Household Energy Bills: VAT — House of Commons, 2022-01-11
Topic: Energy
Benjamin David Bradley (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and he is absolutely right to say that many of our constituents who are ably described by Opposition Members as struggling to pay their bills would I am sure prioritise paying those bills and putting food on the table, rather than paying green levies on their energy bills for some future that they may or may not see. We know that that may be a short-term solution, but this is a short-term problem that we need to tackle now, and those levies are not helping people put food on the table tomorrow and to pay their bills tomorrow. We do need to think more about this than just to chuck an answer out there that may seem all right on social media, but actually relates to something in the region of about £1 or £1.10 a week for such constituents. It is certainly not the answer It is clear that there is an awful lot of work to be done, but there is already a lot of work being done to support people in need. We have had the list already from Conservative colleagues. There are warm home discounts, winter fuel payments, cold weather payments, winter support grants—it goes on and on—so let us not pretend that the Government are not acting on this. We know that these are tough times for a lot of people, but through covid, uncertainty, inflation and rising costs, the Government have acted, and they will act further and will help That debate is a legitimate and important one, but this is not that debate. The bit of the motion that may pass many of my constituents by—on the surface it is dry, internal administrative stuff, but it is actually really important to recognise this—is that it does not just ask the Government to tackle the cost of energy bills, but seeks to take us back to a time in the midst of Brexit negotiations when the Government lost the ability to control the business of the House through such a motion. The chaos that surrounded that whole scenario, with the damage that that process caused at the time to our Brexit negotiations and the illegitimacy of the premise that elected Governments should no longer decide what laws they introduce, was of absolutely no help to anybody. In fact, it made a mockery of this House and its procedures, and undermined both the democratic outcome of the referendum and the democratic outcome of the preceding general election, because it is of course Governments who are elected to make laws, not the Opposition This Opposition day debate does not just ask the Government to remove VAT; it asks the Government to give up control of the legislative agenda. It means we would just forget the measured consideration of which of the measures I described earlier might have the best impact and value, and instead allow the Opposition to set the agenda and timetable, and to legislate. That is not how Parliament works and it is not how democracy works. We have been there and tried that, and it was wrong at the time and it is wrong now. Sadly, the Opposition have turned what is otherwise a reasonable debate into something wholly unacceptable. If Labour Members’ answer to the rising cost of living is to knock a quid a week off energy bills and tell people it is a silver bullet, I think they need to go away and think harder, as the Government are doing, about how we genuinely support people in need.