Health and Social Care Levy Bill — House of Commons, 2021-09-14
Topic: Social Welfare
Nadia Edith Whittome (Labour, Centre-left): With your permission, Dame Eleanor, I will speak to new clauses 3 and 5, tabled my hon. Friends the Members for Ealing North (James Murray) and for Erith and Thamesmead (Abena Oppong-Asare). New clause 3 requires the Chancellor to assess the impact of the Act on tax revenue from different sources of income and new clause 5 calls on the Government to publish an equality impact assessment of the Act Dame Eleanor, given that even in Committee this has been a wide-ranging and broad debate, I hope you will allow me to set out the context of those new clauses. It is people in poorly paid jobs who will bear the brunt of the national insurance increase, at a time when in-work poverty is already at a record high. How can it be right to ask those who are already saddled with extortionate housing costs, poverty wages and mountains of debt to pick up the tab for this Government’s failures on social care? To put it simply, the Government are choosing to protect the interests of the wealthy who fund them at the expense of low-income workers and renters. While landlords and the super-rich who are hoarding wealth and housing pay nothing under this new tax, my constituents will be having their pockets raided Since 2010, under this Government’s watch, £7.7 billion has been cut from social care budgets. If I could sum up this policy—if we can call it a policy—in one word, it would be "unfair": unfair on the working people who are funding the tax rise; unfair on the care workers who will not see their pay and conditions improve; and unfair on those relying on social care, whose needs will continue to be unmet. Figures released this week show that nearly 70,000 people in England could die waiting for social care before these changes even come into force If the Government were interested in fairness, they would tackle the soaring housing costs, low-paid jobs and inadequate benefits that my constituents are facing. Instead, their policy agenda is fuelling inequality and impoverishment. As we heard from the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn), 2.5 million working households will be hit by the cut to universal credit and the increase in national insurance. Working families will be losing, on average, over £1,000 next year. Meanwhile, the furlough scheme is ending and evictions are resuming There is, however, a group of people who have benefited from the pandemic—who have done very well, in fact: British billionaires. They have increased their wealth by over £100 billion. That is why now is the time to get serious about taxing wealth. The Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, the right hon. Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt), said earlier in the debate that this tax hike would raise more than a wealth tax, but I am afraid that that is not true on any measure. City A.M.—this is City A.M., not "Das Kapital"—calculated that one wealth tax option would be to tax wealth progressively between £1 million and £10 million, with all wealth beyond £10 million taxed at 3%. That would bring in a total of £55 billion over five years. Alternatively, the economist Richard Murphy calculated that, if wealth was taxed at the same rate as income, that could raise up to £174 billion a year Will the Minister explain why none of those options was considered and what the Treasury makes of those calculations? And perhaps the Chancellor could explain to us, as a multimillionaire, why he cannot dig deep into his own pockets and why it has to be my constituents—in fact, all our constituents—instead. I think that this House and working people across the country deserve to know why a wealth tax was dismissed in favour of a tax on the poorest and the lowest paid, and what is more, to fund a plan that will not even work We have heard during this Committee that the Government’s excuse for not ring-fencing the money raised for social care is that health and social care are interlinked. I agree, to an extent, and that is why, to fix our social care system, we need a national care service, like our national health service, which is free at the point of use. We need to redesign the system so that the needs of care users, for want of a better word, and care workers are at its heart. The money to do that is there but it is in the pockets of the richest and it is the political will from this Government that is sorely lacking. Anything less than a national care service, funded by a tax on wealth, not on workers, would be a great disservice to the people we are elected to this place to represent.