YouSaid · the spoken record
Jon Trickett
On the record 2018–2026
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This is everything the corpus holds for Jon Trickett. It is not everything they have said on the record.
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“When the Minister said that the Post Office was not fit for purpose, it was hard not to agree with him, given the elite contempt that the organisation has shown for the people who worked for it. It dripped with contempt for ordinary folk. When the Minister meets the new management, will he bear in mind the experience of my constituents? I have 23 former mining villages, with chronic poverty throughout. One after another, the banks have withdrawn from every village and small township in our area. We have 20,000 people without a car and—quite honestly—a crap bus service. Many do not have access to the internet either. The only lifeline that they have is the post offices.”
House of Commons13 November 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Yesterday, a large number of women lobbied Parliament. They represent a generation of women—just women, not men, which is perhaps not too odd given the values of the Conservative party—who suffered a great injustice in the Pensions Act 2011. They call themselves the Women Against State Pension Age Inequality Campaign, or WASPI. Government inevitably takes time—estimates must be made and legal advice taken—but I would be grateful to the Leader of the House if she indicated when we might hear a statement on the WASPI situation, or have the opportunity to debate it, so that we can give some hope to thousands of women, including 4,500 in my constituency.”
House of Commons31 October 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“There is the same short-term memory of the failures their Government had committed under John Major and the other Prime Minister before that, and the same lack of remorse. There is a lack of remorse for what we have now: food bank Britain, with millions of people in poverty. Not a word from those on the Conservative Benches. There are millions of people on NHS waiting lists. No remorse from the party opposite for that. There is no remorse for the fact that our economy has not been properly invested in throughout their whole period in office. This country was the lowest investor in the whole of the G7. There is no remorse for all the other failures either, and no sense of humility when the public told them that they had made a series of mistakes.”
House of Commons31 October 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will try to be reasonably quick. I pay tribute to the maiden speeches we have heard today, which were exceptional. In particular, I associate myself with the views of my hon. Friend the Member for Dagenham and Rainham (Margaret Mullane) when she said that she stands for working class life and communities, and will do everything she can for them. That is how I have seen my 28 years in this place, too. I think I am probably the only person on the Labour Benches today who was here in 1997, so I want to say something to the Government and to all our Back Benchers. I was there when Labour came into office—I was elected in 1996, so I was here in ’97—and the same lack of humility shown then by the Conservative party, which had been thrashed by the electorate, is being shown today.”
House of Commons31 October 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“With those few thoughts, and an encouragement to be more radical and even more bold for the future—let us bear in mind ’97—I wish the Budget well.”
House of Commons31 October 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“If we measure my constituency by GDP per head—a controversial measure, but the one we are familiar with—that lack of investment means the average worker produces £29,000 per year of GDP. Wages are pegged to productivity, as we all know, so we have low wages—less than £30,000 a year. But listen to this. In Camden—we know it is a different economy in Camden—GDP per head is £174,000. The regional differences between output, capacity and productivity are all the result of that failure to invest. The Budget sets out to invest, and to invest big and go for growth, but I will be pressing, for all the held-back, post-industrial communities up and down our country— not only the coalfields but in the midlands and elsewhere —for the investment we achieve and the growth we deliver to be more equitable than it has been under the Conservatives.”
House of Commons31 October 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“If we are going to raise bus fares—that is the decision that has been made, which I regret—we need to reform the way buses operate so that they are accessible to communities. The Government have made some announcements in relation to that already, which is welcome. My final point is on the lack of investment the Conservative party presided over for years. I heard the shadow Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Godalming and Ash (Jeremy Hunt) saying today, “Okay, there might have been a black hole in the public finances, but we were going to cover it with cuts.” That is effectively what he said. The cuts were always taking place to investment and they were going to cut more investment.”
House of Commons31 October 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I regret this Government’s decision to raise bus fares from £2 to £3. I do not suppose there is anybody in this whole Parliament who does not have access to a car, but there are many people across the country who do not have a car because wages are so low. People are walking in the dark at 7 o’clock in the morning to get to work from one village to another. And for those of us who do have a bus service, it is going up by 50%. It will be roughly £6 a day to get to and from work. That is £30 a week and £1,500 a year in bus fares to get to work and back. Clearly, that gives us a problem. In my constituency, there are villages that are only seven miles apart, yet the bus takes one hour and 19 minutes to get from the one you live in to the one where you work. That is completely unsatisfactory.”
