Conservative and Unionist Party MP for North West Hampshire since (elected).
Parliament recordVoting recordWritten questionsEarly day motions
Entries on this tracker
443
Each filed under the party they sat for that day
Register entries
0
As currently published
| Party | Office | Area | Period | Began | Ended | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conservative | MP | North West Hampshire | – present | elected | — | Party history |
Every entry the member has in the Register of Members' Financial Interests, as Parliament currently publishes it. The wording and values are the member's own declarations; nothing here has been assessed by this site.
Totals add only the entries that declare an amount received: payments for work, donations, gifts, and funded visits (register categories 1.1, 2, 3, 4 and 5). Ongoing employment is listed but not added, because its figure is a rate rather than a sum received. Each entry is dated by when the benefit happened, not when it was registered, and placed under the party the member sat for on that date. A member who changed party therefore has a separate total for each.
Not yet retrieved from the register. Parliament's register page
As the Housing and Planning Minister knows, a planning inspector has made some outrageous decisions regarding the national landscape in my constituency over the past few months. Will he therefore please confirm from the Dispatch Box, for the benefit of all the planning inspectors out there, that his intention is to strengthen protections for our national landscapes in the latest edition of the national planning policy framework?
I, too, support these sanctions. They seem sensible to me, and I would imagine that any patriot would support something that seeks to make us more powerful in the world in pursuit of not only our national interests, but our national values, as the right hon. Member for Oxford East said. I know she said that we often talk about technical questions; I do, though, have three short technical questions for the Minister. First, the regulations seek to differentiate between citizens of the rest of the world and those of the United States, European Union, Australia and Canada. Could the Minister explain why those territories or countries get special treatment compared with everybody else? The second issue is about transparency of consideration. The Minister will know that one of the frustrations that the House has expressed on many occasions over the past three or four years is the unwillingness of the Government to share their legal advice in consideration of their position under lots of international treaties and agreements. If, say, a Member of Parliament—or anybody else, frankly—was to bring a particularly egregious case for consideration under these designation sanctions, how would that person understand how the Government had reached their conclusion, either for or against? Obviously, there is a huge amount of discretion with regard to the Secretary of State’s powers, but the credibility of these sanctions and their deployment stands very much on the contemplation of how those decisions are reached. The Government may have to fess up to the fact that they are making decisions on basic politics—that is to say, there is somebody whom, under any other guise, we would love to designate, but there is also something else, which we are getting round the back from them, that we need to be cognisant of. I think the Government lose credibility if they start to take inconsistent decisions without that being illustrated. My final question is: when can we expect the first wave of sanctions, assuming that this measure goes through today?<span id="12" class="column-number" data-column-number="12"></span>
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Carlisle (Ms Minns), although she will not be surprised to hear that she and I have very different views about the Budget. I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests as a business owner and, frankly, to my interest as a father, although that is not because I think I am going to be particularly affected—I do not think anybody will be particularly affected by this rather bland bowl of muesli of a Budget from a Chancellor who was quite obviously decaffeinated this morning. I am quite exercised about the Budget because, while a number of colleagues have said it is a missed opportunity, I think it is a lot worse than that. In many ways it is profoundly negligent of a Government to produce such a Budget in the face of three distinct emergencies—three distinct fires burning in the basement of the British economy—some of which have been made worse and are forecast to be worse because of the Budget. The first of those, which a number of hon. Members have raised, is our debt. It is worth remarking, as some have, that the OBR has said that we will borrow even more in every year of the forecast—particularly next year. Combined with the massive downgrade of growth for next year, that is alarming. It is worth colleagues remembering that the OBR has quite a poor record in medium-term forecasting—it is generally optimistic. We can broadly agree that it gets the year 1 forecast right, plus or minus, but after that it is wildly optimistic, and every year it get the forecast completely wrong, particularly on debt. That matters, because the country is effectively running a structural deficit at the moment, and because of some of the measures in this Budget and the previous two, the public sector is basically eating the private sector every year we proceed. The private sector’s ability to support the public sector is reduced as a result, and we find ourselves caught in a weird kind of vice, exacerbated by the second emergency, which I will come to.<span id="386" class="column-number" data-column-number="386"></span> Even in some of the measures today, there seems to be no contemplation of that problem. Who does the Chancellor think will pay the bank levy—this 3% extra on corporation tax? Certainly not the international banks—they will manage to retain their return on capital. It will be the businesses, and the consumers who bank with them, who will see higher mortgage rates and higher interest rates on their loans. That money will be extracted from the private sector and sent directly to the public sector to be spent. If we continue on this path, I am afraid that the IMF has forecast that by 2050, well over half our GDP will be spent by the Government. That is a disaster, because once in that vortex it is hard to come out of it. The second emergency, which is exacerbating the first—there was no talk of it today and, in fact, there were no measures to try to help with it—is our demographic problem. I am afraid we are not having enough children in this country. We are now down to 1.39 children born to every mother, which is below replacement rate, so we have a shrinking body of workers who are having more and more difficulty supporting an expanding body of retirees. The pyramid is inverting, as we have seen in other countries, such as Japan, to disastrous effect. If the public sector and the retired sector suck more and more money out of the private sector, we will find ourselves in a downward spiral, which will be much to our detriment. The third emergency is one of capital. The Chancellor raised the issue of capital and spoke of trying to set entrepreneurs free. I have been a moderately successful entrepreneur during my life, and I can tell hon. Members that nothing in the Budget has done anything to reverse the assault on the return on risk that, sadly, has taken place over the last 20 years under Governments of all stripes.
