argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Finance Bill — House of Lords, 2020-07-17
Topic: Macroeconomics
Edward Timothy Razzall (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, this is clearly our opportunity to comment on the Chancellor’s economic policy. He has an unenviable task. The unemployment forecast is grim, particularly for the under-25s, and a recent forecast for the manufacturing industry shows the cost of the pandemic at £37.5 billion and recovery postponed to 2022 at the earliest. Obviously I welcome the overall thrust of his actions. Keynes is back, and hopefully austerity is dead. But the job of an opposition party is to provide constructive criticism and to suggest alternatives First, the criticism. Will £1,000 per employee brought back from furlough really provide an incentive to employers? For example, if a company employs 20 people at £15,000 per annum and brings them back at a cost of £300,000 per annum, will a £20,000 payment provide a real incentive to bring them back There is admirable aspiration in the Chancellor’s proposals for young people, but the proposal that 16 to 24 year-olds should receive a minimum wage for six-month work placements requires 350,000 work placements. In reality, as I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Hain, would agree, there is no chance of business offering 350,000 work placements. A similar scheme, the Future Jobs Fund referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Livermore, introduced after the 2008 crisis, produced only 100,000 placements. If the Government are modelling themselves on Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal, as Will Hutton has suggested, do we not need an organisation such as a national youth corps as an umbrella organisation to marshal placements? Otherwise, I fear these proposals will be more aspiration than reality I have three suggestions as additions to the Chancellor’s policy. First, why not raise the national insurance threshold to the level of the income tax threshold? That would provide an incentive for employers to take on staff and, obviously, would help the working poor. Secondly, we should establish an entity to take on the billions of pounds of toxic loans that will remain after the virus, as was done after the previous crisis and as is recommended by the leaders of all our major banks. Thirdly, there is Brexit. The government policy is clearly to crash out and blame Covid, but that will not work. In the current climate, will we really replace the European Union with China as a major trading partner and import chlorine-washed chicken from the United States as a price for a US trade deal? The only rational policy is to conduct negotiations to keep us as close as possible to the European Union, our largest trading partner. If we do not do that, I echo the comments made by a number of commentators on our Brexit policy, who have gone back to Enoch Powell’s infamous "rivers of blood" speech in a different context: "Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad." Sadly, all of us will be the victims of this lunacy.
Finance Bill — House of Lords, 2020-07-17
Topic: Macroeconomics
Lorely Burt (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I will address my remarks from the perspective of small business. As other noble Lords have said, there is much to be welcomed in this Bill, especially the £3.7 billion to support jobs and the help for our struggling hospitality sector However, an eye-watering £9 billion has been allocated to the supporting jobs programme. This will be largely dead money and not well spent. Either a job is economically viable enough to be retained or it is not. I do not think that a £1,000 pat on the back for keeping on someone whom you already need will change the decision if the job is not viable Some categories of people have been left out, such as newly self-employed people and company directors who rely mainly on dividends for their remuneration. I know that the Chancellor has steadfastly resisted the pleas from representatives of these two categories, but many entrepreneurs—those arguably at the most precarious stage of their journey and who receive awards only when they have been earned—will be lost to the economy at a time when their willingness to take risks is most needed. Rather than showering £9 billion on companies for workers who would have been retained anyway, a small fraction of this money could have saved tens of thousands of wealth generators for the future Finally, I make a plea on behalf of those companies whose ability to borrow will be blighted to the tune of over £1 billion—possibly far more—by proposed changes to the Government’s Crown preference policy. Floating charge creditors and unsecured creditors, such as pension schemes, would be leapfrogged by HMRC in any subsequent insolvency proceedings. Who is going to lend when they could lose everything if the company to which they are lending goes bust? This will seriously hamper the recovery, especially for small businesses. The insolvency and restructuring profession has been clear that the policy will make it harder to rescue businesses from administration and will reduce the likelihood of successful CVAs. This measure should be paused, at least until the full economic impact of Covid-19 is known. I urge the Government not to help with one hand and take away with the other.