House of Commons31 October 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The previous Government—that lot—spent £418 per head on transport in Yorkshire. In London, it was £1,200. That is three times as much per head per year spent on transport in London than in Yorkshire, and that leaves us with problems. I represent 23 villages—rural communities in many ways, deprived communities, post-mining communities. To get from one community to another, bearing in mind over 20,000 people in our area do not have a car and the trains do not work very well—the train service has left us without adequate public transport by train—the only option is the bus. Buses often do not start until 8 o’clock, but people begin work at 7, or leave home at 7. I have met women walking from one village to another in the dark on unlit streets because the bus service has not yet started. That is a problem the Conservatives created.”
House of Commons31 October 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“They destroyed the mining industry and have done nothing to replace it in the last 40 years, so we have widespread poverty, as there is in all post-industrial communities throughout our country. They perpetrated a hoax on those communities by saying that they would level up. The levelling-up fund was not directed to where poverty was. In any event, it was a competition in deprivation between one area and another. My communities got nothing, yet we are struggling desperately to achieve growth. Levelling up was a great slogan, but it was used as a trick to persuade people to vote Conservative in 2019. What happened? People have learnt their lesson. Let me come on to one point that I am worried about and then on to a general point. On transport, the differences in the distribution of funding for transport are extraordinary.”
House of Commons31 October 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“So, I say to those on the Government Front Bench: continue in the direction you are travelling, but move faster and be even more radical. I recommend that they have a look at Spain, where a socialist Government are in place. They have—I think I am right in saying—the highest rate of growth in the G7. They introduced a 0.5% wealth tax on estates worth more than €3 million a year and they are getting high growth. That shows that a determined Government restructuring the economy, as we need to do, can deliver change and not damage a country’s economic success. I represent 23 villages, all former mining communities that were treated brutally by the Tory party 40 years ago. It is a distant memory for many, but I remember every single moment of the strike.”
House of Commons31 October 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“No, I am going to try to be quick. I am not going to take any interventions. All those matters, and others too, require us to make a change in the direction of our economy. That is what this Budget has begun to do; we are turning the page. One final reflection on ’97. When Labour introduced the minimum wage, one of the great reforms of the century, the Tories kept us in the Lobby night after night after night. We were proud to do it. The arguments they made then have a parallel with the arguments they are making about our Budget today—that there will be job losses, an impact on profitability, small firms will be in trouble and so on. Let me say this. Eventually, they accepted the minimum wage because it was the right thing to do. There were no job losses and there was no impact on profitability.”
House of Commons31 October 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Is it not clear that the ruling economic orthodoxy has let this country down over many years? How else can we explain the fact that in 24 of the last 30 years, the UK spent less on investment than any other G7 country? In particular, in post-industrial areas like mine, the investment simply did not come. I encourage the Minister to break with the prevailing orthodoxy and ensure that we achieve the appropriate investment levels and direct that investment particularly to the north, the midlands and elsewhere.”
House of Commons28 October 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Like other Members, I hope that as the scheme is rolled out and we establish confidence among the victims, the Government will organise opportunities for the Minister to come back to the House so that we can raise constituents’ questions and establish a more trusting relationship between the Government, who are doing dramatic work on this matter, and the people who have suffered for decades.”
House of Commons23 October 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“You have a duty to ensure that every single penny is properly spent, so please exercise care in any announcements you make.” I imagine that those conversations happen on most days. Of course we have a duty to protect money, and very significant amounts will have to be spent to compensate people properly, but equally there is a duty to deliver justice to the people who were treated by state actors in a shabby and disgraceful way over decades. When there is a lack of paperwork and victims are perhaps very ill or dying, how will we secure value for money for the taxpayer while delivering justice for people who have struggled for decades as a result of Government negligence? I leave those thoughts with the Minister and hope that he will address them in his reply.”
House of Commons23 October 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We are dealing with people who do not necessarily have large resources to employ representatives such as lawyers and other advisers. The Minister indicated that the Government are open to victims having their own representatives. However, if the Government are to encourage the appointment of such representatives, it must be clear that they are not appointees of the Government; they must see themselves as representatives of the victims. Otherwise, people will not have the necessary trust in them. That brings me to my final point. I can imagine the kinds of conversation that the civil service has had with Ministers about this matter over decades: “Minister, you may be dealing with billions of pounds.”
