John McDonnell
MP for Hayes and Harlington · Labour · United Kingdom
“It is not a laughing matter—I am sorry for interrupting the flow of the discussion. It would be useful if the review looked at NATS’s long-term investment plans, particularly since its partial privatisation in 2001, which I opposed. I thank the Minister for meeting Unite this morning and thanking the workers, who have worked so hard.”
“On a number of occasions, I have raised the case of Lee Cheuk-yan, who many Labour Members will remember was the general secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions and founder of the Labour party in Hong Kong. He was detained during the democracy movement five years ago.”
“I thank the Minister for his statement. NATS used to be in my constituency and then moved down to Swanwick. Of course, with Heathrow in my constituency, I receive—as I mentioned yesterday—a large amount of correspondence from a whole range of other MPs’ constituents, who think I am responsible for Heathrow airport.”
“I fully agree, and let me also say that wheelchair compensation is significant in this legislation. Most of us have dealt with cases like that. Going back to accountability in the process, a number of different organisations have provided us with notes on the legislation.”
“I apologise to my right hon. Friend; I should have checked this before the debate. The proposed new section 61G refers to priorities and objectives of the Secretary of State, which include a requirement for the Secretary of State to issue a document setting out those priorities and objectives for the CAA.”
“At the moment, when people in my constituency are faced with these problems, they do not know where to go; it is as simple as that. Finally, the debate that we will have on Heathrow expansion and the new policy statement will be interesting, given that we do not know what the flight paths will be. If I was a constituent of my hon.”
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“They have pointed out how much more could be done on the Government’s climate change agenda if the powers and resources were made available to local government. When I raised the issue before, Government Ministers have argued that council spending has been boosted by the retention of business rates and the ability to raise more through council tax in recent years. First of all, based on the National Audit Office’s figures, it is likely that councils’ overall spending power is now some £5 billion lower in real terms than it was in 2010. The Minister will also know that raising council tax has very unequal impacts: a 5% increase in Surrey raises about £38 million, while a 5% increase in Blackburn with Darwen raises £2.8 million.”
“Alongside the building of more council housing, a Mayor with powers of rent control would really help level up in London and areas like mine. I hope the Government are going to listen and back the Mayors who are seeking to re-regulate the buses in Greater Manchester, Liverpool city region and West Yorkshire. It is a great policy. It is about improving infrastructure that will increase private investment, it is about a modal shift that will improve carbon emissions and improve air quality, and it is about increasing active travel, which has health benefits as well. I point the Minister towards the recent reports from Green Alliance, a coming together of various national environmental groups.”
“I hope the Government will listen to the demands from, for example, the Mayor of London for more powers. He is asking for more powers to set rent controls—powers which major cities around the world, from Berlin to New York, possess. Shelter, the housing charity, has recently published a report that explains the consequences of levelling up infrastructure investment without taking housing need into account. I will use my area as an example; the Minister is welcome to come down and visit and we could have a discussion on site if necessary. In my area, a consequence of the welcome multi-billion pound investment in Crossrail is that land and house prices have shot up. Without new council housing or rent controls, local people are being forced out of the local housing market.”
“Levelling up must mean not just an injection of cash, but a redistribution of power as well. Councils need more than just greater resources in order to level up—they need to be given powers to do so. That is the message from all local authorities controlled by all political parties. I will watch with interest the Secretary of State’s recently floated idea for further Mayors—or governors, as he said—covering more of the country. It will be interesting to see how that can be rolled out. I am not opposed to it. I am not happy with the mayoral principle, but it has been established and it seems anomalous that there are Mayors for cities but not for other areas. Let us talk about now. We have devolved Governments in the nations, and a dozen or so city-region Mayors in England.”
“Local authorities in the north-west of England are receiving £1.2 billion less per year in 2021-22 in central Government funding than they did in 2015-16; that is a 36% cut. The calculation is that the north-west would need an extra £3.47 billion per year in capital funding just to reach London’s level. The north-west received nearly £500 less—well, £492 less—per person per year when compared with London. We know of some councils that are so depleted by cuts that they did not have the in-house capacity to even submit bids for the levelling-up fund. These are funds that were allocated in the recent Budget, which we welcomed. We cannot have a begging-bowl approach, with councils fighting over scraps; we need a rising tide of funding that raises all local authority ships. I want to talk about power.”
