Contribution
My Lords, in moving Amendment 2, I will also speak to Amendments 17 and 20 in my name and those of my noble friend Lady Kramer and the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge. I was not able to speak at Second Reading. The Grand Committee will be delighted to know that I do not intend to give a Second Reading speech, even though there appears to be a precedent this afternoon. Nor will I talk about the quantum of £X billion, although I will briefly explain why I was not at Second Reading.
I realise that it is not necessary to apologise, but I was detained up north waiting for a meeting associated with my father’s discharge from care, without which the NHS is paying for his care in a care home and has now done so for three months. Until it and social services are able to come to a resolution, the NHS is paying for his care, rather than either the local authority or, indeed, my father and his family. All the issues we heard about in the discussion on the first group of amendments are absolutely as acute as everybody said. We really need to deal with some of them, but whether they are best dealt with by increasing employers’ national insurance contributions I am not at all persuaded.
As we heard in the previous group, this is a tax on jobs. In concluding the group, the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, said something about our wishing this legislation through or hoping to see it pass. I am not looking forward to seeing this legislation pass, because it is undoubtedly a tax on jobs, and it is not clear how it will help growth or any of the ambitions that His Majesty’s Chancellor of the Exchequer seems to think are necessary for our economy to improve.
There is a serious issue at the moment. The specific issue on which my group of amendments focuses is veterans. I am aware that that sounds even more niche than health and social care or the voluntary sector, and that the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, will be poised to jump up to say that this just adds yet more complexity. Why does a Liberal Democrat appear to be simply finding a way of adding to the complexity of the tax base? There are two reasons.
One is that the Government and this country have a commitment to our veterans, as part of the Armed Forces community. We have a very clear commitment to supporting our veterans, in particular by getting them back into work. As tabled, this set of amendments is rather broad and I am aware that if we were on Report, I would not have amendments quite as broad as they are at present. The detail of the amendment is, in form and structure, identical to that of those for health and social care and all the other Liberal Democrat groups of amendments, where we are essentially saying that we should keep the threshold and the percentages as they are, rather than increase the thresholds and tax rates.
The issue with veterans is that people who leave our Armed Forces are highly skilled and capable, yet not always seen as the most obvious people to employ. Larger employers may do so but it is not inevitable. A report by the Federation of Small Businesses back in 2019, A Force for Business, clearly highlighted the importance of bringing veterans back into the workforce. Its commitments to bringing veterans back into the workforce built on a report that highlighted that 12% of small businesses had employed veterans in the previous three years, and about 20% of manufacturers. It is important for veterans to be employed, but it is also important for small businesses to be able to employ them.
On the back of those proposals and the report from the Federation of Small Businesses, under the previous Government, as of the tax year April 2021-22, there was an exemption for newly employed veterans: not for all Armed Forces veterans, as the current amendments talk about, but for those who were in their first job after leaving the Armed Forces, however long the period between leaving the Armed Forces and having their first civilian job might have been.