House of Commons23 October 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“How can victims establish that they deserve justice if documents have been lost or even wilfully destroyed? The Minister mentioned that, but we need to hear more from him about it either today or in the coming period. Secondly, as other Members have said, civil society groups have the confidence of the victims—the Haemophilia Society is one, but my constituent mentioned Tainted Blood, of which the Minister is probably aware. It would be helpful if the Minister said that he and the Government are open to further conversations with civil society groups, which can speak on behalf of victims. It is important that the victims’ voices are heard, and because those groups have the confidence of victims, those exchanges and that dialogue would be very helpful. The Minister referred to one of the central requests that have been made.”
House of Commons23 October 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Imagine living life with a cloud upon you after losing your father when young, because of negligence by operatives of the state and the cover-up that followed. The only way we can reduce the scepticism is for the payments to begin to flow through. In the meantime, there is clearly a wish for some reassurance from the Minister today. He has made some of these points already, but I will go back to them. First, someone who lost her father in the ’80s when she was two will probably struggle to find the appropriate evidence, as she is not necessarily skilled enough to search for it forensically. Langstaff discovered—this is shocking—that documents were destroyed knowingly by the Government of the day because they thought that it might incriminate them. It was an establishment cover-up of some scale.”
House of Commons23 October 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“With disasters such as the Post Office scandal, the policing of the miners’ strike or Hillsborough, the establishment always closed ranks. The Langstaff report is very clear. First, it says—this goes to the root of the scepticism that people feel—that, from the 1940s, Governments of different parties were fully aware of the scientific opinion that these actions could infect recipients of blood transfusions. Sir Brian Langstaff says that the disaster did not happen by accident. He tries to imagine what it must be like for those suffering the agony of being victims, and then being refused the truth that a wrong had been done by successive Governments. My constituent Katie has been in touch with my office. Her dad died in the 1980s when she was an infant.”
House of Commons23 October 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I congratulate the Minister on the way he spoke to the House. He spoke firmly, with a sense of urgency and great clarity in his use of English, which was very much appreciated. The truth of the matter is that there is a deeply ingrained scepticism in the community we are talking about. Words, in the end, will not count; actions will. Of course, today we are taking significant action on the road. When we reflect on the views of victims and their relatives, it is hardly surprising that there has been a breakdown in trust. It always seems to be the case that the British establishment’s first reaction when there is a disaster is to close ranks, deny the truth and not listen to the victims. It is only in recent times that victims’ voices have begun to be heard.”
House of Commons23 October 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“As the Leader of the House knows, our manifesto promised justice for the mineworkers’ pension scheme, especially the £1 billion that is in a reserve fund. Can I encourage her to ensure there is an early statement or a debate on this matter? That money would be very well received in miners’ pockets, and those of their widows too.”
House of Commons5 September 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker—I did not quite catch you calling me. May I say how delighted I am to see you? You helped me to establish my parliamentary office 20 years ago, and I am so proud to see you in the Chair. I also welcome my great right hon. Friend to her position as Leader of the House. I am one of many Members who represents mining communities. Miners provided power, light and heat to our country and helped to create our wealth, but they did something else: they created a massive pension fund, which the Conservative party sat on for 14 years. That party allowed it to accumulate and ripped off hundreds of millions of pounds, leaving miners and their widows in poverty on low pensions.”
House of Commons5 September 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I welcome the Chancellor’s statement about public sector pay, but is it not clear that, after savaging public services, holding down public sector pay and driving 3 million people into food banks, this crazy ideological austerity programme of the Tories has failed massively while at the same time, the richest 250 people in the country gained wealth of £500 billion? Can I tempt the Chancellor to say that, while we accept that there are hard decisions to make, we reject the ideological commitment to this form of Tory austerity?”
House of Commons29 July 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I thank the Minister very much for her response and I welcome the whole team to the Front Bench. The problem with outsourcing is that, normally, the outsourcers will drive down pay and conditions for the workforce, thereby creating a two-tier workforce; they are not properly accountable to Ministers; they are exempt from freedom of information requests; and finally, there is the question of public service centres. Will the Minister confirm that we will proceed with abandoning the previous Government’s ideological obsession with outsourcing?”
