Sir James Cleverly
MP for Braintree · Conservative · United Kingdom
“On 26 March, I said that people will ask whether these reforms are an act of gross gerrymandering and political opportunism, or gross incompetence and stupidity. I think today we recognise that it is both. The right hon. Lady has only just returned to the Dispatch Box, so it cannot really be her fault, so who has screwed up?”
“Increased energy costs, increased material costs, the increased cost of employing people, particularly young people, the increased cost of bureaucracy and business taxes are all pushing up the cost of building and squeezing the viability of projects.”
“I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. This is blatant—blatant. These changes, like so many of the Secretary of State’s decisions, have been driven by party politics.”
“In Nottinghamshire, Conservative-run Rushcliffe council is a well-run, financially secure council, yet under his plans it will be carved up with most of its assets transferred to debt-ridden Labour Nottingham city council.”
“In Devon, he has accepted the proposals put forward by Labour-run Exeter and Plymouth. In Leicester, he has accepted the submissions by a Labour-controlled council. In Nottingham, he has accepted the proposal put forward by the Labour-run city council. I could go on and on, but time does not permit.”
“So please can he inform the House: is two-tier local government good or is two-tier local government bad? He does not seem to know. What assessment has the Secretary of State made of the democratic deficit?”
The complete record
Every one of 3,156 lines we hold for Sir James Cleverly, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 59 of 64.
“You’re playing all the wrong notes.” Eric Morecambe replies, “No, sweetheart; I’m playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.” That was an awful accent; I apologise. The hon. Gentleman was not playing the right notes, and definitely not in the right order. Some of the claims made by Labour Front Benchers are built on sand. Far from being on the side of tax dodgers and tax avoiders, this party in government has put measures in place that have generated an additional £160 billion of tax revenue since 2010, and the Bill will, if enacted, bring in additional billions of pounds to the Treasury, so the hon. Gentleman was singing the wrong notes.”
“As I am sure you agree, Mr Speaker, we all love a familiar tune that we can hum or whistle along to, the bars and notes of which come effortlessly to mind, so I imagine that a warm feeling of familiarity washed over all Members when they heard the tune being played by the Labour Front Bencher, the hon. Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd). It was the familiar one about the Conservatives not taking tax seriously, being on the side of tax dodgers and so on. We have heard it so many times. It is nice to see the hon. Gentleman using this gargantuan Finance Bill as a stage from which to play that tune. It brought to mind that wonderful 1970s Morecambe and Wise sketch with André Previn; I do not know whether you are familiar with it, Mr Speaker. Eric Morecambe is at the piano; discordant notes are flooding from it, and André Previn says, “Stop, stop!”
“Having a tax regime that supports business and enterprise is an important part of doing that.”
“I thank my right hon. Friend for her intervention. We may not necessarily agree on the Brexit decision or on its impact on international businesses and British businesses that might be international, but it is fair for her to highlight the fact that we should do nothing that gives businesses cause for concern. It would be unfair to suggest that the decision to leave the EU has no impact on business decisions. As someone who campaigned for Brexit, I have an additional duty to prove her wrong. I know that she is of such a generous nature that, if in our dotage we are sharing a glass of wine, looking back at the events in the immediate aftermath of Brexit and I were to be proved right, she would be more than willing to concede that point. However, we have a duty to give businesses as much confidence as possible about being based in the UK.”
“I will be more than happy to invite Treasury officials and Mark Carney to the end of days party that it seems I will be throwing for my hon. Friend and my right hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry). We can sit down to discuss such things, sharing my beautifully aged claret— [Interruption.] . Or indeed some wine from the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Ms Ghani), which produces some fantastic wine. We will discuss the implications for the British economy of fear-mongering.”
“We need to let them know that the UK is open, ready to do business and welcomes business people, as long as they pay their fair share in tax and help to support the public services that we value.”
“My hon. Friend is spot on. I cannot help but think that new clause 1 is more to do with Labour Members feeling that they need to table revised clauses because they do not know what to say. A call for a review of this kind invariably occurs when people are not sure what to say. Mr Speaker, you will be disheartened to hear that I am about to conclude my comments. I strongly urge Members on both sides of the House to reject the new clause. We should do everything we can to send a positive message to businesses currently in the UK, to businesses that may think about coming to the UK and to business people who are deciding where they will domicile and to pay tax.”
“Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) said, there must be no stigma for either a man or a woman in taking advantage of flexible working.”
