As I said earlier, one thing that the Government could do and have consistently refused to do would help thousands of people throughout the country: they could abolish the hated bedroom tax. They could also accept our proposal for a tax on bankers’ bonuses, and adopt our properly designed programme to get young people back into work and give them the start that they want. Until we get young people into work, ensure that they have adequate housing and ensure that they can have a decent quality of life, the majority will not have an opportunity to think about
saving from one year to the next, let alone trying to invest for the longer term. In Committee, I asked whether it was only me—or only Opposition Members—who held this view. My hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) made a powerful speech in which, like my hon. Friend the Member for Inverclyde, he described the reality of what was happening to young people in his constituency.
I have looked at the tax information impact note again, in search of further details of that 22-year-old’s story, but I can find nothing that explains how such people will benefit. The only reference to benefits for investors was this rather disappointing revelation:
“This measure could improve returns on investments (including pensions) but would otherwise have no impacts on individuals or households.”
I do not yet see how the measure can benefit the people we are trying to represent.
I am sure that we would all like to hear the next chapter in the 22-year-old’s life story, and if the Minister has any more information to illustrate the fact that he is just the kind of person who stands to benefit from this measure, I am genuinely willing to hear it. However, in the absence of any such information, I shall return to the subject of amendment 67.
Our amendment invites the Government to lay out clearly and transparently exactly who will benefit from this policy and by how much. In Committee my hon. Friends expressed on a number of occasions the view that this is just another tax break for the Government’s friends in the City. While it does look like that, we are open to giving the Government the chance to prove otherwise. That is why our amendment asks the Treasury to publish the costs to the Exchequer in order to ensure that a list of beneficiaries and a distributional analysis for the abolition of stamp duty reserve tax are put into the public domain. That way we will be able to see all the facts as to who the Government are really concerned about.
Of course, if the Government do not agree to our amendment, we will be forced to conclude that this is just another tax cut for the wealthy, just as we suspected all along. We would also have to conclude, in the absence of any information to the contrary, that any claims of jobs created in regional economies are about as robust as the Prime Minister’s stance on Europe has been, and we would have to look a lot harder to try and find something in this which would create jobs, as seems to have been suggested on previous occasions, because I cannot for the life of me see how that stacks up. If we really want to tackle some of the regional imbalances, let us look at some of the announcements that have been made today, in terms of the reports put forward by the Opposition, about how we can create more wealth and look to ensure that power and resources are devolved to some of our cities and we tackle the issues around infrastructure in the regions.
In the light of the response when we tabled this amendment in Committee, I have to say that I am not at all confident that the Government are going to agree to provide us with the transparency we so urgently need. Again, if we look back to what was said in Committee, we find that the Government were not particularly transparent in terms of the information we were given,
because, along with the story of the 22-year-old, speakers on the Government side were keen to stress that, because it is fund investors as opposed to fund managers who will benefit from the removal of SDRT, it would greatly boost investment. Again we have to question whether any increased investment would directly benefit those investment fund managers. Hon. Members were also very helpful in trying to enumerate how many people are currently employed by the industry, but try as they might, they failed, as did the tax information and impact note, to detail that important point about how many jobs would be created by the abolition of SDRT.
We also heard that the tax as it currently operates is
“an uncompetitive charge that puts UK-domiciled funds at a disadvantage to funds domiciled elsewhere”.––[Official Report, Finance Public Bill Committee, 10 June 2014; c. 412.]
That does not square with the idea that the UK investment management industry is doing so well that it is the second largest in the world, beaten only by the US.
I want to draw to a conclusion soon because I put quite a number of questions to the Minister in Committee and it would be useful for us to give him some time to respond to them, as he was not necessarily able to do so in Committee. It is important that we give him the chance again today, therefore. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the Minister is continuing to steadfastly—albeit politely—refuse to countenance our amendment for two reasons. First, he seems to be suggesting that the information requested has already been covered by the tax information and impact note, which, as I hope I have outlined, it does not seem to me to do in any clear and transparent way. The other argument that came up in Committee is that it would be difficult and it would perhaps take longer than six months to do. I am sure—and I am sure the Minister will understand this—that should he wish it to be so, he would be able to utilise all the capacity of the Government to overcome any difficulties, and indeed to ensure more information and a report were brought forward, and I am sure he would also be able to use his good offices to have his Government provide us with considerably more information than is currently contained in the tax information and impact note. It would also be helpful if the Minister could give us more information in his winding-up speech as to why he thinks it would not be possible to do this within a six-month deadline, as we have asked in our amendment.
In conclusion, this is all about priorities. The Government’s measures will reduce Exchequer revenues by more than £800 million over the course of the next five years if this particular measure goes ahead. That funding could be used in a variety of ways, and the Government have to be held responsible for the choices they make. Our amendment simply asks them to undertake that assessment and put the information in the public domain, so that we can see who benefits from this initiative and how it would benefit the wider public. The Government have not made that case; they have not shown how the measure would have an impact on our constituents—for the most part they seem to suggest it would not have any impact on them—and they have not answered the questions put previously about job creation and the impact on the regional economies.
Let me therefore remind the Minister of some of the questions we posed in Committee—I am sure other Members will wish to contribute, but he will also want to answer these in his summing up. The Investment
Management Association is saying that the industry is doing very well, so why are the Government handing this tax break to the industry? What evidence can the Minister provide to us, even at this late stage, to suggest that the measure will have a positive impact on the UK economy and, in particular, the jobs market? Unless my memory fails me, he has not so far been able to give me a concrete number on the jobs he expects to be created or any more information about the regional benefits that have been referred to. Can he do that now? It would be helpful if he could do that and if he could set out all that information today. In those circumstances, perhaps I would consider whether our amendment was necessary. I suspect that he will not be able to give that information and will not be able to provide the clarity and transparency we seek, so I strongly suspect that when the time comes, I will seek to press my amendment to a vote.