13/04/2016 Prime Minister's Questions

Questions to the Prime Minister.

Wendy Morton.

This morning I had meetings with ministerial colleagues

and in addition to my duties in this House, I shall have further such

meetings later today.

Last week I visited a manufacturing company, which supplied clay

for the Tower of London poppies.

Would my right honourable friend agree with me that supporting small

businesses and the further increase in personal income tax allowance

shows that we on this side of the House are the party

of enterprise and inspiration and believe in enabling

hard-working people to keep more of the money they earn?

Let me join her in congratulating the firm that she mentioned.

She's absolutely right that it is small and medium-size

businesses that predominantly will be providing the jobs

of the future and we want people to keep more of their own money

to spend as they choose.

That's why the historic move last week to an ?11,000 personal

allowance means that people will have gained, by 2018.

They'll be paying ?1,000 less per taxpayer and we will have taken

4 million of the lowest paid people out of tax altogether.

That is the action of a progressive Conservative Government.

Jeremy Corbyn.

Thank you, Mr Speaker.

I'm sure the whole House will join me in mourning the death

today of the dramatist Arnold Wesker, one of the great

playwrights of this country, one of those wonderful angry young

men of the 1950s and, like so many angry young people,

actually changed the face of our country.

Yesterday, Mr Speaker, the European Commission announced

new proposals on country by country tax reporting,

so that companies must declare where they make their profits in the EU

and in blacklisted tax havens.

Conservative MEPs voted against the proposal for country

by country reporting and against the blacklisting.

Can the Prime Minister now assure us that Conservative MEPs

will support the new proposal?

First of all, let me join the right honourable gentleman in mourning

the loss of the famous playwright and all the work that he did.

It's quite right to mention that.

Let me...

Let me also welcome...

Let me welcome the country by country tax reporting proposal

put forward by Commissioner Jonathan Hill, appointed by this Government,

the United Kingdom Commissioner.

This is very much based on the work that we've been doing,

leading the collaboration between countries, making sure

that we share tax information.

As we discussed on Monday, this has gone far faster and far

further under this Government than under any previous government.

Mr Speaker, if the proposals were put forward by

the British Government, why do Conservative MEPs

then vote against them?

There seems to be a bit of a disconnect here.

The Panama Papers exposed the scandalous situation,

where wealthy individuals seem to believe that

corporation tax and other taxes are something optional.

Indeed, as the Member for Rutland and Melton

informed us, it is only for low achievers, apparently.

Sso when the HMRC says that the tax gap is ?34 billion, why, then,

is he cutting HMRC staff by 20% and cutting down tax offices

which loses the expertise of people to close that tax gap?

I'm glad he wants to get onto our responsibilities to pay our taxes.

I think that's very important.

I thought his tax return was a metaphor for Labour policy.

It was late, it was chaotic, it was inaccurate, it was uncosted.

He's absolutely right to identify the tax gap and that is why

we closed off loopholes in the last Parliament,

equivalent of ?12 billion.

We aim to close loopholes in this Parliament equivalent

to ?16 billion, so the HMRC is taking very strong action,

backed by this Government, backed by the Chancellor,

legislated for by this House, and I think I'm right in saying that

since 2010 we put over ?1 billion into HMRC to increase

its capabilities to collect the tax that people should be paying.

The difference, I think, between this side of the House

and the right honourable gentleman is we believe in setting low tax

rates and encouraging people to pay them and it's working.

Mr Speaker, I'm grateful to the Prime Minister for drawing

attention to my own tax return.

There warts and all, the warts being my handwriting

all being my generous donation to HMRC.

I paid more tax than some companies that he might know quite well.

The Prime Minister...

Mr Speaker, the Prime Minister isn't cutting tax abuse,

he's cutting down on tax collectors.

The tax collected helps to fund our NHS and all the other services.

Last month, the OBR reported that HMRC doesn't have the necessary

resources to tackle offshore tax disclosures.

The Government is committed to taking ?400 million out

of HMRC's budget by 2020.