Finance Bill — House of Lords, 2020-07-17
Topic: Labor
Sharon Bowles (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, the expansion of IR35 has been postponed for a year. That is a small mercy, but a fair balance between the employed and the self-employed needs a more thorough reckoning. First, for the same reasons as now, the economy will not be in sufficient shape by next year to take the IR35 risk to workforce flexibility, nor for companies to take the burden Secondly, the fix is simply a tax fix that ignores the reality, recognised by both the Office of Tax Simplification and the Taylor review: that there is a set of flexible, dependent workers who are part way between being employed and self-employed. The Government are roping them in to tax and NI as if they were employed, on the basis of tax fairness, but leaving them out in the cold when it comes to employment rights and benefits, which is clearly unfair if they pay the same Thirdly, along with the aid given to the self-employed during lockdown, the Chancellor has indicated that a revision of national insurance and the coverage it provides for the self-employed might be necessary. This must apply vice versa, to the situation of the self-employed and the dependent worker: you must get the security that you pay for. Notably, many self-employed have been left out of grant-based help, ironically because they are not companies Fourthly, there is no fair solution, other than banning dependent workers, if this is not taken in the round alongside employment and social security rights Fifthly, contract workers have other expenses that can be imposed on them by their clients. How are these to be treated? They can include public liability insurance and giving indemnities to the client. They come as part of the package terms, which often include unreasonable contract terms that are not applied to employees. What protections will the Government bring in to defend taxpayers equally There are more points to make but time is short. As a veteran of proceedings on the Corporate Insolvency and Governance Bill, I share now, as I did then, the concerns expressed by my noble friend Lady Burt about the new preferential status for HMRC in insolvency, making it even wider in scope than before the Enterprise Act 2002. The arguments about it relating to tax paid by employees and held by the company do not wash, given that the company does not apply that logic to pension schemes in the hierarchy.
Finance Bill — House of Lords, 2020-07-17
Topic: Government Operations
Anthony Robert Greaves (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): What a lot of good sense, my Lords The noble Baroness, Lady Verma, is in Leicester, which is having difficulties, and asked if there is any money left in the local authority coffers. I rise to tell her that there is not, and to talk about local government. I declare my interests, having been a local councillor in the Pendle area for most of the last half-century. Pendle is now working hard to avoid imposing a Leicester-type lockdown The Local Government Association estimates that the cost to local government of coronavirus will be about £7 billion. That is the shortfall after all the grants so far announced by the Government. One of the real problems is that the Government are not fully funding lost income. For the council in Pendle, of which I am a member, the overall cost for that small district is about £3 million, of which the Government have so far provided about £1 million, leaving a shortfall of £2 million. That may not sound a lot, but that is on this year’s budget of about £13.5 million, and so is a very substantial amount on top of all the cuts made in the last few years, which have cut council finances to the bone There are two specific grouses as far as we are concerned. The test and trace funding is going only to upper-tier local authorities in a shire county such as ours, whereas a lot of the hard work has to be done by the people on the ground: the district council environmental health officers and the public health staff, with the expertise and the local knowledge. In Lancashire, the money for the hubs which were set up to help people who could not afford food and other essentials during the worst of the lockdown goes to the county but is being spent by the district Finally, the cost to parish and town councils, particularly the big ones that provide leisure services and so on, has been very substantial. They are being left out altogether. Local government needs the shortfall of £7 billion to be addressed. The Government promised that they would provide whatever was needed. We are still waiting.
