Health and Social Care Levy — House of Commons, 2021-09-08
Topic: Health
Miriam Joy Cates (Conservative, Centre-right): It is an honour to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) I am in absolutely no doubt that we need to raise the money to enable the NHS to recover from the pandemic. It would be wrong to raise this money through more borrowing. We should not expect our children and grandchildren to settle the debt at some time in the future; we need a plan to pay for it now The criticisms of this motion come not so much from the fact that the Government are choosing to raise the money, but more from the way in which it is being raised. Those criticisms centre around one concept: the idea of fairness. As we have heard in this debate, fairness is extremely important for Conservatives. If the Government are to be the force for good that they should be, we need to ensure that our policies are as fair as possible—that benefits and costs fall in a fair and equitable way across the population. I accept that there is some unfairness around using national insurance to raise the levy, but in order to raise the cash required, we must use a broad-based tax. A VAT rise would have a disproportionate impact on those with low incomes and using income tax would not incur a contribution from businesses. Of course, businesses very much benefit from health and social care, as huge numbers of people would have to leave the workforce if those services did not exist. On reflection, I think that using national insurance to raise this levy is a fair way to proceed, especially given that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has made sure that dividends and working people of pensionable age are included. I support the motion today because we have to acknowledge that politics is not about striving for perfect solutions. It is about finding the best solutions possible within the financial, practical and moral constraints that bind us all. However, although the money raised through this motion will be a start, it will not be enough We have to accept that health and care costs are many times higher now than they once were. I echo the comments of my hon. Friends the Members for Wycombe (Mr Baker) and for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt) on this point. When the welfare state was born, life expectancy was about 65. Many people left school in their early teens and entered the workplace. In the 1940s, an individual might well spend fewer than 20 years of their lives not working. Now people can spend more than 40 years of their life not working. Simply put, during our working lives we must now pay a lot more —double, or perhaps more—in taxation, pension contributions and insurance to fund our decades of economic inactivity. We cannot escape that fact So in raising any additional money in future we must be far-sighted, inventive, creative and look to other countries, as other hon. Members have said. In addition to taxation, we could look to build on the success of our automatic enrolment model for workplace pensions or consider some form of contributory insurance scheme. But we must also be clear that there are alternatives to ever-increasing bills for health and social care, so I hope to see extensive consideration of local, community and capability approaches in the White Paper. We must not forget the crucial role of the family. How can we help families to look after their own relatives’ wealth for longer and with appropriate support I acknowledge and understand that there are criticisms of this motion, but doing nothing is not an option. When it comes to finding a pragmatic solution to such a difficult and urgent issue, I am convinced that this is a fair approach for now.