House of Commons25 July 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is good to see you back in your place, Mr Speaker. The new Minister will recall the old saying that a new broom sweeps clean, and I am sure he will make progress very quickly indeed. It seems to me that the Post Office scandal reveals a wider problem in British society. Whether it is Orgreave, Grenfell, contaminated blood or the problems at Hillsborough, the British establishment seems incapable of listening to the voices of ordinary people. Will he raise that matter with other Ministers and see whether there is a way for this Government to ensure that is not repeated?”
House of Commons18 July 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I am grateful to my great and hon. Friend and I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Henderson. Is the population of my hon. Friend’s constituency sparsely distributed? Mine has got 23 separate villages, and there are probably four or five high schools, so making a choice is limited by the geographic spread of the secondary schools especially. That impacts communities like my hon. Friend’s in the north east, and mine, and those elsewhere, too. In that respect, competition between secondary schools and academies does not necessarily help parental choice in my hon. Friend’s constituency.”
House of Commons21 February 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way again. Has he had the experience of some entrepreneurial secondary academies excluding kids who have issues about attainment in an effort to drive up the average result for those schools? And if he has, what does he think happens to those children—those young people—who have been excluded?”
House of Commons21 February 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I absolutely take your guidance, Mr Henderson. I have not asked to make a speech, but my hon. Friend is raising a number of issues of national importance. With your forbearance, Mr Henderson, can I make one final intervention, please?”
House of Commons21 February 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“You are very generous, Mr Henderson. We have a 90-minute debate and my hon. Friend probably has an 85-minute speech, so he will have to cut it down slightly. I have noticed that the proportion of young people in my hon. Friend’s constituency with no qualifications at all is almost one in five; in the city of London, only 6% have no qualifications. Is that due to social class or is it partly about the density of the population in London compared with the sparsity of the population in his area? In my own constituency, 24% of all the kids have no qualifications at all when they leave school. Is that not a disgrace?”
House of Commons21 February 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Office for Budget Responsibility is responsible for giving clear advice to the Government on their fiscal and budgetary strategy. Has the Leader of the House noted that the other day a senior representative of the OBR said that the Government’s figures are a “work of fiction”, because the projections for cuts after the election have never been printed? Will she comment on that? Is it a work of fiction? Can we have a debate on the OBR and its role?”
House of Commons1 February 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The fact that thresholds are being held steady while wages are rising means that people are paying more as a proportion of their income than they would have done if the thresholds had risen at the same rate.”
House of Commons17 January 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The right-wing papers are saying that there is some “fiscal headroom” in the Budget—in other words, the Treasury is sloshing around with money. But where has the money come from? It has come from hard-working people who are overtaxed on their income. There might be other ways to fund state services, but it is the working people who have created the additional money in the Treasury. That has been done through a cruel system, which is no longer quite as invisible as it was, called fiscal drag, whereby people’s wages and salaries are increasing but the threshold at which they pay tax is being held steady by a Conservative Government who have clearly set out to raise more money from working people.”
House of Commons17 January 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“If there were to be a wealth tax, we might well be able to change the way we tax inheritance, but that is not the case; it is not a serious proposal for now, but it is something to think about in the longer term. It is good to see so many Members here. I begin my reflections on inheritance tax with the following reflection: it is always interesting to look at the language politicians use, especially those from the governing party. When Labour proposes a spending commitment, the Government say that we have found a “magic money tree”. When the Tories find money to spend or give away in tax gifts, suddenly it is “wise”, “prudential” and “management of the economy”. Of course, it is no such thing; it is propaganda.”
House of Commons17 January 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I beg to move, That this House has considered inheritance tax. I am looking forward to your firm guidance from the Chair, Sir Robert. I am grateful to the House authorities for allowing us to have this important debate. The whole British tax system is skewed in a very odd way. We simply do not tax wealth sufficiently, but we do tax income from work. Income from wealth is relatively untouched by the taxation system, but income from work is taxed and people feel the burden of it. If we were to redesign our whole tax system, I wonder whether that is the way we would structure it. My office wrote a report on this issue three years ago, suggesting a wealth tax.”
House of Commons17 January 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I do not think it is a rational decision and a proper way to spend money, and nor do the public. In two recent polls, 75% said they were against a cut in or the abolition of inheritance tax.”
