Stewart Hosie
Main Page: Stewart Hosie (Scottish National Party - Dundee East)Department Debates - View all Stewart Hosie's debates with the HM Treasury
(11 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Gauke
My hon. Friend makes an important point. The Government recognise that capital and investment can be very mobile, and that they are more mobile in some sectors than others. We have demonstrated a willingness to listen in this regard. Our principal policy in this area has been to adopt a lower rate, but we have recognised that in certain areas of considerable mobility, we need to respond to what is happening. We have done so through the measures in the Bill, and through the patent box in last year’s Finance Act, which was important in further ensuring that the UK is an attractive location for investment. I shall now give way to another Member of Parliament with a constituency interest in the video games industry.
Stewart Hosie
I welcome some of these targeted measures, particularly those relating to video games. I think that they are sensible. I also welcome the tenfold increase in the annual investment allowance, but does the Minister not think it odd that that increase will last for only two years? Given that certain capital investments will take some time, is it not ludicrous that in two years’ time, the general annual investment allowance will revert to £25,000 a year? Might not that create uncertainty? Would it not be better to maintain the general annual investment allowance rate at a higher level, to encourage medium-term investments not only for two years but for three, four and five years?
Mr Gauke
There is a balance to be struck, and we have rightly focused on bringing down the rate of corporation tax, not only for larger businesses but for smaller ones as well. Let us remember that the small profits rate was set to go to 22% when we came into office, and that it is now 20%. We have increased the annual investment allowance for that two-year period to try to stimulate investment at a time that is not necessarily the easiest for many businesses. That is part of what we have done to help small businesses during this difficult period. Taking steps to bring the rate down is important; it is a tradition, if you like. It has been our direction of travel in the UK over many years, and I think that we have now got the balance about right.
Stewart Hosie
The Minister is keen to discuss the change in the basic rate allowance, but he is rather less keen to discuss the 40% threshold, which has gone from £37,000 to £34,000, then to £32,000. The Government have dragged an extra 670,000 people into the 40p tax rate, which used to be for the rich, and that is before this year’s changes. He is rather less keen to discuss that. I wonder why.
Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)
May I start by making two observations? This ought to be the keynote debate on the Government’s annual flagship Finance Bill, but there are only five Government Members in the Chamber—two Ministers, a Whip, a Parliamentary Private Secretary and one solitary Liberal, who I suspect will leave at the earliest possible opportunity—none of whom is now standing to speak. It is a terrible indictment of the Government that even the normal cheerleaders are not here to back the Chancellor. That probably indicates that many Government Members consider the Budget to be as miserable as we do.
I was struck by the fact that the hon. Member for Redcar (Ian Swales) chose to defend the millionaire tax cut. One reason he gave rather explodes the “we’re all in it together” myth, which, as someone else has said, is rarely used by Government Members these days. Even if this year’s Red Book is right and the cost of the millionaires’ tax cut is only £500 million in the next five years, I think we would all argue that if £500 million is going spare it would be better to spend it on direct capital investment, capacity for the future, and job and GDP creation, rather than give it to people who are already wealthy.
The Finance Bill is a consequence of the March Budget. Apart from some measures I welcomed relating mainly to business tax, it was a pretty miserable Budget. It was miserable because, by and large, it merely continued with the Government’s failed policies. We know they have failed because the Chancellor told us that they have failed—they failed by every measure he set. The net borrowing requirement, which was due to fall to £92 billion, has gone up to £121 billion. The national debt, which was due to peak at 92.7% of GDP—£1.36 trillion—in 2014-15 on the treaty calculation, is now expected to peak, on the same calculation, at more than 100% of GDP. National debt on the treaty calculation is due to reach 100.8% of GDP, or £1.58 trillion, by 2016-17. Therefore, when we hear that the deficit is lower and debt will fall, it does not really bear any scrutiny, even by the Chancellor’s and the OBR’s own numbers. The Chancellor has failed to meet his own targets on his original time scale for his own fiscal rules: that the structural current deficit should be in balance in the final year of the five-year rolling programme, and that debt should fall as a share of GDP. Of course, according to the OBR those objectives were highly dependent on GDP growth, which, as we have seen in previous Red Books, was based on incredible, unbelievable, unmet and frankly unmeetable rates of business investment growth.