Will he now commit to reversing that cut, so that we can collect the tax

that will help to pay for the services?

I'm afraid his figures, rather like his tax return,

aren't entirely accurate.

The summer budget 2015, we gave an extra ?800 million

to HMRC to fund additional work to tackle tax evasion and

noncompliance between now and 2021.

This is going to enable HMRC to recover 7.2 billion in tax over

the next five years and we've brought in more than 2 billion

from offshore tax evaders since 2010.

I think we should try and bring some consensus to this issue.

For years in this country, Labour governments and Conservative

governments had an attitude to the Crown dependencies

and overseas territories that their tax affairs were a matter

for them and their compliance affairs were a matter for them

and their transparency was a matter for them.

This Government has changed that.

We've got the overseas territories and the Crown

dependencies round the table.

We said, you've got to have registers of ownership,

you've got to collaborate with the UK Government,

you've got to make sure people don't hide their taxes,

and it's happening.

So when he gets to his feet, he should welcome the fact that huge

progress has been made, raising taxes, sorting out

the overseas territories and Crown dependencies,

closing the tax gap, getting businesses to pay more,

giving international leadership to this issue, all things that never

happened under Labour.

Mr Speaker, I thank the Prime Minister for that answer.

The only problem with it is that the red book states HMRC

spending will fall from 3.3 billion to 2.9 billion by 2020.

And in regard to UK Crown dependencies and overseas

territories, only two days ago the Prime Minister said that he had

agreed that they will provide, the overseas territories,

UK law enforcement and tax agencies with full access to

information on the beneficial ownership of companies.

There seems to be some confusion here because the chief

minister of Jersey said, this is in response to a need

for information without delay, where terrorist activities are involved.

We welcome his commitment to fighting terrorism but is Jersey

and all the other dependencies actually going to provide

beneficial ownership information or not?

The short answer to that is yes, they are.

And that is what is such a big breakthrough.

I totally accept they are not going as far as us because we are

publishing a register of beneficial ownership.

That will happen in June and we will be one of the only

countries in the world to do so.

I think Norway and Spain are the others.

What the overseas territories and Crown dependencies are doing

is making sure that we have full access to registers of beneficial

ownership, to make sure that people aren't evading

or avoiding their taxes.

In the interests of giving full answers to his questions,

let me give him the figures for full-time equivalents in HMRC

in terms of compliance.

The numbers are going from 25,000 in 2010 to 26,798 in 2015.

It's not how much money you spend on an organisation but how many

people you have out there collecting the taxes and making sure the forms

are properly filled in.

The Prime Minister is quite right.

The number of people out there collecting taxes is important.

Therefore, why has he laid off so many staff at HMRC who therefore

cannot collect those taxes?

In 2013, Mr Speaker, the Prime Minister demanded

that the overseas territories rip aside the cloak of secrecy

by creating a public register of beneficial

ownership of information.

Will he now make it clear that the beneficial ownership

register will be an absolutely public document, transparent

for all to see who really owns these companies,

and whether they are paying their taxes or not?

Let me be absolutely clear.

For the United Kingdom, we have taken the unprecedented step,

never done by Labour, never done previously

by Conservatives, of open beneficial ownership register.

With the Crown dependencies and overseas territories they have

to give full access to the registers of beneficial ownership.

We did not choose the option of forcing them to have a public

register because we believed if that was the case,

we'd get into the situation that he spoke about, where some

of them might have walked away from this cooperation altogether.

That's the point.

The question is, are we going to be able to access the information?

Yes.

Are we going to be able to pursue tax evaders?

Yes.

Did any of these things happen under a Labour government?

No.

The Prime Minister does talk very tough and I grant him that.

The only problem is, it's not a public register he's offering us.

He is only offering us a private register that some people can see.

It's quite interesting that the premier of the Cayman Islands

is today apparently celebrating his victory over the Prime Minister

because he is saying the information certainly will not be available

publicly or available directly by any UK or non-Cayman

Islands agency.