Finance Bill — House of Lords, 2020-07-17
Topic: Macroeconomics
Michael German (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I will make two points about measures in the Finance Bill. These are extraordinary times, and the only certainty is uncertainty—and, unfortunately, greater unemployment. As other noble Lords have said, local firms and UK chains have faced a real battle competing with online companies based overseas which do not have the same overheads as physical shops and services The Government’s digital services tax plan in this Bill is a mouse of a measure compared with the huge profits made by American big tech companies. The Government need to co-operate closely with the European Union, which is devising an international tax with much greater teeth so that these big tech companies will pay their fair share of tax. We need a much more sustainable, long-term solution, with a broader international base What impact is the demand for trade deals having on this measure? British bookstores and other businesses should not face a higher tax rate than Amazon. The Chartered Institute of Taxation points out that this part of the Finance Bill is not aimed at stopping profits arising in the UK being shifted by multinationals out of the UK to tax havens. These disrupter companies play an essential role in our economy, but they use complex ways of moving and hiding the money that we pay them. They have thrived during the pandemic as our high streets have suffered. Their business has grown as demand has shifted online. Surely their tax bills should be at least comparable with those of other retailers—it is a very uneven playing field, and the limited measure in this Bill will do little to rebalance the tax paid. The jobs in this sector are the most fragile. Those who can work at home are higher paid, and it is the lower-paid, face-to-face jobs that are being most challenged My second point concerns small and medium-sized enterprises in the manufacturing sector. The Government’s infrastructure announcements are welcome, but the Chancellor has performed an Aladdin sleight of hand—not "old lamps for new" but "old money for new". The IFS has crunched the numbers and the £5.5 billion announced for transport and infrastructure is old money repurposed. My point is that this money would have been circulating in the economy anyway and does not represent a real boost to companies seeking to rebuild their order books. With half of UK manufacturing companies seeking to make redundancies in the next six months, we have to make sure that there are skilled jobs left, because they are going to be lost right across the country and all sectors of manufacturing.
Finance Bill — House of Lords, 2020-07-17
Topic: Social Welfare
Dominic Hubbard (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, when I see the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, something in my memory tells me we should be talking about education after all these years The Finance Bill is the backdrop to a disaster, not one which the Government made but one which they must handle. I would like to concentrate on the charitable sector, which has had only one or two mentions so far. At the start of this process, a couple of months ago, I was lucky enough to lead a debate about the problems of the charity sector. The Government have given hundreds of millions of pounds to back it up; that is great. However, the sector looks like it has lost billions Why does this matter? Quite simply, there is virtually no section of our society which does not use charities to fulfil its ends. Charities are involved in education, recreation, healthcare support, housing—you name it, charities are there. They have lost their main income streams—those fun things which you do together. The sponsored walk is out; the charity dinner, where everybody drinks slightly too much and makes pledges, is gone; the high-street shop, which has filled a vacuum, is gone or has a very low uptake. The pressure is there Some charities, such as the British Dyslexia Foundation—I here remind the House of my interest as its president—are providing training. There is a big surge with children at home, as parents want to know what to do with a dyslexic child. One feels that, to go back to the old ground of the noble Lord, teachers should have been doing this beforehand, but never mind. All this training is fine, but you still need other activities to back it up, and not all charities can do it. Those sections of our society dependent on social activities to generate their income to deliver social goods are vulnerable There has not been enough attention paid to these groups at the moment. They overlap with other things, like furlough for staff—we have had a great deal of people asking why you cannot volunteer when you have been furloughed. There must be another look at how we can get this sector to work as the economy starts to emerge from lockdown. Some of the primary fundraising activities will be among the last things we can return to We must have another look here or the state must take over these duties, and I do not think that it has a great appetite for that. A little bit of pump-priming, thought and help is required here, or huge sections of our social support structure and things which make life bearable will be threatened.