“It is difficult to see how local economies can be levelled up if childcare and support for parents is not available. How can we level up our town centres and high streets if people do not have a means of transport to get there, or even just basic public conveniences when they do? My argument is that, when we debate the levelling-up White Paper—I look forward to it—we need to debate both the revenue and capital funding that is needed. Let us look at one region, the north-west of England; this example will be relevant to my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Ian Byrne) and it is where I did the most intensive work on Labour’s policies, talking with local communities to find out what was needed.”
“Although I accept that some of that has been offset by the retention of business rates and raising council tax above inflation in recent years, it has still left councils with significant real-terms losses in their overall spending power. It has had real consequences for all parts of the country. According to the briefing provided by Unison, the local government union, councils in England have closed more than 859 children’s centres since 2010, although that figure has been contested—some people think it is actually more. It listed 940 youth centres and 738 libraries that have been closed, while funding for more than 1,200 bus routes has been withdrawn. That has an impact on communities across the country that has to be addressed if we are going to genuinely level up. I will give an example.”
“In recent years, we have seen three councils issue section 114 notices, while another dozen or so have had to call in exceptional financial support from the Government to avoid the same fate. I do not know whether the Minister saw the recent evidence session of the Public Accounts Committee, but we know that there are possibly dozens more councils in contact with the Department over their financial situation. The issue of central Government funding has to be addressed. The figures are pretty stark. Since the 2015-16 financial year, local authorities have lost 41% of their central Government funding—equivalent to the loss of £8.7 billion a year.”
“The message I am trying to get across is that although the emphasis in Government announcements has been on capital spending, levelling up will not become a reality in cities like Liverpool and elsewhere unless we address the issue of council funding overall. When we debate the White Paper, I hope that we can have a serious and sensible debate about how, over time, we can address what has happened over the last 11 years. We can have a political knockabout about whether or not it was justified, but I think we just have to move on and look at how we can address the situation, perhaps being more creative than we have been in the past. The situation is serious in Liverpool, but it is not just Liverpool.”
“The example of Liverpool has been given. It would be incredibly helpful, just to bring the Minister up to speed on a specific example of what is happening, if he would meet a delegation of the Liverpool MPs, maybe with the council leader, to talk about issues there.”
“It is important that we are completely accurate in what we are saying. It is true that the Bill actually does extend the role of the Home Secretary with regard to notices. Let us be clear: it places in the power of the Home Secretary the decision that they need not give notice if that is “in the interests of the relationship between the United Kingdom and another country, or,” breathtakingly, “otherwise in the public interest.” That confers a huge amount of discretion on the Home Secretary. The Bill takes our concerns about due process to another plane.”
“I do not doubt the Secretary of State’s sincerity—we have worked with him and in most cases he has done a good job where he has been—so this is a message through him to the Chancellor: we need an emergency funding package for children’s services now. We cannot wait months for another review. Social workers are overworked and, actually, underpaid and disrespected. We need them to be properly funded and supported.”
“Unfortunately, we are too good at setting up reviews and blaming others. This House needs to take some responsibility. In March 2018, my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) published a report with me, based on consultation with children’s charities, local government and social work professionals. It said that, after £2 billion-worth of cuts, children were at risk and could not be protected. We put forward proposals for the Budget that year, in the following year and in the following year. We have seen a 40% cut in early interventions on children. We all get emotional about this—I was on childcare for 15 years and dealt with children who had been abused, and I never, ever want to see it again.”
“The Minister has talked about a 10-year vision, but most unpaid carers are just trying to see how they can get through the next week, or the week after that, or the week after that. As has already been pointed out, there are 11 million unpaid carers in the country, many of whom depend entirely on carer’s allowance, a legacy benefit. They never gained the additional £20 of universal credit, and they are living in poverty. What is there in this strategy that will assist unpaid carers and lift them out of poverty?”
“I am sorry to rudely interrupt the hon. Gentleman again. I apologise to you as well, Dr Huq. This is a fleeting visit; I am trying to be here and in the main Chamber at the same time, but I have not quite mastered that yet. Before I left, the hon. Gentleman raised the key issue for me and my constituents: the poverty Gurkhas have been thrust into as a result of, to be frank, an act of gross discrimination over years. Does he agree that, because of the length of service and the commitment Gurkhas have shown, including through the human sacrifices made, we should never allow this group of people to live in the level of poverty that he described earlier, and that we need redress as rapidly as possible?”
“We could not understand that, but part of it relates to their experience in work and particularly the stress that they were under, causing cardiovascular problems.”