Let us remind ourselves that in 2010 the Government suggested that business investment had to grow by between 8.1% and 10.9% a year for five years. By the time we got to the OBR’s fiscal outlook the next year, growth in business investment had actually turned negative, which was extraordinary, and so it went on year after year after year. They were at it again this year, forecasting future business investment rates of between 6.4% to 10.2% from 2013 onwards. I suspect that nobody, even in Government, believes that those targets will be met. The Chancellor, or some other poor Minister, will be back at the Dispatch Box at some point in the near future explaining why this was all somebody else’s fault.
The Chancellor also failed because the Budget and the Bill continue down the path of deep cuts and tax rises. I am sorry that the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field) is no longer in his place. He gave a customary thoughtful speech, in which he suggested that perhaps we had all not been honest and that the cuts should be deeper. However, last year’s Red Book told us that the total cost of fiscal consolidation—discretionary consolidation; that is, tax rises and cuts—would be £155 billion a year from 2016-17 onwards. As I pointed out on Budget day, that 2016-17 figure of £155 billion of discretionary consolidation, tax rises and cuts had somehow been deleted from the Red Book, and there was no forecast for 2017-18.
It is fair to say that the Government have made a U-turn and that the fiscal tightening will continue to be the equivalent of approximately 7.5% to 8% of GDP stripped out of the economy in tax rises and cuts. It is extraordinary that they think they can cut their way to growth at the best of times, but that they think they can do so while pursuing a policy which, according to their own numbers, will see fiscal consolidation, discretionary tax rises and cuts of the equivalent of between 7.5% and 8% of GDP in demand stripped out of the economy. If they can cut their way to growth on the back of that, they should be given a Nobel prize. The problem is that none of us believes it will happen. Of course, the overall impact of 4:1 cuts to tax rises tells us exactly who will bear the brunt of these austerity measures.
I said at the beginning that I do not want to be wholly negative—there were some measures to be welcomed. Earlier, we discussed briefly one of the most potentially significant measures, which is the tenfold increase in the annual investment allowance to £250,000. That is for two years only, however, and the Government need to understand that even at this level investment decisions may take some time to be agreed before businesses are able to use the benefit. I therefore ask the Government to look again at the temporary nature of the increase. While we would certainly argue that it makes sense to have targeted tax allowances such as this—it makes sense for businesses to be allowed to keep more of their own money to invest, particularly when banks are still refusing to take the full share of the risk they should take—the real problem with the Budget, the Red Book and the Bill is that the Government continue to set themselves against direct capital investment when the economy needs it most, which is right now.
To understand just how damaging that is, let me give one example: the UK Government argue that they have given Scotland an additional £279 million in capital over the next two years. It is debateable whether that is true, as I will come to, but even if it is, it would still imply a 20% real-terms cut to the Scottish capital budget over the four-year spending review period. But it is not real capital expenditure: £266.5 million is classified as a financial transaction, meaning that it can be used only to fund loans or equity investments. That is a straitjacket. It is accompanied by £103.5 million cut in hard cash from the resource budget, half of which— £56 million—will be cut this year from already agreed budgets. This is not just daft; it is economically really, really silly. I despair that the Government think it makes sense to be putting administrations—public bodies of one sort or another—into a straitjacket, while removing hard cash and discretionary spending.
Pamela Nash (Airdrie and Shotts) (Lab)
Before the hon. Gentleman moves too far on from capital spending, will he say why his party in Scotland is imposing even more draconian cuts on local government than the parties in government here, cutting public sector construction projects in Scotland and contributing to the 40,000 construction jobs lost in Scotland since his party took power?
Stewart Hosie
The problem with that question is that it comes straight from the Labour party central office briefing note. The Scottish Government quite rightly re-profiled revenue spending into capital to make up for the capital cuts from the UK Government. We did that because we recognised that—I think there is unanimity on this—direct capital investment had a 1:1 impact multiplier in terms of GDP growth. That is extremely important, because the problem is that we do not have enough economic growth, so the Scottish Government were right to re-profile revenue into capital spending.