“Someone becomes a platoon commander at a certain age and a company second-in-command at another, they go to staff college at this point and then become a brigade chief of staff, before going on to command a sub-unit and then hit other markers at other points. That is the route to high command in the armed forces. It is great for completely flexible men, but it is much harder to hit those career markers if you need to take time off to have children, and that massively disadvantages women. Hopefully the Bill will become an Act, after which the acme of its success will be that if a man needs to take time off from that career rhythm to support his family—his children, an elderly relative or whoever it might be—he still feels that he has as much chance of getting to high command, should his talent lead him there, as a woman. As the hon.”
“That is a shame, and it weakens us at a point in time when we now recognise that the diversity of experience and knowledge is an important element in successful planning for not just operations, but the background work in which our armed forces take part. One Opposition Member made the point—I apologise for not recalling who it was—that it is not enough just to pass this Bill, important though it is; it is also important that we drive through a cultural change in the armed forces. The hon. and gallant Members who have served will know that there is an unwritten rhythm to the perfect military career.”
“It is now perfectly normal for the woman in the household to have the more significant and high-earning job, and for the man in the household to be the one who bends their working life around the needs —[Interruption.] Of the wife, indeed. There are plenty of examples in the Chamber this evening of that happening, yet until this Bill is passed it will still be the norm in this area for the woman in a relationship to have to sacrifice her career for that of her husband. Surely in 2017 that should no longer necessarily be the case. I was struck by the point made by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Ruth Smeeth) that we have few women in very senior roles in the armed forces.”
“I know that a number of my colleagues were hugely disappointed, but they understood that these soldiers, sailors and Air Force personnel would have to put their family first, and they reluctantly let them go. That was the right thing for these people to do, but unfortunately it was a loss to the service. It is worth remembering that the patterns of military service we are now used to were put in place at a time when a single employer for life was the norm in civilian employment, and the idea that the bloke would go off to earn all the money for the family and the wife would be happy to stay at home looking after the children was also the norm. The world of work in the civilian sphere has changed beyond recognition. It is now perfectly normal to have two working parents in a household.”
“I rise to support the Bill. Having recently served on the Finance Bill Committee, one realises that there is a beauty in brevity, and the two pages of this Bill are indeed beautiful. They are beautiful in what they seek to do, which goes to prove that a Bill does not have to be large in stature to be effective. During my time in the reserve forces, I interacted with a number of friends and colleagues in the Regular Army and the regular services who dealt on an uncomfortably regular basis with members of their service going to them as their officer to say, “Boss, I am going to have to leave because my recent service has been very intense and if I want to keep my family together, I am going to have to enter ‘First UK Civ. Div.’”. In this place, we would call that civilian employment.”
“We must also make sure that the availability of flexible working is well communicated throughout people’s service life, so that they have thought about it before they need to do it, rather than just afterwards. I do not want to see anyone else sacrifice either their career because of their family or their family life because of their career. The Bill is a big step forward and I commend it to the House.”
“Perhaps, through this model of flexibility of service, the armed forces will get better at dealing with people as they move from full-time service to part-time or flexible service, from part-time service to reserve service, and from reserve service to civilian life, in such a way that those people become and remain powerful recruiters for their branch of the armed forces. The changes in the Bill will need careful management, but this agenda should not be avoided just because of that. We will need to make sure that flexible working is not used as a way to duck out of a particularly bad potential deployment—we all know that there are good and bad deployments.”
“While I was waiting to speak, I took part in an exchange on social media in which someone reminded me that traditionally the armed forces have not been very good at dealing with people on their way out. I have always been massively frustrated by that, because those people are the recruiters of the future. It is remarkable that someone who might have had decades of happy service, whether in dark blue, light blue or green, and who could have gone on to become a fantastic recruiter for their branch of the armed forces, could get messed about so comprehensively in their last few weeks and months of service that when they finally hit civvy street the only thing they have to say is what an awful experience they had. That seems a massive waste.”
“That is not something I had thought of, but it is an important point. If not someone at a very senior rank—there might be the implication that they had already cashed in their chips so were fine—I would love it and it would be interesting to see one of the potential high fliers take up flexible working. Those Members who have been involved in one of the numerous all-party groups on the armed forces all have a little shopping list of the people who could be the service chiefs of the future. Were one of those marked people, the future high fliers, to say, “I’m going to take advantage of this and send a really powerful signal that it will not carry any stigma”, that would be important. I hope that the Bill will drive a change in attitudes towards service leavers.”
“Earlier this year, I opened a state-of-the-art manufacturing training facility at Braintree’s further education college. On Friday, I opened a new training centre for Contracts Support Services, a family-run business. Now that unemployment is at a record low and employment at a record high, will the Government commit to supporting both public and private sector trainers to increase productivity in the British economy?”