The Prime Minister is supposed to be chasing down tax

evasion and tax avoidance.

He's supposed to be bringing it all into the open.

If he cannot even persuade the premier of the Cayman Islands

or Jersey to open up their books, where is the tough talk bringing

the information we need to collect the taxes that should pay

for the services that people need?

I think he's misunderstanding what I've said.

In terms of the UK, it is an absolute first in terms

of a register of beneficial ownership that is public.

He keeps saying it's not public.

The British one will be public.

Further to that, and I think this is important because it goes

to a question asked by the right honourable member for Tottenham,

we are also saying to foreign companies that have dealings

with Britain that they have to declare their properties

and the properties they own, which will remove a huge veil

of secrecy over the ownership, for instance, of London property.

I'm not saying we've completed all this work but we've got more tax

information exchange, more registers of beneficial

ownership, more chasing down of tax evasion and avoidance,

more money recovered from businesses and individuals and all of these

things are things that have happened under this Government.

The truth is, he's running to catch up because Labour did

nothing in 13 years.

Thank you, Mr Speaker.

My constituents John and Penny Clough, whose daughter

Jane was tragically murdered by her ex-partner whilst he was out

on bail, are campaigning to save Lancashire's

nine women's refuges, which are currently at threat

at threat because Labour-run

Lancashire County Council are proposing to cut

all of their funding.

Does the Prime Minister agree with the Clough family and me that

Labour-run Lancashire County Council should prioritise the victims

of domestic violence?

First of all, my honourable friend does raise a very moving case

and I know the whole House will wish to join me in sending our sincere

condolences to Mr and Mrs Clough.

In terms of making sure we stop violence against women and girls,

nobody should be living in fear of these crimes.

That is why we committed ?80 million of extra funding to 2020 to tackle

violence against women and girls and this does include funding

for securing the future for refuges and other

accommodation based services.

But it obviously helps if local councils make

the right decisions as well.

The United Kingdom and its offshore territories and dependencies

collectively sits at the top of the financial secrecy index

of the tax justice network.

Since the leaking of the Panama Papers, France has put

Panama on a blacklist of uncooperative tax havens

and the Mossack Fonseca offices have been raided

by the police in Panama City.

What have British authorities done specifically in relation

to Mossack Fonseca and with Panama since the leak of the Panama Papers?

First of all, in terms of who is at the top of the pyramid

of tax secrecy, I think it is now unfair to say that about our Crown

dependencies and overseas territories as they are now

going to cooperate with the three things that we asked them to do

in terms of the reporting standard, the exchange of tax information

and access to registers of beneficial ownership.

That is more than we get out of some states in America, like Delaware.

So I think in this House we should be tough on all those that

facilitate lack of transparency but we should be accurate in the way

we do it.

He asked what we are doing about the Panama Papers.

We have a ?10 million funded cross agency review to get to the bottom

of all the relevant information.

It would hugely be helped if the newspapers and other

investigative journalists now share this information with tax

inspectors, so we can get to the bottom of it,

and his final question on blacklists - we are happy to support blacklists

but we don't think you should draw up a blacklist solely

on the basis of a territory raising a low tax rate.

We don't think that is the right approach.

That's the approach the French have sometimes taken in the past

but in terms of taking action against tax havens,

this government has done more than any previous one.

Angus Robertson.

3,250 DWP staff has been specifically investigating benefit

fraud while only 300 HMRC staff have been systematically

investigating tax evasion.

Surely we should care equally about people abusing

the tax system and those abusing the benefit system.

Why has this Government had ten times more staff dealing often

with the poorest in society abusing benefits than with the super-rich

evading their taxes?

I will look carefully at his statistics but they

sound to me entirely bogus for this reason.

The predominant job of the DWP is to make sure that people

receive their benefits.

The predominant job of HMRC is to make sure

people pay their taxes.

The 26,000 people I spoke about earlier are all making sure

that people pay their taxes, the clue is in the title.

Many farmers in South Herefordshire are still awaiting their 2015

payments from the rural payments agency.

