Baroness Noakes (Con)

My Lords, I will also speak to Amendments 55 and 56. I thank my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe for adding her name to these amendments. They deal with two aspects of the employment allowance: public authorities and the employment of people with personal or household care. We heard earlier in Committee that, under the National Insurance Contributions Act 2014, the employment allowance is not available to public authorities and that the term “public authority” includes bodies in the private sector whose activities are at least 50% the performance of functions of a public nature. GPs and NHS dentists have been cited as among those caught by this definition. Amendment 55 would remove this exception for public authorities so that they would be able to claim the employment allowance and Amendment 54 would create a £20,000 level of employment allowance for public authorities. The effect of this Bill is that all public authorities will pay the higher rate of national insurance calculated on the lower secondary threshold, but none of them will get an employment allowance. Amendment 55 would give them an employment allowance of £10,500, while Amendment 54 would increase that to £20,000. We know that the Chancellor intends to spend around £5 billion each year on reimbursing public authorities, which are classified to the public sector. Since my amendment would reduce the national insurance costs borne by those public sector authorities, it would simply reduce the amount of money that the Chancellor would have to reimburse in her money-go-round and offer a practical benefit for public authorities in the private sector. This would not be a full exemption, which the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, has argued for in relation to GPs and dentists, but it would soften the blow of the national insurance increases. If there ever was a justification for excluding GPs and dentists from the employment allowance, that went out of the window when the Chancellor introduced her jobs tax.