“I chose not to bring this up when the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman was speaking, but the Bill has nothing to do with nuclear safety. It is about nuclear safeguarding. The words are similar, but they have a fundamentally different meaning.”
“That goes to the heart of showing that the concerns raised—again, inadvertently, I suspect—by SNP Members and others about the diagnostic ability of the NHS somehow being compromised by a lack of radioisotopes is in fact a fallacy.”
“Again, I took the time, while keeping one ear on the speeches, to look at the briefing paper from the Nuclear Industry Association that they mentioned. It makes reference to concerns about radioisotopes, but when I followed the links I found a circuit of links using basically the same phrase on the concern about five radioisotopes. I finally got to what I think was the end of the chain, and I discovered that, in response to the squeezing of the supply of medical radioisotopes, Euratom and other agencies had set up the European Observatory on the Supply of Medical Radioisotopes. That body has worked in the intervening years to ensure that there is a timely supply of medical radioisotopes.”
“As I said in an intervention and will now repeat—this has been highlighted by the Nuclear Industry Association, on its Twitter feed during the debate—there is not just a semantic difference but a fundamental difference between nuclear safeguarding and nuclear safety. I will give SNP Members the benefit of the doubt and say that the subtlety of that difference was perhaps lost on them, because the alternative assumption I would have to make is that they intentionally blurred the distinction between the two to scare the British people on what this is about, and I am certain that they would not do so intentionally. SNP Members also placed great store on the supposed risks to medical radioisotopes.”
“Although it is absolutely appropriate for colleagues and Opposition Members to scrutinise and perhaps amend the Bill during its passage, it would be foolhardy in the extreme—in fact, deeply inappropriate—to try in any way to prevent it from ultimately making its way through the House. That is why I am very pleased that the Labour party made it clear, after what I must say was an elegant period of anticipation-building delay by the hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey)—she teased us about the position of Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition until the ultimate line of her speech—that it will let the Bill progress, so that any such concerns are alleviated. I have listened with interest to a number of speeches—no, to them all—and I was particularly exercised by some of the points made in interventions by SNP Members.”
“I rise to support the Bill, unsurprisingly, because as colleagues well know, the decision to leave the European Union also meant, by extension, a decision to leave Euratom. This issue has been debated on the Floor of the House, but that is the position of both the UK Government and the EU27. The Government have therefore made it clear that they intend to honour their commitment to the International Atomic Energy Agency by setting up a domestic safeguarding regime. The regime will ensure that there is no interruption to the British civil nuclear industry and, indeed, that the production of nuclear energy and the various other workings enabled by Euratom will continue without pause. It would be unacceptable for the UK not to have a safeguarding regime in place on its exit from the European Union.”
“No, I will not give way, because a number of Members still wish to speak. I apologise; I would normally give way, but I am about to conclude because I know we are short of time. The Bill will give the Office for Nuclear Regulation additional powers. It will give the Government the opportunity to use limited powers to amend the Nuclear Safeguards and Electricity (Finance) Act 1978, the Nuclear Safeguards Act 2000 and the Nuclear Safeguards (Notification) Regulations 2004, so that references in legislation to existing international agreements can be updated. I appreciate that Opposition Front Benchers have concerns about that, but it strikes me as a remarkably pragmatic attempt to get important business through the House in a timely manner, so that our important nuclear industries are not compromised. I commend the measure to the House.”
“T4. The all-party parliamentary group on trade out of poverty, which I chair, is initiating an investigation into the role that the Commonwealth can play to help developing nations to trade out of poverty. We hope that that agenda will be taken up at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in April. We have a potential leadership role, so will the Secretary of State communicate with the Commonwealth secretariat to ensure that that agenda item is taken up?”
“The vast majority of private sector employment in my constituency of Braintree is in small to medium-sized enterprises. What steps are the Government taking to make it easier for SMEs to bid for and successfully win Government contracts?”
““The narrative”—those were the words used by the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman in response to the measure. We should remind ourselves that the narrative is that we are discussing employment-related tax treatments against a backdrop of a significant increase in employment and a significant decrease in unemployment. That goes to the heart of this whole debate. Employment is something that we all want to see expanding through the UK economy. Having started and run a small business and having recruited people to that business, I know that no employer recruits someone with the intention of kicking them out. I hope that that goes without saying, but I have said it nevertheless.”