Nearly four months after they were due.

This follows the failure of the RPA website last year which is causing

great personal and financial distress and threatens the future

of farm businesses so will the Prime Minister agree to meet

farmers on this issue and press the RPA to make the payments

by the end of this month and does he share my view that farmers should

receive interest on the amounts overdue?

I have recently met with both the NFU and Welsh NFU and have

continued to have meetings with farming organisations including

in my own constituency.

I know that have been problems with the payment system.

The latest figures are that 87% of claims have been paid.

I believe that the figures in Herefordshire are in line

with the national average but that is no consolation for those

who have not received payments which is why we have a process

and we are working with charities and we made payments amounting

to over ?7 million but we have to make sure that lessons of how

to make the system work better in future years are properly learnt.

If the British people vote to leave the European Union,

will the Prime Minister remain in office to implement

their decision?

Yes.

CHEERING Again on Europe, does the Prime Minister agree

that the European Union is not just the world's biggest single market

but also an ample source of foreign and direct investment providing 50%

of the investment we receive and also an excellent platform

for supplying the means to thrive and prosper meaning the ability

to get the skills they need and the innovation they need

and for my constituency means a whole load of high-tech companies

thriving and prospering as they do in the UK?

I remember my visit to his constituency when the company

showed me a world first in a bicycle that was printed on a 3-D printer.

I did not give it a try but it looked like it might even

carry some of my weight!

The single market is 500 million people and that is a great market

for our businesses and services and increasingly the market

and the supply chain is getting more integrated and that is why we should

think carefully before separating ourselves from it.

Brain tumours are the biggest cancer killer of children and people under

40 but despite this, research into them received less

than 1%, just over 1% of the UK's national spend on cancer research.

This will be the subject of a debate next Monday in Westminster Hall.

Will the Prime Minister have a word with the Secretary of State

for Health so that the minister answering that debate might be able

to bring with him or her some long overdue good news of

change in this area?

I'm very happy to do exactly as he says.

It is an important issue.

We invest something like 1.7 billion a year in health research

but there is always a question when it comes to cancer research,

the spending has gone up by a third over the last Parliament

to ?135 million, but there is the question

of whether that is fairly distributed.

I have a still producer in my constituency and share

concerns about the future of the industry.

The North of England still had significant manufacturers of that

but it has been held back by green taxes, high energy costs

and emissions targets.

What more can he do to help energy intensive industries?

I think he raises an important point and the changes we are making

will save the steel industry over ?400 million by the end of this

Parliament and that is a good example of what we can do.

There was an excellent debate yesterday about this issue,

we have to work on everything we can in terms of procurement,

making sure we are taking action in the EU against

dumping and we are.

We have to make sure we reduce energy costs where we can

and we stand by to work with any potential purchaser

of the Port Talbot works which will safeguard steel jobs

in other parts of the country to see how we can help

on a commercial basis.

I'm satisfied with doing everything we can.

We cannot totally buck the global trend of this massive overcapacity

of steel and decline in prices but those are the key areas in terms

of power and plant and procurement, all areas where we can help.

Research by the Sutton Trust shows turning schools into academies does

not necessarily improve them.

Thousands of excellent primary schools, parents want them to be

continued to be maintained by their local authority so why

are ministers planning to overrule parents and force those schools

to become academies?

I think the evidence shows that academies work as part

of our education reforms.

Let me give the evidence.

If you look at those schools that converted into academies,

88% of them are either outstanding or good schools.

If you look at the sponsored academies, often failing schools,

if you listen and look at what happened with the schools

that were often failing but were now sponsored by academies,

you have seen on average a 10% improvement over

the first two years.

All the evidence is that results are better, freedoms

lead to improvements and where there are problems,

intervention happens far faster with academies.

We have 1.4 million more children in good or outstanding schools

and we should finish the job.

The Prime Minister has met many great people but I believe he has

yet to meet the Vale of Evesham known as the asparagus man.

Would you like to join me for the upcoming British asparagus

festival which starts on St George's Day and show his support

for our fantastic farming industry?

