaud the Government for taking the right decisions. We have control over spending and that needed to be done.

I want to comment on the help for savers in the Budget. For five years we have had a 0.5% base rate of interest. When I was in business, I lived through interest rates of 7%, 8%, 10%, 12% and even 15%. They were crippling for those who were borrowing money, but for those who were saving and had money in the bank the high interest rates gave them a very good income. In this five-year period with a 0.5% base rate, our retired people and other people with savings have had a very low income from their savings. People will now be able to put up to £15,000 a year per person into an ISA, and that is to be welcomed.

I also welcome abolishing the 10p rate on savings income. If hard-working people on the base rate of tax have paid tax on their savings, why should they then have to pay tax on the income from those savings? This is, therefore, a very helpful measure. From 2015, pensioners will have access to a bond with a 2.8% return for a year’s savings and 4% on a three-year bond. In these very difficult times with very low interest rates for savers, that is very much to be welcomed.

It is a good idea that people will not automatically have to buy an annuity. For too long, pensioners have been held to ransom by those who sell annuities. There will now be competition. I have been on the Lamborghini website, but I have not seen a huge increase in the price of Lamborghinis as a result of what the Chancellor put in his Budget. I trust people to spend their money, which they have worked hard to earn and put into their savings all their life, in a way that they want. If they want to buy property and use it to provide somebody with a rented home, that is also good news for the economy.

Personal allowances are going up to £10,500 in 2015-16. They are always good for my constituents and good for the people of this country. The Government cannot create jobs or increase the buying power in people’s incomes by waving a magic wand, but they can reduce the amount of money they take away from people. That is what the Government are doing. Let us not forget that this is a Conservative-led Government. We are prepared to give hard-working people on low wages as much money as they can in their pockets, so that they are able to buy as much as they can.

[Lorely Burt]

I am very interested in the hon. Gentleman’s comments on the Conservative-led Government, but this is a coalition Government. The policy on hard-working people keeping more of their money actually comes from the front page of the Liberal Democrat manifesto. He is most welcome to praise it and it is an excellent policy.

[Neil Parish]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. It is indeed a Liberal Democrat policy, but it is also a Conservative policy. If we look at the make-up of the Government Benches, there are some 307 Conservative MPs compared with 50-whatever it is of Liberal Democrats, so I think the Conservatives can take a fair share of the credit for bringing the policy forward. As I said, the rise in personal allowances to £10,500 in 2015-16 is very good news, because it will take more and more people out of tax.

Taking a penny off the price of a pint of beer is great. The Otter brewery and the Branscombe Vale brewery are in my constituency. Of course, we also have Aston Manor brewery, which creates wonderful cider. While I am very happy that the Chancellor has taken a penny off beer and has frozen cider duty, I hope—being a good west country man—that cider will get its fair share in the form of a duty reduction at some point in the future.

There is no doubt that the council tax freeze that the Government have delivered, through both Conservative-led Devon county council and Mid Devon district council, has helped people greatly with their living costs, and I think that we, as a Government, should be commended for it. We in Devon welcome the help for social enterprise, because Devon has one of the highest densities of social enterprise in the country, and we welcome the help with fuel duty for the air ambulance service, because Devon has a very successful air ambulance.

The doubling of the business investment allowance to £500,000 is great news for the economy, because businesses do not get any relief unless they invest the money. If we want to see investment in the private sector, it is absolutely right for the allowance to be raised. The help for energy-intensive companies is also absolutely right, because of the rise in energy prices.

For all those reasons, I very much welcome the Budget.