I am glad that the hon. Gentleman has raised that point. If he looks at the founders’ relief in the scorecard and puts it against the reduction in business asset disposal relief, he will see that effectively there has been a straight transfer of value from family businesses, high street shops and smaller businesses to the tech bros who are going to benefit from founders’ relief. We have yet to see the detail on that relief, but the scorecard shows a net cost to the Government of about £200 million. That is negligible in the face of an economy the size of ours. That is a real problem, because we are standing at the bottom of the ellipse of human achievement, the like of which we have not seen since the industrial revolution. This country has got its capitalism wrong in the past. We missed the IT revolution of the ’80s and ’90s because we were too busy worrying about house prices. British capital has kind of stultified and failed to take advantage of these massive advances in technology, much to our detriment in terms of national wealth. We still live off, to a certain extent, the wealth that was created during the Victorian era. Many of our largest companies came about because of British <span id="387" class="column-number" data-column-number="387"></span>capitalism—naked capitalism—during that era. The palaces we live in, the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, King’s College, Cambridge, and the NHS—all of that built from the profits of British capitalism. We have neglected it over the last 20 years or so, particularly by attacking the return on risk. The rise in taxation on dividends, the rises in capital gains tax, the reduction in any kind of relief for entrepreneurs, and the complexity of the enterprise investment scheme and the seed enterprise investment scheme—all that is a massive deterrent to anybody who wants to start a business and take a risk. Until we realise that we will not get growth until we set capital free, we will continue to be trapped in this vortex of a demographic pyramid inversion and ever-mounting debts as the public sector consumes the private sector. The last thing I want to raise is the new powers that are being granted to the Revenue. All Members should beware of what is hidden in the detail of those new powers. We are getting to a situation where our economy is existing to support the Revenue rather than the other way around.
<em>indicated dissent.</em>
Does the Minister agree that more important than the number of people or how often they attend that House is that it has become clear that individual peers are much more powerful than individual elected Members of Parliament? They have greater privileges and less transparency, and are able to influence legislation to a much greater degree than we are in this elected House. That is fundamentally what lies at the heart of the problem. We can indulge ourselves with tweaks around the edges, as all Governments have done, but in the end, unless we address that fundamental problem, the dissatisfaction will continue.
My hon. Friend is making a powerful argument. He will presumably recognise that the clue is often in the name where our businesses are concerned, as many of those largest businesses that we regard as national champions—Pilkington, John Lewis, Sainsbury’s and banks such as Lloyds—owe their origin to family businesses. The fact that they carry a surname indicates the many generations it took to build them to that power, but by taxing those businesses, we hold the entire economy back from such growth.
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I need to offer you an apology. When I asked my question, I should have declared, or drawn attention to, my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am the proud founder of two businesses, which I hope in time to pass on to my children, if the Labour party does not get in the way.
There seems to be a disconnect in the Labour party’s understanding of the situation. Does the Minister not appreciate that the capital value of an enterprise, whether it be a farm or a business, does not necessarily equate to the revenue that it generates? Many family farms and businesses are what they would call lifestyle businesses, where people are happy to sit on what may appear to be a large capital value that yields only a very small revenue amount that will not support the taxes he is trying to levy, and at the same time only just supports a lifestyle that people are willing to tolerate. It is this imbalance that is causing so much anguish.
Let us say that a farm is worth £3 million, ostensibly on land value. That farm might be yielding a net income to a farmer of only £30,000 to £50,000 a year, on which they are surviving. They are willing to live that way because they love living on the farm, it has been in their family for many generations and they feel a sense of stewardship and custodianship, but that revenue is not enough for them to live on and then sustain the tax that the Minister wants to levy.