House of Commons17 January 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I guess that all Members present will have been around their constituencies in the recent Christmas and new year recess, and they will have seen people hungry and living on the streets, schools closed because the concrete problem has not been resolved, hospitals with cruel waiting lists, people unable to heat their homes, and even unfilled potholes. What we have seen in our own constituencies is true for the whole nation. There are massive pressures on our civil society and the way we live our lives. If we were the Treasury and had £7 billion, would we really want to hand over money to some of the richest people in our society, when all those needs are still there, and when maybe we should be trying to help people on lower pay with some assistance on tax? I don’t think so.”
House of Commons17 January 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I find that a very interesting intervention. I am not opposed to considering that idea as part of the wider debate, but let me return to the point I was trying to develop. It looks as though right-wing ideologues in newspapers and elsewhere are hinting that there is a significant amount of money available in the Treasury. Those papers are saying that we should end inheritance tax or perhaps cut it. It would cost £7 billion of the Treasury’s reserve of money to abolish inheritance tax completely.”
House of Commons17 January 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“If it is agricultural land that is being farmed, there is no inheritance tax on it. Such estates remain there—a blight on our system and a way of securing the continued existence of the British class system, which has caused so many problems for our country. Let me turn from the very wealthy to other people who pay inheritance tax. Less than one in 25 people who die leave an estate that is subject to inheritance tax; that is under 4%. More than half the constituencies in the country pay no inheritance tax at all, or none that can be measured. That figure is from the Financial Times. Ending inheritance tax would not put a single penny into all those constituencies. There would be no benefit to them whatsoever, as far as I can see, from the relief of inheritance tax.”
House of Commons17 January 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“None the less, it is extraordinary that someone earning £10,000 or £15,000 a year—struggling—is paying bloomin’ tax, but a multimillionaire with hundreds of millions of pounds and an estate can avoid tax by handing over a bookshelf that remains in the very house where their family have lived for centuries. The senior economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which is hardly a hotbed of Marxist thinking, said overnight that it is not in favour of changing inheritance tax, except to say that we should avoid all of the reliefs and the systems by which people can escape inheritance tax, which makes it unfair and skews the taxation system as a whole. It wants to see the loopholes that some of these richer families use closed. For example, it is possible to put money in a trust.”
House of Commons17 January 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I will be interested to hear the Minister defend that. It was extraordinary to find that the owners of that property in my constituency avoided inheritance tax on one of the largest estates in the country, which has been left untouched for four centuries, because they were able to gift to the nation a bookshelf—okay, it was a valuable bookshelf. That bookshelf was given in place of paying inheritance tax. How can that possibly be correct? What is even more extraordinary is: where is that bookshelf now? It is in the very stately home where that particular family still has some residential rights. Of course, it is available for the public to see if they visit.”
House of Commons17 January 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“That is barely touched through the way we deal with inheritance. I do not think that is justifiable, when the half the land of a whole nation is held by 500 families. I discovered something quite extraordinary in my constituency while researching this issue. I will not name anyone, because this case has not been in the papers. There is an estate of more than 3,000 acres in my area, with 5,000 acres elsewhere and a further 3,000 somewhere else. That large estate, in place since the 16th century, has been barely touched by any form of inheritance or wealth tax over the centuries. That estate remains in place. What is extraordinary is that there is an agreement between the Treasury and the people who leave these large estates that if they cannot pay the inheritance tax, they can donate a work of art.”
House of Commons17 January 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I do not want to name too many very wealthy people, but let me name one, because it has been in the newspapers. The Duke of Westminster, one of the richest men in the country, inherited well over £6 billion—I think, nearly £7 billion—through various trusts and other arrangements, but according to the right-wing newspapers—the Daily Mail , Daily Express and others—the estates more or less avoided any form of tax at all. How can it possibly be right that that kind of wealth should be handed on, while people who work hard and have maybe managed to accumulate more than £1 million in their lifetimes are paying 40% tax on the residual amount they arrive at? In Scotland—I have no doubt my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) from the SNP may well mention this—500 families own half of all the land.”
