I, too, will make some brief remarks. I rise to speak to the Opposition’s new clause 1, which relates to clauses 16 and 17, concerning the Government’s changes to the bank levy rate for 2016 to 2021 and the introduction of a new surcharge of 8% on bank profits.
Before I begin my remarks and before I forget to ask the Minister, Members will be aware that the changes the Government are introducing are quite controversial in some quarters. Building societies have been expressing deep concern. However, I think I just heard the Minister say that 90% of building societies will not be affected by the changes because of the threshold. Will the Minister tell me, either in her remarks later or in an intervention now, whether she means 90% by number of institutions or 90% by size of building societies in total? The statistic does not reflect the concern that building societies have expressed in recent weeks. I will await her answer whenever she sees fit to give it to me.
Taken together, the clauses will completely reshape the structure of bank taxation in the UK, as the Government move from a tax on bank balance sheets towards a tax on bank profits. Alongside the impact on the banking sector itself, the clauses also have significant implications on tax receipts for the Exchequer. It is our belief that the changes have the potential to damage the competitiveness and diversity of our banking sector. New clause 1 calls for an urgent review to establish the impact of the new measures. Before coming on to the detail of new clause 1, I will briefly examine the case for a reduction in the bank levy in more detail.
When the bank levy was introduced at the start of the previous Parliament, the Chancellor made it very clear there were two separate objectives behind the policy. First, it was designed as a revenue raiser, with the Chancellor targeting an income of £2.5 billion each year from receipts of the levy. The second objective was to cause banks to change the structure of their balance sheets. This was explained by the then Exchequer Secretary, the hon. Member for South West Hertfordshire (Mr Gauke), who said the levy was
“intended to encourage banks to move to less risky funding profiles, and…reflective of economic risk”.—[Official Report, 12 July 2010; Vol. 513, c. 733.]
He went on to dismiss the idea of a tax on bank profits, as it would not create the same kind of behavioural effects as the levy.
In and of themselves, either of those goals was perfectly reasonable and was supported across the House. However, it quickly became obvious that the two goals were incoherent in practice, because as banks changed their balance sheets the revenue from the levy went down. This caused the Government to raise the levy again and again, with a total of nine rises in just five years. Now, having marched the banks to the top of the hill, the Chancellor plans to march them back all the way down again with cuts to the levy every year, finishing with a rate of 0.1% by the end of the Parliament. After 10 years
of this Chancellor, we will have had a total of 13 different bank levy rates—what a mess.
The Chancellor claimed in his Budget statement that the bank levy needs to be reduced because the levy has worked. That is an interesting theory given that the revenue target, one of his policy objectives, has been missed consistently. The main question for the Minister is this: if the Government believed that increasing the bank levy had a positive behavioural effect on the banks, does the Minister believe that reducing the level will have a similar effect in the opposite direction? I thought I understood the Minister to say that she did believe there would be some behavioural effects of the change. Perhaps she might say a bit more about that.
The OBR’s economic and fiscal outlook shows that the future revenue projections are based on the assumption that banks will continue to reduce their balance sheets. Will the Minister explain, for the purposes of clarity, on what basis that assumption has been made? If anything, the new policy framework seems to be incentivising banks to grow their balance sheets, especially outside the UK—that seemed to be what the Minister indicated just now in terms of competitiveness outside the UK—and to reduce their profits. Why is this the incentive structure the Government want to adopt? It is completely at odds with the stated policy objectives of the past five years and bears little relation to wider economic objects. Are the Government not breaking their principle that banks should be taxed according to the economic risk they pose to the economy, as the Minister mentioned?
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The reduction in the levy of course has serious revenue implications for the Exchequer. Under the old system, there was always a revenue target of £2.5 billion. As I mentioned, this target was frequently missed, but at least we had an idea of how much the Government were planning to raise. Will the Minister confirm that for this Parliament the idea that there should be a revenue target has been completely abandoned? It is now the rate that is fixed, rather than the expected income. Will she explain the rationale behind this decision?
To make up for the lost revenue from the levy, the Government are introducing a new surcharge on banks’ profits, which is forecast to raise about £1.2 billion every year across the Parliament. When combined with the gradual decline in revenue from the bank levy, the result is a projected increase in revenue of about £2 billion across the Parliament. Clearly, this increase is welcome in the short term, but I have some questions about its sustainability over the long term. The Government’s revenue costings for the banking sector do not take into account the planned cuts in the corporation tax rate, so will the Minister inform the House precisely how much this cut will be worth to the banking sector over the Parliament?
The bigger issue, though, is what happens after 2020. The Government have signalled their intention to reduce the scope of the bank levy from 2021 so that it applies only to UK balance sheets, as the Minister said. This would greatly reduce the revenue that the levy brings in, especially from big global banks. Will she please set out the rationale behind this decision and explain what effect this change would have on revenue from the
banking sector further into the future? Are the Government not simply storing up problems in order to appease big global banks?
There are further worries that the introduction of the surcharge will encourage some banks to adopt more complicated organisational structures in order to avoid paying the surcharge on their non-banking profits. Alongside any revenue implications of such behaviour, surely it would make regulation of the sector more difficult and make it harder to quantify potential risks to our economy posed by the activities of some banks. I really think this is a serious matter, and I would like to know if the Government have considered it.