As I said earlier, the 4:1 ratio of cuts to tax rises under this Government, plus their smoke-and-mirrors approach to direct capital investment, shows just where their priorities lie, and it is not with people, jobs or growth. We can all probably agree that plan A has failed, and with the UK still teetering on the brink of a triple-dip recession the Chancellor seems to want to continue to do the impossible, which is to cut his way to growth. It has not worked and it will not work; and this Finance Bill will not help.
The Bill does, however, make provision for personal tax changes, and the increase in the basic rate threshold to £9,440 is welcome. The Government are right to try to take as many people as possible on low and modest incomes out of tax, and the savings from that increase, added to the £326 of savings from basic rate taxpayers, whose personal allowance has risen from £6,475 in 2010 to £8,105 last year, makes sense, but that is only part of the personal tax story. As I have said, the Government are also foolishly ploughing on with a tax cut for millionaires, which at their own conservative estimate will cost £500 million.
It is those in the middle who are really being squeezed. The tax relief in terms of the 40% band used to be £37,400, but that was decreased to £34,300 last year, so for every £326 changed up in the Budget, at 20p in the pound, people have had to shell out an extra £560 at the 40p rate, before this year’s changes. So although the change in this year’s basic threshold is welcome, we must recognise that the Chancellor pulled the same trick in the middle again by pre-announcing another cut to the 40% threshold down to £32,010 last year. That means that in three years the Government have taken the proportion of taxpayers paying the 40% rate from 10% to 13% of the total taxpaying public—up 670,000 in three years. Over 25 years, the proportion has doubled to 2.1 million extra people now paying a tax rate that was previously only for the rich. With hundreds of thousands of people now paying a 40p tax rate that was never designed for low and middle incomes, it is safe to say that the middle is not so much being squeezed by the Government as garrotted.
Ian Swales
Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that the first two changes in the 40p band were to ensure that 40% taxpayers only got the same amount out of the threshold increase as a basic rate taxpayer? In other words, it was a measure of fairness across the spectrum.
Stewart Hosie
I recognise that an increase in the basic threshold from £6,400 to £9,400, which is a £3,000 rise, implies a saving of about £600, but a fall in the 40% threshold from £37,400 to £32,100, which is £5,000, implies a cost of £2,000. If one was paying 40% before, they still will be, while many hundreds of thousands more who were not, and who ought not to be, now will be. I do not see the fairness that the hon. Gentleman speaks of. I suspect that when we get to the next election, that might be part of the Liberal party’s campaign against their current Tory friends.
I want to turn to one of the most damaging small parts of the Finance Bill, which is the planned increase in air passenger duty. APD has become increasingly unpopular in the aviation industry and is now the most expensive in Europe. We know that standard rates vary from £13 for a short-haul flight to £94 for a long-haul flight. The rates were increased by RPI on 1 April this year, as announced in the 2012 Budget, and will be subject to a further increase by RPI next April, as announced in this Budget. We have consistently made the case for devolution as a means to improve connectivity and to give the aviation sector a competitive edge.
As the Minister will know, the Scottish Government Deputy First Minister wrote to the main airports in 2012 reaffirming our intention to press the UK Government to devolve APD as soon as possible. We do so because it makes economic sense. The study “The economic impact of Air Passenger Duty”, published only this February, confirmed that. It suggested that abolishing APD entirely could boost GDP by 0.46% in the first year, with benefits continuing to 2020, and that the GDP boost to the UK economy would amount to at least £16 billion in the first three years and result in almost 60,000 extra jobs over the longer term. We would argue, therefore, that the time for continually increasing APD has gone and that the time to devolve it is now.
We also welcome the support of Scotland’s four main airports for the devolution of APD. It is safe to say, however, that we have become increasingly frustrated with the UK Government’s continuing prevarication and the impact on Scotland and Wales of the further increases in rates from April this year and April 2014. To be fair, the Government have recognised, in devolving APD to Northern Ireland, that a one-size-fits-all policy might not be appropriate, but increasing APD throughout the rest of the UK and not devolving it demonstrates that the Government do not understand the differences in the UK aviation sector, the connectivity challenges faced by Scotland or the needs of passengers. This is a matter that we hope to return to in the Committee of the whole House.
The Finance Bill is utterly inadequate and ignores the pressing need for investment and growth. I am happy to say that the Scottish National party and Plaid Cymru will oppose it tonight.