“To be frank, the reason why prison officers have been discriminated against is that, like their prisoners, they are locked away and we just want to look away completely from the problems that they experience. That is the reality of it. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey for time and again bringing to this House the reality of what the members of the Prison Officers Association and those across the service are actually experiencing—the physical nature of the job. Let me also remind people of this. When we had the firefighters discussion, we looked at or had actuarial work done, and one of the interesting things was the number who died soon after retirement.”
“I will try for less than that, Sir Charles. I declare an interest as another honorary life member of the Prison Officers Association. As one of my witty colleagues said, the only benefit is possibly a more comfortable cell. The hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Gordon Henderson) summed up the argument precisely. I just want to remind colleagues that we had this debate some time ago with regard to firefighters and we had it with regard to police. I can remember the consensus that was built. No one wanted a firefighter of 60-odd coming through that window to carry us down a ladder. No one wanted that. Similarly, nobody wanted to see police at this age—up to 68—going out on the streets and trying to defend us when such physical assaults were occurring at the time. Nobody wanted that.”
“We should be supporting them in that, so the appeal is to start the talks again, start negotiating, and if more is to be paid in contributions, more should be paid in salary to compensate for that.”
“If my right hon. Friend does not mind, I just want to finish. Exactly the same applies to prison officers. In fact, some would argue that it applies more, because the nature of the threat is continuous. The time has come to deal with this. Exactly as the hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey has said, the talks need to start to resolve it now, because none of us wants to put these workers through that sort of threat, suffering and stress—all of that—by forcing them to work that much longer. In addition to that, the point that they would make—this is dedication to the job—is that they want to deliver the best service possible. When they get to a certain age, they are not able to guarantee the safety of the prisoners, because they do not have the physical resource to do it. What officers want to do is deliver a quality service.”
“Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson). There is currently a loss of confidence not just in the Government but in governance overall, and more so this week: from what I heard on the news this morning, there are going to be announcements about transport investment this week that renege on the commitments to the funding of rail in the north, particularly in respect of the extension of High Speed 2. In that political context, the Bill takes on a greater significance than usual.”
“I see none of that in the Bill. I caution the Government. Let me put it in this context: we have had two weeks of report after report of corruption, in effect, on top of month after month of public amazement and now, increasingly, shock about what happened with the distribution of covid contracts. Confidence in not just the Prime Minister but the Government is now at an all-time low. At the weekend, I saw in one article that unless things change, the Prime Minister will be out by the summer—and that was Tory MPs speaking, not us. Lots of evidence now abounds that the Foreign Secretary’s and the Chancellor’s leadership election campaigns are up and running and that the structure is being put in place for that challenge, when it comes, but it is more serious than just the future of the right hon.”
“Not only is there nothing in this Finance Bill that will tackle those problems, but the reverse is true: benefits are being cut and austerity continues. That is quite remarkable. On a side point, my hon. Friend the Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd) always says when we have a Finance Bill before us that the Government, yet again, have not tabled an “amendment of the law” resolution. That is an arcane parliamentary point, but it is important because it limits our scrutiny of the Finance Bill. If I were trying to identify the Government’s strategy on the basis of the Prime Minister’s words, the high-skilled, high-wage economy is meant to be based on high levels of investment. The Chancellor has referred to the ending of austerity on numerous occasion, and the Prime Minister has made reference to the importance of tackling climate change.”
“It is difficult to discern from this Bill any form of overall Government strategy, and it is difficult to understand how the Bill relates to the many real-world issues we currently face—that is what is so surprising. The hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) made the critical point that, having come back from COP, we might have expected the Government to be fired up to mobilise the whole economy with the purpose of ensuring we tackle the existential threat of climate change, but there is very little in the Bill that relates to any of that major threat. My hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) explained the situation of many of our constituents who face deprivation, challenges, insecurity of income and issues with the delivery of public services.”
“You surprise me, Madam Deputy Speaker, as I am usually last. I came to this debate solely to make a proposal on local government, but because the House is not packed I will respond to some of the previous comments. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (James Murray) on his comprehensive analysis of the Government’s Budget, which revealed its lack of substance as much as anything. The purpose of having a Finance Bill after a Budget, and especially after a spending review, is that it is meant to embody the Government’s strategy and political analysis in line with their appraisal of the economy and the political situation.”
