George Kerevan: What assessment he has made of the potential effect of provisions of the great repeal Bill on Wales’s devolved competences.
George Kerevan: Accepting the Minister’s request to be positive, may I ask him whether he agrees that the best way forward for Welsh and Scottish farmers is for the responsibility for financial subsidy arrangements to be transferred to the Welsh and Scottish Assemblies post-Brexit?
George Kerevan: With your indulgence, Sir David, I thought that this might be an appropriate moment to pay tribute to the outgoing right hon. Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie), the Chair of the Treasury Committee, which has paid a lot of attention to making tax digital. There could be no more fitting tribute to the right hon. Gentleman leaving this House than the Government withdrawing the making tax digital...
George Kerevan: I have two points. First, I reiterate to the Minister, who artfully shifted to saying that there was a 2% rise in the tax, that there is a two percentage point rise. It is a 20% rise in the tax. I asked the Minister how she justified that massive, excessive increase relative to inflation. She did not reply—I suspect because, as a Conservative tax cutter, she is embarrassed. I have a...
George Kerevan: Essentially, this is one of the taxes that the Government are keeping in. It is the third insurance premium tax rise in 18 months. Will the Minister justify why the Government are proposing this third increase, which actually increases the rate by 20%—well above the rate of inflation?
George Kerevan: It will be someday.
George Kerevan: May I, too, thank the new hon. Member for Copeland (Trudy Harrison) for such a passionate and entertaining speech? It is good to have a representative of the land of Beatrix Potter here in this Chamber. I listened to her last points about the deficit and her encomium that this Government are bringing it down. I will be slightly wicked in saying that I am sure she knows that the Office for...
George Kerevan: Does this Bill not raise taxes on insurance, and on this, that and the other thing? Is the hon. Lady in favour of the Bill or not?
George Kerevan: They are paying for the health service.
George Kerevan: I shall support the amendment, although that does not prevent me from believing that there are many interesting and good things in this draft Finance Bill. However, I find myself agreeing with my colleague on the Treasury Committee, the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), in one respect. We will have two Finance Bills, because the current process has been truncated, and a...
George Kerevan: I was very careful to say that I was not anticipating who would actually be in government. I was giving the present incumbents in the Treasury a chance to say what they might do should they be re-elected. Let me move on now, because I think it important to analyse the contents of the Bill. I think that it contains two sets of structural weaknesses. The first reflects what I consider to be a...
George Kerevan: I accept what the Minister says, but the extra investment from the productivity fund that is going into the economy at the moment totals hundreds of millions, not billions, of pounds. The bulk of the spend, when it comes in 2019, will be in long lead items. A lot of it will be for housing, which is one aspect of the productivity investment fund I have never quite understood, as I do not see...
George Kerevan: I am happy to agree with that point. The weakness of the euro is that across Europe it has locked the German supply chain into an artificially low exchange rate. On the back of that, Germany has generated a massive trade surplus, which it is not redistributing. That is undermining the whole European economy. I perfectly accept that. I was not arguing that the German economy is perfect;...
George Kerevan: I could not agree more, and I look forward to the hon. Gentleman taking that up in the 1922 committee—as I am sure he has. If we run through a whole series of the provisions in the Bill for raising taxation, we see this creeping distortion of the tax system, such as the tax-free allowance on dividend incomes cut from £5,000 to £2,000 to raise £800 million, which is a substantial, chunky...
George Kerevan: rose—
George Kerevan: Indeed, I had a fine East Lothian Easter egg. Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the difficulty with the hands-off approach he suggests, leaving it entirely to the individual, is that there is a vast advertising industry that also influences consumer behaviour and that using a sin tax is a way of evening out that process?
George Kerevan: I cannot let the hon. Gentleman continue with his analysis of the previous Chancellor’s single plan for the economy. In the first two years of the previous Chancellor’s reign, from 2010 to 2012, there was a very rapid move to austerity—tax rises and cuts in spending. Growth slowed precipitously and by 2012 the Chancellor reversed his policy. In fact, he got the Treasury and the Bank of...
George Kerevan: Can the hon. Gentleman explain why Germany, which has a much higher headline rate of corporation tax, does so much better industrially?
George Kerevan: In the interests of this potentially more consensual period in the run-up to Prorogation, as we try to work out what will remain in the Bill, could the Financial Secretary tell the House where the £2 billion per annum to replace the non-raising of the national insurance contribution is going to come from, if she is so wedded to balancing the books?
George Kerevan: This is the Finance Bill!
