We have a mission-led Government. I am not sure whether anybody knows exactly what that means, but we do know what the mission is meant to be: delivering for working people. But I am afraid that the Government have forgotten how working people become working people. It is the people—the other people—who employ them. All of us in this House want excellent public services, but it is only the Conservatives who understand that to get excellent public services, business needs to generate the wealth. The Government have a bit of a “four legs good, two legs bad” mantra that sees business as a cash cow to be milked to pay for the public sector. They have forgotten that fundamental dependency. They have even messed up the “four legs good, two legs bad” theory, because they seem to have forgotten that a very large part of what delivers our public services is people—people who are not directly employed by the public sector.
Let us take nurseries as an example. We have had another mission this week on early years education, which I welcome, but it will be hampered in its delivery by this national insurance contributions rise. Then there are the universities. They received a bonus of £390 million from a fee increase a couple of weeks ago, but they will be paying £400 million in extra national insurance contributions.
I have also heard from many GPs across my constituency in East Hampshire, who see the Government giving with one hand and taking away with the other. The Minister says that the Government will take care of this in the settlement for GPs, which is fine, but it should have come on top of what they should have been doing for GPs anyway. Lord Darzi and the Secretary of State have been talking about increasing the focus on primary care. We know how the Treasury works when it is making its spending allocations to Departments; things will be tucked in under that settlement, so we need to see it rise. How do the Government think GP practices plan? Here we are in December, and the new financial year starts at the beginning of April. Do Ministers not think that, in the national health service, general practitioners need certainty now about what is going to happen?
The wider point is this: the Treasury can reimburse GPs, but it cannot reimburse the private sector. Ultimately, there is no such thing as a tax on business. Taxes can only ever ultimately fall on people. They fall on the owners of that business, the customers of that business, or the employees of that business. The analogy for the Treasury reimbursing GP practices for their increased costs is the employees of a private company reimbursing their employer for that cost. It is they who will ultimately pay. Economists are united in saying that employer national insurance contributions are only ever, in the end, seen in lower wages or lower employment figures. The Government talk about difficult decisions, but difficult decisions are the ones that employers will be faced with: do I cut down my wage settlements or do I let people go?