“The tonnage tax was linked to the training of officer cadets, not ratings, and a limited number of officer cadets were recruited by the shipping companies. As a result of lobbying—I was there in a meeting with the Minister—we did get a bit of flexibility, whereby if a company was not recruiting officers, it was able voluntarily to recruit ratings and still qualify for the tax. Let me just explain to the House the tonnage tax figures. The tonnage tax was introduced in 2000-01. Its cost—£2.165 billion. How many jobs do hon. Members think have been created, that we know of, for £2.165 billion? Does anyone want to intervene with a figure? All we know about, on the record, is 75; that is £28 million a job.”
“I have been lobbying on that now for nearly 15 years. The tonnage tax was introduced by John Prescott—by the way, I hope that all of us will send our best wishes to him in the hope that his recovery from the severe stroke that he had is going on apace—as part of a strategy to revive British shipping. The purpose of it was to give a tax allowance to shipping companies so that they would then employ more UK seafarers, and employ them on a decent wage as well. Year after year, we argued about it with the Government—the Labour Government got into this one as well. Large amounts of money were going to these shipping companies, but the jobs were not appearing. In fact, we were losing UK seafarer jobs. Seafarers were largely being recruited from abroad, and in some instances were not even being paid the minimum wage.”
“The Government’s argument is that 99% of the business investment that is undertaken will be covered by the annual investment allowance, but to then go on and give a super tax deduction of 130% flies in the face of that argument. If we look at the record of tax reliefs, most of which, historically, have never been reviewed by the Treasury, we see that they mount up year after year, decade after decade. Some of them go back nearly a century, but they are never reviewed, and that is often with scandalous effect. On the entrepreneurs’ allowance, even the Government had to accept that that was an abuse of an allowance. People were walking away with large amounts of benefits without in any way demonstrating their entrepreneurial skills. It is the same with the patent box. Let me now come to the tonnage tax.”
“An additional levy was placed on the banks to make sure that they paid something back from the crash, and also that they paid something in return for the guarantee that they were given. What we find now is that the amount that they have paid so far does not even pay off some of the damaging costs that fell to taxpayers as a result of their wild speculation that brought about the crash. One matter that has been raised in the debate—the Exchequer Secretary has also mentioned it—is that of tax reliefs and the extension of the annual investment allowance. I can understand why the Government have done that, but what I cannot understand is why they have done that as well as introduce the super deductions.”
“The Government argue that, in the Bill, they are doing something about the taxation of earnings from dividends, but it is negligible in comparison with what is needed and it sends out a similar message that they are willing to penalise earners, but, at the same time, allow others who earn their money from wealth to walk away. The reason that the bank levy offends is not just that it is going back to the days of the crash and the scurrilous role that the banks played in enabling that to happen—the profiteering at all our expenses; it is because what the banks have is the best insurance policy in the world. It is an insurance policy, backed up by the UK Government, that no matter what they do, no matter how much they fail, they will never be allowed to fail because the Government will always step in and bail them out.”
“Given that the argument over the need to ensure that we tax on capital and wealth as well as on levels of earnings has been won, the proposal that I thought would be in this Bill was to ensure that taxation on earnings and on capital gains were brought into line. The amount that that would bring in to the Government was initially recalculated at £14 billion, but I see that the TUC’s figure is £17 billion. That could have resolved the issues in social care. That would have ended austerity for large numbers of our population.”
“Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) talked about how people have been treated in respect of other announcements; how can the Government argue that the Bill is about high wages when they are freezing tax bands, introducing national insurance increases and cutting universal credit? All those things hit earners. Something fundamental at the heart of this Bill—it was at the heart of the Budget, too—is the Government’s refusal to take on the imbalance between the taxation of wealth and the taxation of earnings. We have seen it in the Government’s setting out of proposals some time ago on reforming capital gains tax but their failure, yet again, to do it in this legislation.”
“I do not think it is there—it is certainly not in the Bill. We can take some humour from this situation. The Chancellor certainly led with his chin in respect of the proposals to cut the bankers’ levy and the tax on flights and champagne. No one could blame the shadow Front-Bench team coming forward and taking the rise out of what was quite obviously a bankers’ Budget. Let me comment on a number of the key issues that have been raised in the debate so far. If the Budget was about the end of austerity, high skills, high wages and so on, the Bill flies in the face of all that. The hon.”