Finance Bill — House of Lords, 2020-07-17
Topic: Macroeconomics
David Goddard (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I will address the loan charge in the Finance Bill. For the avoidance of doubt, we do not support tax evasion and fully support everybody paying the tax that is due. However, the scandal of the loan charge must be addressed Today I spoke to a family whose breadwinner unwittingly signed up for a payroll loan scheme in 2012. He checked that the company was legally compliant. It was backed up by a QC opinion and a chartered accountant was appointed to look after his tax returns. It was only in 2018 when he had retired that he became aware that a loan charge had been made to his retirement plans. Now on a pension, not working, he faces a bill of upwards of £50,000. He is uncertain of the final settlement, as HMRC will decide how much to add on in penalties, interest and maybe inheritance tax. The Loan Charge APPG has published a damning report on the conduct of HMRC’s dealings with loan charge-affected citizens, who have no right of appeal to HMRC. They simply want to work and be on the right side of legislation This person is not alone. About 100,000 families are similarly affected. The use and industry-wide acceptance of payroll loan schemes, where the payroll scheme makes substantial deductions and passes the money back to the employees through a mixture of PAYE and credits, became common from 2010. The people affected are not Premier League footballers and celebrities, but hard-working contractors in oil, gas and IT and, latterly, NHS and care workers, for whom in many instances it was a condition of employment that they engage in a recommended payment loan scheme These schemes still operate. A recent BBC report on "Money Box Live" highlighted how they are drawing into their clutches lower-paid and essential workers. This Finance Bill also condones retrospective tax law—a dangerous precedent According to a recent Morse report, the average liability is around £50,000. For the family I spoke to, that is two years’ gross pension and clearly unpayable. They are now putting their house on the market, as they have no other course of action. New Clause 31, which is not included in the Bill, would have restored natural justice to our system. It proposed to exclude people who have submitted tax returns in good faith and that the loan change should apply only to those who have deliberately reduced their tax bill. The principle of "innocent until proven guilty" would also have been preserved In summary, the loan charge has not stopped payroll loan scheme companies operating. It is retrospective. It has caused immeasurable stress and hardship to those facing it. It is forcing house sales, bankruptcy, family breakdowns and confirmed suicides. It does not serve a purpose. In rejecting NC31, the opportunity to restore the rule of law and fairness to the tax system has been missed. It must be looked at again.
Covid-19: Businesses and the Private Sector — House of Lords, 2020-05-21
Topic: Foreign Trade
Jeremy Purvis (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): I thank the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, for the debate, and I very much share the sentiments of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. We know there will be very serious long-term consequences for many sectors in the UK economy beyond this immediate shock. For example, the Chancellor has already indicated that the self-employed will be likely to pay higher taxes and national insurance contributions next year, while businesses in Northern Ireland will have greater trade barriers because they were misled by the Government. Those are just two examples On a wider scale, we know from analysis in the FT that the UK is being and will be impacted greater than many of our competitors because of the profile of the UK economy on top of the contraction of investment, economic flight, and restrictions on labour mobility that we were already seeing as a consequence of Brexit. Our services-centred economy and the flexibility our businesses have had in a liberalised labour market were both highly integrated into our biggest economic market but from 2021, new barriers are being erected to that market Therefore, it is imperative that we have information on the core estimates of what the economic and business impact will be of the proposed trade agreement with the EU. When I asked the Government for this in a debate recently, I received subsequent correspondence from the noble Lord, Lord True, for which I am grateful. However, he said: "The economic impacts of our trade deal with the EU are the subject of a thriving public debate among analysts. It is impossible for a single model, number or scenario to capture that complexity or represent the varying impacts that will be felt across different parts of the economy." It seems to be possible to give a model, number and scenario of the impacts of a hoped-for trade agreement with the US, and a hoped-for Japan agreement, but the Government refuse to do so for what is by far our biggest import and export market. It is not acceptable that we go blind into making serious decisions, impacting on our businesses and private sector for the long term, without the Government releasing core estimates of the economic impact of their proposed agreement with the EU.
Covid-19: Businesses and the Private Sector — House of Lords, 2020-05-21
Topic: Labor
Dominic Hubbard (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, in listening to this debate, I find that two things occur to me. One is that the mixed economy really does not have any opponents here; the only thing we are arguing about is the level of the mix. The private sector holds some of the answers, but certainly not all. Remembering that the Government set the terms of market—that is, trading—and what is possible and desirable, we must never take our eye off the interaction. That brings me to the question that I want to talk about: what will happen in the new job market to those with disabilities There has been a huge drive to get everybody who has a disability into work. I refer the House to my registered interests, both paid and in the voluntary sector. How will we help? I have seen, in over 30 years as a Member of this House, the peaks when everybody was to be employed and we were short of labour, and the economic downturns when suddenly this group is squeezed. A group that needs adjustment, even if it is comparatively easily done, will always be slightly less attractive to employers than those who do not. Those who have problems that develop at work will always be that much more vulnerable or feel that they should not ask for the help that they are entitled to when the job market suddenly becomes tighter. Can the Government give some assurance that all employers will be reminded of their legal duties and moral responsibilities to these groups? Normally, they are workers who stay in their jobs, do not change and, indeed, perhaps oddly, do not take sick leave. Can the Government assure us that they will maintain this level of support in the future?