As is customary at the conclusion of Report stage, I will speak to the issues that have been raised, rather than the full content of the Bill. Let me start by saying how much I enjoyed the splendidly generous and warm speech by my great and hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Mark Jenkinson). As Members across the House noted, Workington will have a fine voice in the Chamber for many years to come. I was impressed by his ability to smuggle some Cumbrian dialect into the Chamber—I do not know whether it counts as a foreign language, but it was certainly unintelligible to me, which may be true for other colleagues. I take my hat off not only to Mr Harris for identifying his prime ministerial potential but to my hon. Friend for his robust sense of self-confidence. Colleagues normally play down their prime ministerial potential early in their political careers, and I admire his chutzpah, to use a different piece of dialect, in bringing our attention to that. He also acknowledged his predecessor’s capacity to align himself with the Opposition
rather than the Whip; I am grateful to him for that. He made some valuable points, and I congratulate him on his maiden speech.
Labour’s new clause 29 and the SNP’s new clause 10 would require the Chancellor to review the impact of provisions in the Bill on child poverty and total poverty and to lay a report before Parliament within six months of Royal Assent. We were treated to a moving and personal speech from the hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting). I congratulate him on his achievement in getting to Cambridge University on the back of that personal experience. Of course, he is right to focus on the importance of combating educational disadvantage—a cause that every Member of the House believes in. I found it surprising that he did not go on to acknowledge the achievement of this Government in raising the number of good or outstanding schools from 68% in 2010 to 86% today, or the fact that the proportion of 18-year-olds from disadvantaged backgrounds going to university went from only 13% in 2009-10 to 21% in 2019.
The hon. Member talked about pensioner poverty but neglected to mention that there are 100,000 fewer pensioners in poverty now than there were in 2010. He talked about jobs but without acknowledging that, at least until the pandemic, which has struck us all and will have had unfathomable effects, as we know, 3.9 million more people were in employment. Specifically, the employment of the poorest 20% was 9% higher under this Government than in 2009-10.
The hon. Member was right to say that the tragedy of an economic crisis is that it hits the least well off the hardest, and that is precisely the inheritance that this Government’s predecessors left to us in 2009-10. As I never cease to remind the House, the financial crisis of 2007-08 was brought about because bank leverage was allowed to rise from 20 times, where it had been for the previous 40 years, to 50 times in seven years under the Blair Government. If hon. Members do not believe me, they can look at the independent report on banking published under Professor Vickers.
I should, however, return to new clauses 29 and 10, some of which are not necessary because the information they seek is largely already in the public domain, including on the distributional effect of tax, welfare and spending policies, on the equalities impacts of tax measures and on poverty rates.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Sir Graham Brady) for his probing new clause 30. I admire his range of references. I thought he was going to reference Stephen Colbert, the American talk show host, but tragically it was Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who produced the line about plucking the feathers from the goose. He is absolutely right. No one would describe him as a hisser, but we do pay careful attention to the points he has made, and I am very grateful to him for raising them. I would also single out my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Andrew Griffith), who rightly pointed out that the configuration between APD and the environmental performance of flights is a very blunt relationship indeed, so I thank him for that.
Colleagues across the House will know that new clause 30 would ask the Treasury to review the effect of proposed rate changes on APD. We are working closely with the sector and are closely attuned to its concerns in the face of the pandemic, and of course we have paid
close attention to the points my hon. Friend raised. I am sure colleagues will be aware that, even as it is, the current rate will only take effect in April 2021 and will rise by only £2 for a long-haul economy flight, which is the cost of a rather inexpensive coffee at airport prices. It may not be quite as urgent, but the point about the wider need to look at this is well made.
I turn quickly to amendment 4, which seeks to extend the exemption from vehicle excise duty for medical courier charities in clause 86 explicitly to include vehicles carrying human breast milk. The hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) will know that this amendment is not necessary because the clause already provides for the transportation of human breast milk. The purpose-built vehicles used by the medical courier charities, which are exempt from VED, do not merely transport blood; they transport a wide range of medical product, including X-rays, MRA scans, plasma and human breast milk.
There are many other things I could say in response to other comments, but I will leave it there.
Question put and agreed to.
New clause 19 accordingly read a Second time, and added to the Bill.