Social Security (Contributions) (Rates, Limits and Thresholds Amendments and National Insurance Funds Payments) Regulations 2018 — House of Lords, 2018-03-06
Topic: Macroeconomics
Archibald Kirkwood (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Primarolo, who has a lot of experience, having been a Treasury Minister. I agree largely with her plea for a better context in which to consider these orders. Like her, I was in the Grand Committee last week when we looked at the social security uprating order, which is a sister order. In the normal annual review that we have had in the past, they are normally considered, pari passu, together, in a way that enables a more joined-up debate to take place. I absolutely agree with what has just been said about the importance of the context of what we are considering The Minister, in his usual efficient way, explained exactly what these orders are doing, and he is right. I am perfectly prepared to believe that the orders are legal and accurate and what is required by law. But if we are talking about £130 billion of contributions through the national insurance fund, £24 billion of which is allocated now to the National Health Service, I think we deserve a better context in which to discuss these things This is a procedural point rather than anything else, but I am getting more and more worried about how the deregulation provisions that we passed in the Act some years aback are now being used more and more to deflect some of the routine things that Parliament needs to be consulted about. It is called "ambulatory provision", for those who are students of these things. I am getting frightened that the consideration of these important orders, including the social security uprating orders that we considered last week, is being pushed further and further into the long grass. I do not need to tell the Minister, because he was there at the time but, in the old days, when we were all in the House of Commons, these were big debates. It was understood that it was a significant sum of money. The biggest spending department in the Government by a mile was under examination and scrutiny in Parliament. We now do that through these restricted orders, which, stricto sensu, as the noble Baroness, Lady Primarolo, said, is technically out of order. I agree with her—and in a moment I shall indulge in the same kind of latitude that she took My point is that the Minister is a very experienced hand in this. Will he go away and reflect how we can, particularly at the beginning of a Parliament—and this is a new Parliament, with its first Budget—think about sustainability and affordability and about the adequacy of benefits, child benefit being principal among them, as well as about the social change that surrounds that? The world of work has changed quite dramatically in a number of respects, particularly in relation to self-employment. I want to talk about class 2 and class 4 contributions in a moment. The Minister understands these things perfectly well. There should be some occasion, maybe a day in government time, to which these uprating orders are appended, when we can have a proper discussion on the context in which these contributions are being raised and the benefit spend is being agreed. That would give some of us more confidence, at least once at the beginning of every Parliament, that the Government were willing to open themselves and be transparent about their longer term aims and ambitions. Basically, I guess that they would say that they were doing their best with universal credit and doing their best to try to understand the challenges when disability costs are increasing. But we should have a grown-up discussion about that—it is not for now, but I hope that he will go away and reflect on that carefully.