House of Commons17 January 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“If someone leaves more than £1 million, they may well be required to pay inheritance tax. Let me deal with what actually happens, based on figures provided by the Financial Times , which are based on Treasury figures. If someone leaves an estate worth more than £5 million, they will find that the amount of money they pay in inheritance tax declines. The people between £1 million and £5 million are probably paying 40%—unless they have made certain arrangements—but the really wealthy estates above £5 million, where the power and wealth in our society resides, pay less and less tax the more wealthy they are. Hon. Members can see the graphs; they are freely available on the internet. The richest estates in our country pay virtually nothing at all in inheritance tax. Can that really be right? I do not believe it is morally justifiable.”
House of Commons17 January 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“When the second person in the marriage or civil partnership dies, the first person’s £500,000 is accumulated to the second person’s £500,000, so that is effectively £1 million per house. Nobody in a couple who owns a house in that particular way would pay any inheritance tax on the house, so it is a specious and false argument to say that inheritance tax would somehow deprive people of their houses. Look at the figures. In Yorkshire, only one in 300 properties is worth more than £1 million. All the rest are worth substantially less. In the whole of Yorkshire, there are 7,500 households worth more than £1 million. Across the whole country—of 60-odd million people—there are 700,000 properties worth more than £1 million. It is important to put that on the record, before we go any further into the debate.”
House of Commons17 January 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I said I would give way twice. The right hon. Gentleman has already had one intervention, so I will only take another from somebody else; a lot of people want to speak. I am sure we are all clear on this, but let us remind ourselves how the system works. One argument that might be made is, “Are you really saying that if you’ve worked hard all your life and managed to buy a house, your descendants can’t inherit that house?” Well, the rules are quite clear. It is not as people might imagine, because a person is allowed half a million pounds with no inheritance tax on the house value. With a couple, however—whether they are married or in a civil partnership—the partner left behind after the other has died inherits the house with no tax; we all know that.”
House of Commons17 January 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“No, I will not give way—the right hon. Gentleman will have a chance to speak in a moment. I want to illustrate what is happening. I think I am right in saying that, if inheritance tax were abolished, it would put £12 million back into the Minister’s constituency, which makes £60 million in a five-year Parliament. In all the 42 red wall seats in the north of England, which went from Labour to Tory, that sum is hardly more. All those seats together would raise £15 million a year in inheritance tax. Abolishing inheritance tax would put a fraction of the amount of wealth in our country back into those constituencies, and then only into the hands of the richest in our society.”
House of Commons17 January 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is a political strategy to move money into those areas where the Tories are now extremely worried that they are going to lose their seats. This is about pumping money into blue wall seats. It is a political strategy rather than a fiscal one. That is where we are. The Government think that they can bung people, whether with contracts or honours or by putting money back into the pockets of the richest people in our society, in order to secure their own continuance in office. But the British people do not like this stuff. It is grossly unfair and it should not be happening. I hope that the Minister can say, “Well, we might have had a look at it, but we’re not going to do it, because—you’re correct—it would be unfair.””
House of Commons17 January 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“So in Tory seats in the south and south-east, and to some extent in London, £1.5 billion was paid, while only £15 million was paid in all of the so-called northern red wall. That is a completely extraordinary set of figures. I think Ministers and right-wing commentators really fail to understand the way in which our society is structured, with the inequalities and all the other problems that we face on a daily basis. If it were to happen, the abolition of inheritance tax would be one of the largest shifts of wealth that has ever taken place under any Chancellor, certainly in recent history. I have been in Parliament for 28 years and I do not remember anything as large. Here is the central point: this is not a fiscal strategy, and it is not about justice, or fairness, or responding to what the people of the country want.”
House of Commons17 January 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The hon. Gentleman raises an important issue, because I think there is £800 billion of wealth in our country that nobody—not even the Treasury—knows the owners of. That is a colossal, unimaginable amount of untaxed wealth, which has simply disappeared because the Treasury cannot find out who owns it. It is true that people can reside in one place and own property in another, but I am talking about someone’s place of residence when they died. Let me remind Members of the figures, because I do not want to lose the argument. In all of the red wall seats that Labour lost to the Tories, £15 million in inheritance tax was paid; only in three of those seats did anyone pay any inheritance tax. However, in the 42 blue wall seats that I have looked at, £1.5 billion was paid in inheritance tax.”
House of Commons17 January 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Out of the 29 constituencies in the north-east of England, only three paid a penny of inheritance tax in that last tax year. Does my hon. Friend think that cutting inheritance tax will put massive amounts of additional resources into his region?”
House of Commons17 January 2024Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