“Although I did not speak about this set of clauses on Second Reading, I did welcome the Bill, and I welcome this general move to simplify, to clarify and to give small businesses in particular—although of course this affects businesses of all kinds—the confidence to employ people, knowing that the HR and financial treatment around that employment will be as simple as possible. The Opposition spokesman kept talking as though severance payments were not taxed at the moment, and of course they are. They are taxed—”
“I was doing the client interaction and sales, and a colleague of mine was doing the journalism side of the business, but we were also the accountants and the HR department. To give confidence to small and microbusinesses that they can employ people, it is incredibly important that everything to do with employment is as simple and transparent as possible. At the moment, the tax treatments around severance payments are very competitive. Depending on the combination of events, the payment can be taxed any one of a number of ways.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I will respond to her point in a few moments, but it is a very important one and we must not overlook it. We have had a jobs boom over the past few years, in stark contrast to many other developed economies around the world and across Europe, which has struggled. In particular, in the UK, which is dominated by small and medium-sized enterprises and, indeed, microbusinesses, which often have only one or two principals and one or two employees, it is important that we continue to give confidence to those businesses, many of which do not have a large administrative back-office function. That is often the case, as it was in the business that I started.”
“Above the £30,000 threshold, there are tax treatments. Through the Bill, the Government are seeking to make the treatment of the figure above £30,000 most important and straightforward— [ Interruption. ] I absolutely welcome that.”
“So the idea that there would be some sort of back-office sleight of hand in this is inaccurate. At a time when we have, unfortunately, heard news of proposed job losses in one of our key businesses, the Opposition’s approach is unwise. I understand why their Front Benchers have done this—they want to attack the Bill—and I am sure that if I were in their shoes, I would find whatever means I could to try to criticise the Bill. The simple truth is that there are no such proposals and nothing in the Bill to imply that there would be, but it is right that the Government maintain the opportunity to be flexible in the future.”
“I am happy to take interventions, but I have never been a particularly good lip reader, so the Opposition will have to help me out on that one. The Opposition suggested that somehow there would be some terrible Government sleight of hand to try to diddle people out of their money at a point at which they have lost their job, but it has been made absolutely clear by the Minister and in the speech made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) that there will be transparency in any changes. None are proposed, but if they were, they would follow the affirmative procedure, which would mean a Minister at the Dispatch Box, in front of the House, being quizzed and questioned by the House. They would have to be voted on by the House.”
“Surely, the Labour party is not suggesting we should turn a blind eye when a clever set of accountants can massage figures, making sure that the burden falls wholly and solely on small businesses, which do not have the opportunity to employ people to do that kind of smoke-and-mirrors work? I cannot imagine that is what Labour would want to do. Amendment 4 proposes including the words “injured feelings”. Again, I am sure that this is being proposed with the best intentions, but the Labour party must realise that putting into a Bill a definition that is so vague and open to abuse is just inviting unscrupulous businesses to use it as a means of avoiding the tax that should be fairly paid upon a severance.”
“Surely, Opposition Members would wish to make sure, as Government Members would, that tax is applied fairly, dispassionately and transparently, and that it affects all people equally. Once again, a disproportionate burden would otherwise fall on small businesses, which do not have that administrative back-office function and cannot play manipulative games to avoid tax. They are the ones that have to pay the full tax, as is right. Some companies may have clever back-office accountants looking at ways in which to massage the definitions of the various elements of a severance payment to minimise the tax—tax that is due to the Treasury and that we want and need to fund public services.”
“The hon. Gentleman will be unsurprised to hear that I do not agree with him. The Bill is where the proposal is and the passage of the Bill has been timetabled in the way that it has. The idea that we delay changing the tax treatments of severance payments to a point in time when no one in British society is in the process of losing their job is farcical, as I am sure that, on reflection, he will recognise. As has been said, the £30,000 threshold means that 85% of termination payments are completely unaffected. I am sure we have all heard anecdotes about businesses seeking to manipulate the definitions of the various elements of severance payments specifically to avoid the tax that is owed.”
“The only individuals who should be a little distressed by what is going through in the Bill are the very small number of companies that have abused the severance payment structures to avoid paying the tax that is fair. I have little sympathy for those companies. If they play by the rules, we are on their side. If they seek to bend or break the rules, I have no sympathy whatsoever.”
“I thank the hon. Lady for informing me of that. I am more than happy to look in more detail at that definition, because I do not have it at my fingertips, but putting it in the Bill would present to unscrupulous employers something that looks like an invitation to use this as a back-door route to avoid the tax that should rightly be paid upon severance. It would be unwise for that to go through, because it would send exactly the opposite signal to what we are trying to achieve with the relevant clauses elsewhere in the Bill, which is to say, “If you play by the rules, fine.” The vast majority of people who receive severance pay have no need to concern themselves and neither do the vast majority of businesses.”