The Minister will be aware of new research from Ernst and Young casting doubt on the OBR forecast of revenue from the surcharge. The research finds that revenue will be nearly double the £6 billion projected over the Parliament. I would not wish to second guess Ernst and Young, but would the Minister comment on the research and say whether the Government plan to review their position? All this uncertainty strengthens the case for our review.
More important than almost any other consideration is competition. Our main objection to the Government’s new policy is the effect on competition in the banking sector. I am sure there is agreement across the whole House that a competitive banking sector is vital to the long-term health of our economy—the City Minister has been touring the country praising new challenger banks in recent weeks, and well they deserve that praise—but the truth is that the changes in clauses 16 and 17 will directly harm small challenger banks and building societies, which need to grow to provide competition to the bigger players.
The big banks are compensated for the new surcharge by the fall in the levy, whereas the small banks that did not pay the levy are simply smacked with a new tax. The Government are effectively spreading the taxation over the whole banking sector, reversing the previous position that only the biggest and riskiest banks should pay more. The reality is that the people worst affected by these measures are exactly the people the Government claim they are trying to help. The situation is particularly damaging when it comes to mutuals, because their main way of raising capital to expand or for new lending is through retained profits. They cannot simply sell shares, as other banks can—that is what it means to be a mutual.
A tax on profits is clearly particularly damaging for mutuals—it is obvious. The simple point is that building societies are legally different from banks, thanks to the Building Societies Act 1986, which limits how they can raise money and who they can lend to. The Government must surely know that, yet the new surcharge will add an estimated £630 million to the tax bill of mutuals over the course of this Parliament, according to the Building Societies Association.
As has been said by my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Dr Blackman-Woods)—who is not in her place—that money would not otherwise have gone to shareholders, but would have been used for expansion or new mortgage lending. For example, Nationwide has said that the extra £300 million that it will pay through the surcharge could have financed £10 billion of domestic mortgage lending. As Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies said before the Treasury Committee in
July, this tax would reduce the capacity of some banks and building societies to lend. Analysts from Morgan Stanley have warned that it may lead to the re-pricing of domestic loans, which would push up the cost of consumer borrowing.
We are left with the frankly perverse situation where small building societies would be paying the surcharge but large loss-making banks would not. As Stuart Adam of the IFS has said:
“It doesn’t look like it’s well targeted either at those that got the biggest bail-outs in the crisis, or those that pose the highest risk in the future.”
The point is that the charges are not only obviously unfair, but bad for the economy as a whole, because of the effect on competition in the sector. That is particularly bad news for consumers, who benefit from a competitive banking market to give them choice and who need smaller banks to provide a viable alternative to the established names. Yet it seems that the Government have constructed an entire policy in order to appease large global banks, with little thought for the ramifications on the rest of the sector. Can the Minister explain why the Government have not done more to reduce the impact of their surcharge on challenger banks and mutuals? Does she accept that building societies are legally and structurally different from banks and should therefore be treated differently? Has she considered the case for excluding building societies from the surcharge? If she has not, I would ask her to do so.
Even a number of the Government’s own MPs are making that argument, including the Chair of the Treasury Committee, the right hon. Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie), who is not in his place, who has warned the Chancellor of unintended consequences, and the hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier), who is in his place, who has said that building societies should be excluded. Does the Minister accept these very well made arguments and will she commit to holding a review into the impact of the changes on competitiveness in the banking sector? I do not think anyone in the House, of whatever party, thinks that we need less competition in the banking sector. At the very least, having a review is an obvious course of action.
Our new clause 1 calls for a review of a number of separate areas. The first area concerns the implications for bank balance sheets, because the bank levy was targeted in order to de-risk balance sheets and thereby reduce the potential threat to the UK economy. The Government must now explain why reducing the levy will not encourage more risky behaviour from banks. The review must also make clear what effect the change will have on long-term revenue from the banking sector. The Government must also make clear how big the tax cut is that they are offering the big global banks after 2021 and what impact that will have on the sustainability of the tax base in future. Finally, there must be a proper examination of the effect of the new surcharge on competitiveness, for the reasons I have set out.
Speaking at an event organised by TheCityUK recently, the City Minister said that these changes represented a
“sustainable, fair and competitive long-term plan”.
However, the Government have undermined sustainability by creating perverse incentives and reducing the long-term tax base. They have undermined fairness by giving a big tax cut to a small number of global banks while increasing
taxes for new challengers. Most importantly, they have undermined competition by choking off the growth of building societies and smaller banks. This is not a long-term plan to build a better banking sector; it looks like a quick fix to appease the likes of HSBC and Standard Chartered. It is a plan that has been criticised by the British Bankers Association, the Building Societies Association, the IFS, the Chair of the Treasury Committee and the Government’s own Back Benchers. The Minister does not have to take it from me, the Opposition spokesperson; she should take it from her own Back Benchers. The Government must take this opportunity to think again. I urge all parts of the Committee to support our new clause.