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Mr. Alan W. Williams (East Carmarthen and Dinefwr): Will the right hon. Gentleman acknowledge
that in the last year of Conservative Government, debt was £28 billion, which was over 3 per cent. of GDP? His figure is highly artificial.
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: I have not referred to the reduction in Government debt when we left office: I am talking about the tax burden. It is rather an eloquent commentary on the tax burden that the hon. Gentleman does not refer to it at all: clearly, he implicitly agrees with what I am saying. All I am asking is that the Chief Secretary should recognise the figures in his own document. They are all there in black and white.
The truth is that the tax burden is even higher than the figure that I have given. How do we know that? We know it because the Government have admitted it. In the tables that I have cited, the working families tax credit has been deducted from the tax figure. There is plenty wrong with the working families tax credit. It is wrong, for instance, that those who earn up to £38,000 a year should be able to draw it. Higher-rate taxpayers will, through the churning mechanism, also receive some of the benefit.
We all agree, because the Government have admitted it, that the WFTC is an item of public expenditure. On page 178, the document says:
- "income tax credits . . . score as public expenditure under national accounting conventions."
Mr. Andrew Smith: The right hon. Gentleman said that there was plenty wrong with the working families tax credit. Would he scrap it?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: If there is a great deal wrong with it, it follows that we will change and amend it. The right hon. Gentleman overlooks the fact that we already had family credit, under which many of the people concerned received payments. However, we did not try to turn every business, including every small business, into a benefits agency in the process. We have not seen that process yet or the effect that that may have on employment, but there is a great deal wrong with the working families tax credit. We shall return to that subject in due course. It was very interesting that the Chief Secretary did not even attempt to justify his treatment of the WFTC--as well he might not.
Mr. Smith: Does such treatment not follow the precedent set by the right hon. Gentleman's Administration on mortgage interest relief?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: If the right hon. Gentleman is seriously advancing the proposition that mortgage interest relief is the same as a social security benefit, he has not learned anything in the few months during which he has been in his job.
I am not advancing some outrageous opinion or a matter of dispute; I am simply quoting the Government on the working families tax credit. It is stated in the document, as plainly as it could be--admittedly in rather small print at the back--that the WFTC is an item of social security expenditure. However, in the Government's tax tables, they have deducted such expenditure. That is what we mean by
fiddled figures. When that figure is added to give a true tax burden, the increase this year and by the end of this Parliament over and above the figures that the Government inherited is even more dramatic.
Dr. Nick Palmer (Broxtowe): If the right hon. Gentleman does not consider the working families tax credit to be a negative tax, does that mean that, if a Conservative Government were to scrap it, it would not be covered by their tax guarantee, since they would say that it was not a tax?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: Our tax guarantee stands unaltered. I emphasise that it is not me who is advancing the proposition that the WFTC is not a tax credit. It is the Government who are stating that it is an item of expenditure. The hon. Gentleman has a dispute with those on his Front Bench, and he might take it up with them during the debate.
So much for tax increases; they are now indisputable. We must next examine, however briefly, what has happened to the money. So far this Parliament we have had the stealth taxes, but what has happened to the increases in public services? I would say that they have been not so much stealthy as invisible. We have witnessed the well-known failure to reform the welfare state, and we all remember that the Prime Minister himself said that the increased expenditure on health and education was to be paid out of reductions in social security expenditure. Despite that promise, the increase in social security expenditure will be more than £30 billion by the end of this Parliament. Again, those are the Government's own figures.
Mr. James Plaskitt (Warwick and Leamington): Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: Let us consider health expenditure. The Government and the Chief Secretary persist with the lie that any of my right hon. Friends has ever opposed the Government's increased expenditure on health and education. I regret that that has not only been asserted again by the right hon. Gentleman in his speech but has found its way into the motion before the House.
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: My right hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor said in the debate on the pre-Budget report--
Kali Mountford: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: --at column 893:
- "I said that last year"--
Kali Mountford: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Is it in order for a Member of the House to use the word "lie" in debate in that way?
Mr. Deputy Speaker: It depends entirely on the context in which it is used. I do not think that I have heard anything out of order so far. Mr. Heathcoat-Amory.
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I apologise for not sitting down immediately
when you responded to that point of order. I was quoting from my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude), who said:
- "I said that last year and I say it again today. We support increases in health and education spending."
- "We have just heard this afternoon from the shadow Chancellor that he opposed putting that £40 billion in"--[Official Report, 9 November 1999; Vol. 337, c. 893-905.]
Mr. Plaskitt: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Nigel Griffiths (Edinburgh, South): Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: No, I am not giving way.
What is certain--we can all agree about this--is that the health performance that that increased expenditure is supposed to have enhanced is deteriorating. I cannot be the only Member who is being deluged with complaints from constituents about the national health service.
My health authority in Somerset has just issued an annual report which points out that the number of people waiting, both as in-patients and as day cases, has risen from March 1997, and that
- "the number of patients waiting longer than a year for admission has more than doubled over the past 12 months and shows a ten-fold increase since the end of March 1997."
What a way to end the millennium--to have built a plastic dome in Greenwich costing three quarters of a billion pounds--
Fiona Mactaggart (Slough): Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: --while more than half a million of our fellow citizens are waiting even to get on a national health service waiting list. That is a staggering commentary on new Labour's priorities.
Mr. David Borrow (South Ribble): Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Then there is the matter of central bureaucracy. If the Government have a defining characteristic, it is their almost obsessive centralisation and control tendency combined with a disreputable lack of accountability and democratic control.
We know all about quangos and the attendant problems of accountability. However, the Government have given us son of quango, called task force. An interesting article appeared in The Sunday Times a few weeks ago. It was entitled:
- "Unelected, Unaccountable--Labour's Taskforce Kings".
I tabled several parliamentary questions to get to the bottom of the matter. I asked the Government for the number of task forces, but they could not tell me--
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