Nigel Mills: It is real pleasure to welcome a much more optimistic and extensive statement than I had thought. A few weeks ago, we heard stories that inflation was higher and stickier than we thought, interest rates were forecast to be higher for longer, and it could be a miserable statement to sit through. Then, we heard stories that we may not be able to increase pensions by the triple lock and benefits...
Nigel Mills: Would the Minister agree that the journey we have been on with benefit rates for the last decade and a half has perhaps been a little haphazard, and it is pretty unclear to most people exactly what basket of goods and services benefits are actually meant to buy? If the Minister does not agree with the case for an essentials guarantee, will the Government commission their own study to work...
Nigel Mills: I have half an hour, Mr Davies, so I can wind up at great length. I thank everybody who has taken part in the debate. Hopefully, it has given us a chance to illuminate the issue and to give some profile to the importance of getting this right. I think we all, on all sides, want this tax to deliver its objectives; we all want to see more recycling of plastic packaging. There has to be a role...
Nigel Mills: I do not know whether the Minister knows this, but was the enforcement action against the importer or against somebody further up the supply chain?
Nigel Mills: It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies; there has been a swift change of Chair in the last three and a half hours. I am grateful to everyone who has come back after the short interval for this crowd-pulling debate. Before we disappeared, I was trying to convince the Government that, with a bit more work, they could raise extra tax, protect jobs in the UK and help achieve...
Nigel Mills: I beg to move, That this House has considered HMRC enforcement of plastic packaging tax on imports. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McVey. I am grateful for the chance, however long it might be, to raise this issue. The tax has been enforced for about 18 months. As a Parliament, we are not brilliantly effective at reviewing taxes after we have introduced them to check...
Nigel Mills: That is the exact point that I am trying to make. We will not get more use of recycled content if we do not enforce the law and ensure that our domestic businesses are not undercut by the market. The fact is that plastic film that includes recycled content is 20% more expensive than using virgin polymer; that is why we need to have the plastic packaging tax. If we allow imports to enter which...
Nigel Mills: I strongly agree that we could beef up the HMRC guidance. HMRC has published guidance on the due diligence checks that businesses buying this plastic film should make. It does require something stronger than just asking for a certificate. My hon. Friend is right: if I were buying film from a reputable company in Germany that had all the accreditations under German and EU law, and had the...
Nigel Mills: It is greatly welcome that we are trying to get the assessment to give people the outcome they deserve, but it is intriguing to make what sounds like a fundamental change to an assessment that we are going to try to scrap in a few years’ time. Will the Secretary of State set out how many of the 2.5 million people he cited as being in this situation he thinks would not be in the same group...
Nigel Mills: What steps his Department is taking to incentivise pension schemes to invest in the UK.
Nigel Mills: I thank the Minister for his answer and welcome those measures. Have the Government considered what more can be done to unlock surpluses in defined-benefit schemes to allow employers to use that money more effectively, rather than having it end up going into insurance companies on buy-outs? There is a huge tax penalty on unlocking surpluses. Is there a way of relieving that to encourage the...
Nigel Mills: I agree with the importance of having a timely assessment. Last week, a constituent raised her case with me: she filled in her renewal form nine months ago, but has been given less than two weeks’ notice for an assessment next week. Surely we need to have assessments when the form is fresh and accurate, not nine months later?
Nigel Mills: The Health and Safety Executive website currently makes no mention of the aerated concrete issue that we all heard about at the end of last week. Can we be assured that the Executive has the resource and motivation to get that guidance out there, so that employers and other building owners know what they should be doing in this situation?
Nigel Mills: There was welcome news this morning of inflation falling by more than expected. Businesses in my constituency are trying to plan their pricing for next January and are struggling because of the proposals to introduce the extended producer responsibility. They do not yet have the information on how much it will cost or how it will work. Will the Prime Minister look at pausing and resetting...
Nigel Mills: I welcome the Mansion House compact and the focus on auto-enrolment pensions delivering a better pension for their scheme members, but if the Minister looks at the websites of the firms that have signed up to his compact, he will see that they are all still marketing themselves as being cheap and simple for employers, rather than the best quality and best return for savers. What more can we...
Nigel Mills: I thank the Leader of the House for moving the motion and for accepting the recommendations of the Procedure Committee, of which I am pleased to be a member. The idea of extending proxy voting further was not entirely without controversy. Some people were very concerned about it—understandably, given that we are meant to be a Parliament where people gather and exchange views, and our voting...
Nigel Mills: It is pleasure to speak to amendment 21, which stands in my name. I also want to speak to the amendments on the Office of Tax Simplification, which my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) tabled and I was happy to put my name to. In my more naive and mischievous days, I occasionally tabled amendments to Finance Bills that called on the OTS to review elements of...
Nigel Mills: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, how much and what proportion of the Government's total spending on Official Development Assistance was spent on in-donor refugee costs in financial year 2022-23; how much and what proportion of that spending was disbursed by the Home Office; if he will make an estimate of forecast Official Development Assistance...
Nigel Mills: What recent assessment he has made of the adequacy of funding for defined-benefit pension schemes.
