On the loan charge, as I said, we have always supported cracking down on tax avoidance and we support action against those who enabled the scheme. New clause 31 makes a connection between people’s tax treatment and what they knew; I believe we have to explore that principle as a matter of taxation and think carefully about how to proceed. I look forward to the debate on that later.
7.15 pm
In the 21st century, modernising our country needs to be about more than bricks and mortar. Even if, unlike the Prime Minister’s bridge over the Thames or his island airport, the projects announced yesterday can actually be delivered, in today’s world, and in particular in today’s labour market, investment has to be in people as well as in buildings. The truth is that the technological change and the acceleration caused by the coronavirus crisis makes that even more urgent than it was before. Why, when the Government announced new funding for schools last week, were the early years left out, when we know that those years are often the most influential in charting a person’s educational progress and their chances in future life? Where is the programme on a scale that we need to skill and reskill adults who will have to change jobs as a result of the economic change happening before our eyes?
Where is the plan for social care, wherein throughout this crisis, often on low pay, workers have heroically battled to look after people? As the Resolution Foundation reported just a few days ago, to take the ratio of social care workers to the over-70 population back to its 2014 level would on its own create 180,000 new jobs. Where, in this international age of nationalism, is the international response to co-ordinate economic support between countries in what is, by definition, a global health and economic crisis? The response to this crisis must meet the needs of the time.
It is for those reasons that we believe that the yardstick by which the Bill should be judged, and the focus of next week’s statement, must be jobs. Having supported the economy this far, we cannot stop now. It is moments like this for which Governments exist. We need not only the capital spending but the investment in people to help the country through it. That is what the country is looking for now from its Government, and that is why we tabled the new clause.