“In conclusion, I will be generous in spirit and assume that these amendments are just poorly thought through, rather than anything that is attempting to be more damaging. They would undermine the core direction of travel of the Bill, so I will not support them.”
“Although, as I am reminded, there is an NI implication. Again, I have heard a number of anecdotes about conversations with departing employees from not the most honourable of companies in which things have been said such as, “If this complaint were to gently disappear, I am sure we can squeeze a little more money into your severance payment, using this route or that one.” This is one of the areas where simplicity and clarity are important, because companies may be using massaging methods to try to get a bit more money into the pocket of a departing employee, so that employee does not to have recourse to the law where inappropriate behaviour has taken place. Dangling some cash in front of them may be being used as an enticement not to take a constructive dismissal case, for example, and that is exactly the kind of thing we want to avoid.”
“Although the distance between Stansted, my local regional airport, and Luton, which is Monarch’s home airport, is relatively small, some people will be displaced much further afield. What plans has the Department put in place to ensure that those who are displaced during the recovery phase can get back to their most local home airport?”
“I am sure that Members on both sides will confirm that listening to senior Danish politicians is a very good idea. Would my right hon. Friend recommend that the leaders of the other 27 EU countries listen to the wise counsel of the Danish Foreign Minister, who suggests that they stop playing games and now move on to negotiating our future trade arrangements?”
“The number of people claiming out-of-work benefits in my constituency is now 67% lower than it was in 2010, but that brings a different challenge: several employers, particularly high-tech manufacturing employers, are struggling to fill vacancies. May we have a debate on the availability of technical training to enable the workforce to fill successfully the technical jobs gaps in my constituency?”
“My hon. Friend highlights the words of the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Secretary of State, but is it not a fact that it was not just students in his university town who interpreted the Leader of the Opposition’s comments as a debt write-off? Two shadow Ministers broadcast their interpretation that this would be a 100% write-off of student debt.”
“It gives me huge pleasure to follow such an assured and impassioned maiden speech by the new hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden). I was born and brought up in south-east London, with a lot of family in Essex in the constituency I now represent, but my mother came originally from Sierra Leone, and the first part of the country that she set foot on when she arrived here in the early 1960s to set up a new life, and ultimately meet my father and have me, was the port of Liverpool. So the hon. Gentleman speaks of the Liver Birds alive in his stomach during his maiden speech, and my mother before she passed away recounted seeing those iconic buildings of the Royal Liver building, the Port of Liverpool building and the other one—”
“We continue our drive to ensure that non-doms who—“take advantage” is the wrong term—make use of our services and the positive environment we create also pay their fair share, and in this Bill I am pleased to see the Government continuing on that route to ensure that the people who use our public services and who live under the umbrella of protection we provide also pay their fair share. I will now bring my comments to a conclusion. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] That is the best thing I have said thus far. I will be supporting the Government on this Bill, and I would encourage everyone to do so because its philosophical underpinning is exactly right. We need to continue making tax simpler, fairer and more effective.”
“They are putting the squeeze on the sparky, hard-working, innovative, entrepreneurial, often back-bedroom businesses, many of which have been started by people who, demographically, are not as well represented in the British workforce as they should be; they are often ethnic-owned businesses. Women starting entrepreneurial digital businesses are being put under incredible pressure by big overseas players that are undercutting them unfairly. I am pleased that the Government have taken notice of that concern. This is a big step in the right direction, and I will keep a close eye on how it rolls out.”
“Let us use that as the starting gun in a race for good ideas to unlock our small and medium-sized business sector, particularly digitally enabled micro-businesses. Clauses 48 to 59 specifically address a phenomenon that has been brought to my attention in constituency advice surgeries. Smart, innovative British-based businesses are being unfairly undercut by the fulfilment houses of overseas businesses, which make it impossible for British businesses to maintain a sensible living, driving a number of them out of business. Those international players are not paying their fair share of tax.”
“The topic of small businesses has come up several times already this afternoon, and my view has always been that if we have in our minds the economic impact of our political and financial decisions on the small business sector, we will rarely go wrong when it comes to the economy in general. If we look to relieve the financial burden on small businesses, they will without a shadow of a doubt be able to grow, expand and recruit, and big businesses will continue to do well in a more buoyant economic environment. The Bill contains several measures to relieve pressure on small businesses, but if I were to have a criticism, it is just that I would like to see that go further and faster. Particularly after we end our membership of the European Union, we should consider every opportunity to unleash the potential of the British business sector.”