I'm happy to say that my honourable friend's constituency is only

one constituency away, we share the same railway line

so if there is an opportunity for some great British asparagus

I would be happy to join him.

Can I take the Prime Minister back to his response to the honourable

member for Pendle, it was a truly dreadful case.

Women's refuges are facing absolute crisis.

The changes the government proposes to make to housing benefit

will force the closure of women's refuges.

He needs urgently to look again at these changes

because unless he makes refuges exempt, they will be closing up

and down the country.

Can he do it?

What I would say is what we did in the last Parliament with rape

crisis centres we are doing the same type of thing with these refuges

and that is why the ?80 million of funding is so important.

It is why the Secretary of State has written to local authorities

to explain that this money is available to make sure

those refuges are there.

As part of world autism awareness week last week, the National

Autistic Society launched its biggest ever awareness campaign.

Young Alex Cunliffe the star of the film, was here in the house

and met many MPs this week.

Some 50% of autistic people don't even go out in public

because of what people think and their reaction.

Will he meet with me and the charity to discuss how the government can

support this campaign and how we can tackle the social isolation

of so many families Let me pay tribute to my right honourable

friend who has been campaigning and legislating on this issue now

for many years including the landmark legislation that went

through in the last Parliament.

We have been working closely with the autism alliance and have

invested some ?325,000 since 2014 but we don't do more in terms

of helping families with autistic children and raising the profile

of the understanding of what being autistic is all about.

Let me put in a plug for the strange incident of the dog in nighttime,

which is still available at the Whitehall Theatre,

it is excellent and will give you a better explanation of autism

and perhaps anything we can discuss in this house.

Authorities in El Salvador and Panama have raided

offices of Mossack Fonseca, seizing documents and computer

equipment but nobody has knocked on the door of their branch

in the UK.

While recognising the operational independence of our enforcement

agencies, does he share my deep concern that comes as we speak,

documents are no doubt being shredded and databases

being wiped, undermining the opportunity to bring further

potential wrongdoing to light?

She makes an important point which is that we need to make sure

that all the evidence coming out of Panama is properly investigated

and that is right we have set up a special cross agency team

including the National Crime Agency, HMRC and other relevant bodies

to make sure we get to the bottom of what happened.

She is right to reference the fact that these organisations

are operationally independent and it would be quite wrong for a minister

or Prime Minister to order an investigator into a particular

building in a particular way, that is not a river,

we want to cross in this house.

Empower the National crime agency and HMRC,

give them resources and let them get on with the job.

Can I draw his attention to the tragic death

of a 21-month-old baby when she was stamped

on by her mother so violently that it tore her heart.

Yet she had been known to social services since the day she was born,

they knew about the violent boyfriends, the domestic violence,

they saw the doors kicked in and smelt the cannabis,

they saw the bruises, the cuts, the fingerprints

on her little thighs and they did nothing.

He will understand that people want to know how this

could have happened, yet they are concerned to know

that the serious case review has on its panel people who are directly

involved in the organisations that are being investigated.

Will he look at what we can do to make this and other serious case

reviews more independent so we can make sure that no other child

suffers the life and death that this little girl did?

I think my honourable friend is absolutely right to raise this.

Obviously in the work we all do we hear about some hideous

and horrific incidents but anybody watching television that night

and seeing the description of what happened to that girl,

it simply took your breath away that people could behave in such

a despicable way towards their own children.

There is no punishment in the world in my view that fits that sort

of crime carried out by their own parent.

There will be a serious case review and I will look carefully

at the suggestions he makes and I know the Secretary of State

for Education will do so as well.

There are criticisms of the way these cases are done but in this

case we must get on with the review because we have to get to the bottom

of what went wrong.

There are currently over 7000 people in the UK needing an organ

transplant including 139 children and many will die

because of a shortage of available organs.

The Welsh Labour government has already introduced ground-breaking

legislation for opt out legislation in Wales so will you join me

in supporting the campaign for opt out organ donation

throughout the UK?