“I raised in my Budget speech the lack of confidence in the Government’s commitment to levelling up overall and even to defining what it means, and I mentioned the importance of the need for a bit of levelling back because of the scale of the cuts that have been endured over the past 11 years. I make the general point that there is currently a level of insecurity and uncertainty, and a questioning of politics overall and of whether the people can trust any politician. I thought that with a Budget and a comprehensive spending review the Government would at least be able to set out their plans and bring forward the measures in the Finance Bill so that we would at least know where they are going, which might give us some security or confidence that the Government at least have some sense of direction.”
“This Budget, the comprehensive spending review and certainly this legislation do not provide that. The Bill will increase the levels of concern and insecurity that unfortunately are impacting on our communities. I find it a disappointing piece of legislation, and I hope that by way of amendment we might be able to improve it. In that way, we might at least meet some of the challenges our communities face, tackle some of the poverty and deprivations, end austerity and maybe give a bit more hope to the communities we represent.”
“It would be welcomed cross-party in local government and would relieve many local councillors from the appalling decisions they will have to make in the coming months between increasing local council taxes and, more importantly for many of them, another round of cuts in public services, because of the high interest rates they are having to pay and the interest charges that are falling upon them. The final point I will make in this Budget debate is to return to the points that a number of Members have made. This Finance Bill does not seem to relate to the Government’s strategy overall, and it certainly does not relate to the needs of our communities. I worry that after the experience of covid, people are looking increasingly to the Government to provide leadership.”
“That could be a zero rating on all existing loans before we move to the Bank of England base rate on all new loans. More expansively, it could recognise the failure in recent years from central Government to oversee and the impact of Government austerity cuts, which have led to the debt crisis in local government. The Treasury arguably should fund a partial debt write-off for councils. With more than £70 billion in principal debts, plus interest rates, even a 20% write-off could free up nearly £15 billion for local councils to spend in the coming years. That is the proposal I wanted to argue for in this debate.”
“The Bank of England base rate is still 0.1%, so every pound spent on interest by councils—it is the same for central Government—is £1 less spent on social care, children’s services, street cleaning, bin collections or whatever. The average interest rate charged by the Public Works Loan Board is 3.57%. That is 36 times higher than the Bank of England base rate. What we need in the longer term is stronger oversight of loan applications and for the Public Works Loan Board to charge interest at the Bank of England base rate. In the meantime—this is why I was hoping that the Government would move somewhat in this legislation—to deal with the high interest rates and the high levels of debt, we need some form of debt jubilee for local councils.”
“In addition, there has been a complete lack of oversight from both the Department for local government, under its various names over recent years, and the Public Works Loan Board, which has lent the money to those councils. The accounts of the Public Works Loan Board reveal that over £2.8 billion was lent last year and over £3 billion was generated in interest income. That is extraordinary: it is robbing Peter to pay Paul. Councils are under huge financial pressures, and they now owe £71 billion in debt to the Public Works Loan Board. I want to see whether we can amend this legislation to reduce the interest rates to councils.”
“Some time ago, as part of their pushing local authorities to try to seek alternative local funding sources, but also as part of their commercialisation agenda, the Government forced councils into a position where many of them sought to compensate for the lack of Government funding by borrowing from the Public Works Loan Board to buy investments with revenue-producing potential. Some of those investments have proved to be risky misjudgments. Admittedly, this has happened across the board, with all political parties in control in different council areas, but the Government have to take some responsibility for the mess, because they have forced those local authorities into that sort of speculative behaviour, which is also beyond their levels of experience and expertise.”
“There was no acknowledgment of what councils have endured over the past 10 years—that includes Tory, Labour, Lib Dem and SNP councils—or the debt crisis that is now engulfing many town halls in our country. I was hoping that we would at least get the opportunity of some resolution of the debt problem of local councils within the Finance Bill, or would have the opportunity to prepare amendments to enable that to happen. Creatively, we will see whether we can bring amendments forward in that way, but that is made more difficult by the amendment to the law motion not being brought forward by the Government. Many councils across the country are in debt. In recent years, three section 114 notices have been issued, in the case of Tory as well as Labour councils, and dozens more have applied for and received emergency Government loans.”
“That means that before we can even talk about levelling up, we need levelling back. We need to give councils the power to invest in local services in their communities again. The hon. Member for Broadland (Jerome Mayhew), who is not in his place, raised the importance of the Budget for local communities, and I agree. This Bill should be doing that, but apart from the occasional grant to individual communities—on, unfortunately, a sort of pork barrel basis—there does not seem to be an overall strategy to enable it to happen. As I said during the Budget debate, we have seen the impact, with the cutting of funding for nearly 900 children’s centres, 940 youth centres, 738 libraries, and 1,200 bus routes. Local government was mentioned only once by the Chancellor in the Budget speech.”
