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Mr. Terry Lewis (Worsley): What time do the shops close?
Alcohol
I am aware of the serious problem that cross-border shopping and smuggling of alcohol causes our drinks industry in Britain. I have already announced that customs is further stepping up its efforts to catch smugglers.
Last year, I was able to freeze the duty rate on beer and wine. This year, it will remain frozen. The proportion of tax on the price of a pint in the pub is now at its lowest level for 30 years. For some of us, that helps to keep our small cigars affordable--[Laughter.]
Last year's cut in the duty on spirits was the first cut that any Chancellor had made for 100 years, and I was tempted to maintain a striking rate of once every 100 years. But I am sure that the industry will be glad to know that it will not have to wait so long this time. From 6 pm tonight, the tax on whisky, gin and other spirits will fall by another 4 per cent., which is worth 26p. The reduction in the rate on spirits boosts an important industry in the United Kingdom, and it will also reinforce last year's signal to overseas authorities not to discriminate against our products. Only smugglers will regret that we are slowly moving our duty on spirits nearer to the continental level.
From 1 January, the tax on alcoholic soft drinks will be increased by over 40 per cent., which will put up the price by between 7p and 8p a bottle--for those who have not yet tried them. That increase will meet public concern about the attraction of the "alcopops" for under-age drinkers, but it will also attack a distortion of competition by bringing the tax broadly into line with that on beer. The House will notice that I have considered carefully the balance of my overall package on this matter, and I have not yet been converted to a bubble-gum flavoured "alcopop"--[Laughter.]
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Nothing matters more for business than a stable economic environment--low interest rates and low inflation--and businesses throughout Britain are benefiting from the healthy sustainable growth in the economy that I have described today.
As I promised in my last Budget, there will be, from April 1997, a cut in the main rate of employers' national insurance contributions, to 10 per cent. The cut will be paid for by the proceeds that we are receiving from the landfill tax. A tax on waste is cutting a tax on jobs, and it will benefit employers in Britain and make it even cheaper to create new jobs in our growing economy. Our overheads on jobs are already less than half those in Germany, France or Italy. I am determined that we must keep that advantage over our competitors on the continent, where the creation of new jobs, in the rest of the European Union, is overregulated and overpriced. That fact is another practical reason for being confident that our unemployment will keep falling.
In this Budget, I propose to keep the three intermediate thresholds for employers' national insurance contributions where they are now. I propose to increase--by £10 and £1, respectively--the upper and lower earnings thresholds for employers' and employees' national insurance contributions.
In this Budget, I also want to deal with a particular concern of our small businesses, upon which so much of our future economic prosperity depends. I think that small businesses are most concerned about the burden of non-domestic rates.
The uniform business rate is a fixed cost which can rise each year beyond the control of the manager of any business, and it hits the small business hard. Since the last revaluation of business rates, I have repeatedly slowed down the increase of rates for those businesses whose rates have had to go up. No business property has seen its rates go up by more than 7½ per cent. above inflation in any one year. But I want to do more than that; it is not good enough. I have decided to freeze next year's rates bill for all small businesses whose rates would have gone up. Small properties whose rates are falling will have those reductions accelerated, which will benefit over 1 million small business properties, by up to £130 a year.
I want to go further. A freeze is a significant step that I can make right away, this year. We have already reduced business rates for rural village shops. But I realise that the current system of business rates bears particularly hard on smaller businesses, for which it represents a much bigger proportion of total costs compared with their large competitors. We must therefore move on as soon as possible to make more changes in the system to recognise this and to redistribute the burden more sensibly between smaller and larger businesses. My Budget next year will be a convenient opportunity to proceed with that.
The Government are committed to reducing and then abolishing capital gains tax and inheritance tax. I repeat those commitments. But we have always said that we will cut these taxes only when we can afford to do so. This is a responsible Budget which is protecting future growth
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Mr. John Prescott (Kingston upon Hull, East):
Next year.
Mr. Clarke:
The right hon. Gentleman can come back next year and discover from the same seat that he is now occupying.
I am pleased to announce that we can take a further significant step towards abolishing inheritance tax. Inheritance tax is nowadays a penalty on thrift, independence and enterprise. It is a growing anachronism.
Lloyd George's maxim that the "the most convenient time to tax the rich is when they are dead" no longer holds. Inheritance tax today is largely paid by people of modest means who either cannot or simply do not make careful plans to avoid it. [Hon. Members: "Modest!"] Modest means in the opinion of all those outside the hard core of the labour movement, that is.
Last year I made significant progress towards our commitment. In this Budget I will build on that by raising the value of the inheritance tax threshold to £215,000.
Mr. Dennis Skinner (Bolsover):
I read that this morning.
Mr. Clarke:
The hon. Gentleman appears to know that from this morning. Is he also aware that the Government have raised that threshold by 40 per cent. in only two years?
In last year's Budget I announced a project to rewrite Inland Revenue tax legislation in plain English. That is a tall order. The project is as ambitious as translating the whole of "War and Peace" into lucid Swahili. In fact, it is more ambitious. I am told that "War and Peace" is only 1,500 pages long. Inland Revenue tax law is 6,000 pages long and was not written by a Tolstoy. We have consulted extensively on how the project should be carried out, and I am glad to say that there is wide consensus. The Inland Revenue will publish the plans and arrangements shortly after the Budget.