I'm always happy to look at this again having looked at it before

and have not come out in favour of opting out.

We debated in the last Parliament and made a lot of moves to making

opt in much easier and we found that if you look at different hospitals

and areas of the country there are different records in terms

of how well they do.

My position is that it is something we should support and continue

to drive but this house can vote on the issue about whether it wants

to go down the Welsh track rather than the track

we are on but personally I say we should make opt in better.

He will be well aware that our colleague Lord Bates has

just started a 2000 mile walk from Buenos Aires to Rio de Janeiro,

arriving in time for the Olympics.

Will he join me in wishing him well on this epic journey

and committing his government to uphold the values and principles

of the Olympic truce?

I have already written to Michael Bates to wish him well

and give support for the work he has done over many years.

He leaves me a bit of a hole in the House of Lords where he has

been doing fantastic work for the Home Office on security

issues so we wish him a good walk and a speedy return.

At Ealing hospital the experienced doctors I met with last week

are dismayed that the government's own equality assessment

of their new contract find it discriminates against women

which is over half of them.

As he is a self-confessed feminist, leading a progressive

government, will he...

So he says.

Will he reverse this blatant injustice which has no

place in 2016?

I am grateful for her question and backhanded compliment!

I would say that this contract is actually very pro-women

because it involves a 13% basic pay rise, because it restricts

the currently horrendous hours that some junior doctors

are working that are unsafe, and because it gives greater

guarantees about levels of pay and the amount of money that

doctors will get.

As people start to work on it and with it, they will see

it is very pro-women.

Over 200,000 economic migrants came from the European Union

in the period for which we have figures and yet the propaganda sheet

said that the British people says we maintain control of our borders.

As we withdraw from the free movement of people,

is it simply untrue?

The truth is that economic migrants coming into the EU don't

The truth is that economic migrants coming into the EU don't

have the right to come to the UK, they are not European nationals.

They are nationals of Pakistan or Morocco or Turkey.

None of them have the right so it is very important

and it is important we send information to households

because then they can see the truth about what is proposed.

What he has put forward is classic of the sort of scare stories we get,

Britain has borders, Britain will keep its borders,

we have the best of both worlds.

Still at the University of sporting excellence elite sports have been

rocked in recent months about an international doping

scandal that threatens the entire country being thrown out

of major competitions.

Does he agree that the world anti-doping agency needs further

support and can he tell me what further action can be taken?

I think he is right to raise it, we have made a lot of advances

in recent years.

There is a relevance to our anti-corruption Summit in May

when we will be looking at corruption in sport and bringing

forward new codes of practice to adopt in this country

and we hope others also do.

There is also the question about whether doping should

be a specific criminal offence which is something

we should be debating.

What progress has been made in Sir Bruce Keogh's ten clinical

standards published in December 2013 which are essential for rolling

out the seven-day NHS?

Perhaps I can write specifically on the clinical standards

but the truth is that what is good is that he and others in the NHS

support this vision of a seven-day NHS and recognise that we should pay

tribute to all those doctors and nurses who work at weekends

already because it is very important but what we are trying to move

toward is an NHS where the individual has access

to their family doctor seven days a week and also where hospitals work

on databases because it will save lives and improve care

and I will write to him about the specific detail.

Parent governors play a key role in local schools supporting their

children's education and performing an important civic duty.

If the Prime Minister is aware of the sadness and anger which has

resulted from the forced academies announcement that the duty for each

school to have parent governors will be removed?

Will he urgently review this attack on parents?

I'm delighted the Honourable lady asked this question because we will

be debating it later but let me be clear,

we support parent governors, we think they have a great role

to play but no school should think that by simply having

parent governors you have solved the problem about

engaging with parents.

Let me say that there is something in the Labour motion today

that it is actually inaccurate and should be withdrawn.

It says, the white Paper proposes the removal of parent governors

from school governing bodies.

It does no such thing.

As well as not getting his tax return in on time he is

bringing forward motions that are simply wrong.