“I thought that as part of the Budget, the comprehensive spending review and then this Bill, the Government would bring forward what has been promised for some time now—a fairly radical reappraisal of local government finance with the potential for reform that would provide local authorities with the resources, as well as a relatively independent source of income, that would then embody their ability to engage in genuine levelling up across our society, as raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams). But the figures show that local government funding from central Government grant is about £16 billion a year lower today than it was in 2010. Cumulatively, that is a reduction over that 11-year period of £100 billion in central Government support for local government.”
“However, as other hon. Members have said, unfortunately the new jobs have gone into chasing compliance issues as a result of covid, and not into increasing the operation to address tax avoidance. Those are the issues that I just wanted to comment on. I actually came here to make one specific point and put forward one proposal with regard to local government, but as there are not people rampaging to speak in the debate, I thought that I could at least comment on some wider points. The point I wanted to make is about what is happening with regard to local authority finance.”
“We need to go so much further, with full transparency and enforcement. When we are trying to enforce against tax avoidance, the one thing that we must not do is open up opportunities for new forms of tax avoidance, but the Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK Trade Policy Observatory and the TUC have said that the introduction of freeports is the new opportunity for tax avoidance schemes, for the displacement of jobs from one area to another with no overall benefit, and—this is exactly what the TUC is saying—for the undermining of trade union rights; and we know what that will do for workers. I have welcomed the Government’s investment in HMRC. I was sitting here years ago when the first major cuts to HMRC were introduced, and we saw the results. It was an undermining of the work to address tax avoidance and evasion.”
“Friend the Member for Ealing North have said, the failure to link these tax reliefs to the achievement of net zero means that we are undermining the ability of the Government to intervene effectively in the economy in order to ensure that we are all signed up to tackling climate change. I also thought that the Government were going to come forward with amendments in legislation to prevent companies with any record of tax avoidance from being able to qualify for tax reliefs at all, but that is not in this legislation. We are therefore in a situation where we are giving tax reliefs to companies that we know have in the past engaged in tax avoidance. Of course we all welcome the tax avoidance measures that the Government have introduced, but this legislation is an incredibly slow, incremental development.”
“Don’t tempt me. Those are the only figures that we have, but I thought that we should be generous and say that there were, on average, 25 jobs a year at least. We do not know, as all we have is the figure of 75. In the case that there were 25 jobs a year, we are still talking about, at best, £4 million to £5 million a job in subsidies for the British shipping companies. I do not know what other Members think, but there is an issue of productivity here, is there not? That is the sort of problem that we have when we get into relying on tax reliefs to stimulate the economy and jobs growth. Let me make a final point on tax reliefs. As the hon. Member for Glasgow Central and my hon.”
“They said it would cost £1.3 billion in ’22-23; that was in comparison with the uprating with prices. I was in the House a few weeks ago. We are arguing about an additional £1.3 billion for pensioners. Actually, a £25 billion corporate tax break was given away by the Chancellor in the Budget. It will be £12.5 billion next year.”
“I just wonder what this row is all about, because I support the amendments. I would have given the 8%, because I do not believe that people should break the principle of a manifesto commitment in such circumstances and I believe the additional top-up would have worked. However, the Altmann amendment is moving towards a 5% increase and the Government will award a 3% increase, so the difference we are talking about—this is the argument—is about £2.75 a week. Even if we went to the full amount of the 8%, there would only be an additional £7 a week between the 3% and the 8%. Are we really having a row in this House about robbing pensioners of £2.75 a week? I just find it unbelievable that we can even contemplate that. I have seen the range of costings, but I have examined the DWP estimates on the effect of the Altmann amendment.”
“In addition, pensioners from black and Asian communities are about twice as likely to be living in poverty. What I find interesting are some of the individual examples we can bring to the House about what this means. I remember that, the last time energy prices rose, I had a constituent who used her bus pass to stay on the bus all day to keep warm. Such stories about the reasons why people were living in such fuel poverty were not uncommon. I remind the House that this year fuel bills are increasing on average by £139 and they are expected to rise again next year, so I predict that we will have more of our pensioner constituents going cold this winter and, if we are not careful, in future winters as well, especially as, as has been said, inflation is now likely to be 4% and some are even predicting 5%.”