The aim is to prepare a series of rewrite Bills, the first of them to be ready for enactment in the 1997-98 Session. My noble and learned Friend Lord Howe has produced a thorough and helpful report on how Parliament might handle those Bills. We endorse his broad proposals, and invite the Procedure Committee to consider how the House is going to handle the Bills in a sensible fashion. I can announce that my noble and learned Friend Lord Howe has agreed to chair the steering committee that will oversee the rewrite project.
The project will bring the benefits of clarity and certainty to businesses and ordinary taxpayers. It has been widely welcomed and deserves the continuing support that it has enjoyed in all parts of the House.
The Government have led Britain towards our clear goal of a low-tax economy in which private enterprise has the incentive to generate jobs, investment and wealth to make people and their families more prosperous. We are
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Low direct taxes are the most effective way to encourage enterprise and hard work--a message to which we have not converted Labour Members, but one that they no longer dare to deny. Under this Government, those who do an honest day's work and those who take entrepreneurial risk will keep more of what they earn and save by their own efforts.
This year, people have taken more heed of my speeches on the overriding priority of securing future prosperity and jobs and financing key public services. Sensible people already expected my cuts in direct taxation to be modest before they read the one leak and many guesses this morning. They know that their well-being depends on lasting growth and more jobs and that living standards rise from a combination of steadily rising incomes in a successful economy and steadily lowering taxes. Tax cuts matter a lot to low-paid people and to men and women in ordinary jobs.
I announced my income tax cuts last year as a return to our tax cutting agenda and, for the second year in succession, as a result of all the steps that I have announced, I can afford to deliver an instalment of that agenda. The choice is how best to do so. It is the old dilemma between thresholds and rates. Today it is between The Guardian, the Daily Mirror, The Independent or The Sun.
I want to ensure that tax does not start to be paid at too low a level of income and I want to improve work incentives. Therefore, I propose to raise the threshold below which no income tax is paid at all.
In this Budget, I am making an increase in the basic personal allowance of £280. That is 3½ times more than necessary to cover the rate of inflation. It will also ensure that each and every person who pays any income tax at all will get a direct benefit out of the Budget.
I am also increasing the married couple's and related allowances by £40, maintaining the extra tax allowance to all married couples. It will now be worth nearly £275 each year for married couples. The tax system does recognise marriage, contrary to popular belief.
We also give a special tax allowance to blind people. This year, I am increasing that by the rate of inflation. I am also moving to put indexation of that allowance on to the same statutory basis as for the other income tax allowances.I also propose to raise the threshold above which people start to pay the 40p higher rate tax by £600.
One of the Government's most important pledges is that we will move to a basic rate of income tax of 20p as soon as we can. We are proving that we can move towards the delivery of that promise and still maintain healthy public finances. Every step that we take makes that more credible and makes it more affordable to reach the ultimate goal to which we are getting tantalisingly near and which a Conservative Government will achieve. As a further step towards that, I propose to widen the lower rate band of 20p tax by £200--twice as much as is required to meet indexation.
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That will mean that the slice of income on which a 20p tax rate is paid will have more than doubled during the lifetime of this Parliament. More than one in four of all taxpayers will now pay a marginal rate of tax at 20p in the pound.
They are wide thresholds, so were the newspapers wrong? Am I indeed going to cut a penny off the basic rate of income tax? What the newspapers did know was that my control of public spending and borrowing and the responsibility of my Budget means that I can raise thresholds, widen the 20p band and also responsibly afford to reduce income tax as well. If I had put it all on tax rates, I could have taken 2p off the basic rate of income tax, but I preferred instead to raise personal allowances and widen the 20p band for those at the bottom end of the scale. In addition, I am able to reduce the basic rate of income tax by one penny to 23p in the pound.
The small companies rate of corporation tax will be reduced to 23p in line with that, helping 400,000 companies. The main rate of corporation tax of 33p is already lower than in any other major industrialised country. I look forward to hearing what the Labour party says about the basic rate of income tax.
Seventeen years of steady progress--so far--means that the basic rate of income tax is now a full 10p lower than the rate that we inherited in 1979. The standard rate is now the lowest for nearly 60 years--since Stanley Baldwin was Prime Minister and Wally Hammond scored a double century at the Oval.
Another penny off the basic rate is a significant further step towards this Government's target of a 20p basic rate of tax. For more than 7 million people, our promise of a 20p basic rate is already a reality. I am bringing other income taxpayers ever closer to that reality. A basic rate of 20p is a realistic and attainable goal for the next Parliament. We shall not be content until we have completed the task of getting it down to 20p and every Budget that I have presented has shown step by step how we shall get there.
With increases in real earnings and all the tax changes in the Budget, a family on average earnings will be another £370 better off next year over and above inflation. We said it last time and it happened. The same family will have more than £1,100 more to spend each year after tax and inflation than they did before they voted Conservative at the last general election. In 1992, the background was one of a worldwide slowdown, but now we are enjoying strong growth and rising living standards, and we shall enjoy more of the same.
In November 1993, I promised that I would put Britain firmly on course for a sustained period of rising prosperity and falling unemployment, based on low inflation and healthy public finances. I have done what I clearly said I would have to do and I have delivered on those promises.
The Budget cuts public spending next year by £2 billion, and it generates an extra £½ billion in revenue through "spend to save". It contains a balanced tax package--it includes tax cuts of £2 billion while it secures the tax base by £1 billion. Taken together, the effect of the Budget is to tighten fiscal policy and so protect healthy lasting recovery--and still achieve our target of cutting the basic rate towards our 20p goal.
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