Liberal Democrats in Parliament are backing a cross-party amendment to the Finance Bill to ensure the maximum stake for fixed-odds betting terminals are introduced as planned within six months.

Currently the maximum stake for Fixed-Odds Betting Terminals is £100, but the Government’s own review has concluded that this should be reduced to just £2. However the proposal in the Budget is to delay this change for nearly a year until October 2019.

Liberal Democrat Leader Vince Cable said:
“A few months ago I was approached by a mother who was distraught after her son had committed suicide as a result of distress caused by debts that had accrued from compulsive gambling.”

“I and the Liberal Democrats will therefore work with others to stop these abusive practices and introduce a crackdown as promised. The Government is giving in to lobbying from the industry and must now back the cross-party amendment.”

“Further delays are causing more and more vulnerable people to face financial stress, mental health problems and worse.”

Much of the media attention on this week’s budget from the Chancellor was on some of the tax cuts that have been made (or brought forwards one year). These mean that those people who pay income tax will be slightly better off from next April.

Whilst this is welcome, the Chancellor failed to grasp some of the real problems that face public services up and down the country:

• There was nothing to help the Police, who are struggling to provide enough police to provide adequate community policing or investigate crimes.
• Local Councils will still have to make £1.3 billion worth of cuts to services as no extra money was found for long term funding.
• There was a tiny bit of extra funding for schools, but when many schools are having to lose staff at a time of rising costs this works out at less than the cost of a single teacher.
• Taking action on tacking plastic waste was dodged by failing to provide a tax on single use items like takeaway plastic cups.

On social care funding, the Chancellor announced £650 million of extra money for local councils to help with the enormous costs of social care. While £650 million for social care sounds a lot, this includes £240 million already announced for reducing winter pressures. Adult and Children’s social care faces a funding gap of £2.6 billion in the next financial year, so the £410 million extra isn’t enough to fill this. For example, the increases in the Budget for the National Living Wage for care staff, while very much deserved, need to be paid for.

What would we have done differently?
A Liberal Democrat budget would:

• Secure the future of our NHS, focusing on social care and mental health with an extra £6bn per year, funded through a penny in the pound on income tax.
• Improve living standards for 9.6m parents and children, by reversing George Osborne’s cuts to the “work allowance” under Universal Credit, costing £3bn.
• Invest an extra £2.8bn in to the schools budget, by reversing the Government’s proposed cuts to school funding.
• Scrap business rates – replacing them with a tax on land values known as the Commercial Landowner Levy.  The reformed system would increase incentives to invest in new equipment and renovations, and cut taxes for businesses in nine out of ten English local authorities.
• Reverse Conservative cuts to Corporations Tax – still leaving the UK with the lowest rate of corporation tax in the G7.
• Work with the EU to crack down on tax avoidance by the tech titans, and working to secure agreement on taxing multi-nationals’ profits.
• Reform wealth taxation – bringing capital gains and dividend taxes into line with income taxes, removing the most generous pension tax reliefs from the highest earners, and replacing the inheritance tax system with a fairer lifetime transfer tax.

Liberal Democrat Deputy Leader and Leader Jo Swinson MP and Vince Cable MP have written to the Chancellor of the Exchequer calling on him to throw his weight behind a new Europe-wide tax initiative on tech giants.

This urges Philip Hammond to use the Budget to set out how he will incorporate what is currently an EU’s initiative into any Treasury initiative to tax big internet firms.

Jo Swinson said:
“Tech giants are getting away with not paying their fair share of tax because we make it easy for them.

The time to act is now if we want to create a level playing field for businesses in the UK and give our struggling high streets a much needed boost.

Britain is always at its best when it brings countries together in a common cause. If we want to tax tech giants we must work together with our European allies and others around the globe.”

I urge the Chancellor to focus his energy on making this EU-wide tax happen. This is a golden opportunity that we cannot afford to miss.”

Last week was the regular meeting between the Mayor of Greater Manchester (Andy Burnham) and representatives of Liberal Democrat Council Groups across Greater Manchester. Our group leader in Bury, Councillor Tim Pickstone, was at the meeting.

Greater Manchester Spatial Framework
Residents may have read in the local press that the major ‘Greater Manchester Spatial Framework’ is likely to be delayed again.

GMSF is the Greater Manchester plan for housing, infrastructure and other land use for the next 20 years. The second version of the proposals was due to be published in October 2018, for another stage of public consultation, but this is now having to be delayed.

The reason is new population figure estimates nationally which, on the face of it, show that Greater Manchester needs significantly less houses in the future than previously thought. (The original plan had 227,000 new houses required over the next 20 years, the new figures suggest more like 155,000. HOWEVER, Greater Manchester waiting for the Government to publish a ‘formula’ to interpret the figures, and it may be that this future is pushed back up again.

This seems like good news. Greater Manchester has enough ‘brownfield’ sites to build over 190,000 new homes without touching any of our precious green belt land. If this was to happen then Manchester and Salford was be taking slightly than their ‘fair share’ of new houses, but feels sensible for the more urban and central areas of the region.

The other big demand on land is for ’employment land’ to make sure that there are places for everyone to work. I the north of Greater Manchester, including Bury, there are calls for more employment land which may or may not be on current green belt land.

Prior to his election, Andy Burnham promised ‘no net loss of green belt’, if he was elected. It will be interesting to see if he can stick to that promise. In Bury it will be interesting to see what our Council does with its plans and whether it still pushes ahead with a loss of green belt for new houses and/or employment land.

Trains and Regional Development
We asked the Mayor about how we can tackle the ‘summer of chaos’ on our regions railways, but crucially about future investment in our rail infrastructure. Big decisions are imminent on the Manchester to Leeds rail electrification, which is a really important next step to giving the north of England the good rail connections we need. We also asked about progress on High Speed 2 to Manchester and again there are worrying indications from Government about wanting to reduce costs and whether it is willing to provide us with the the High Speed 2 infrastructure we need in Greater Manchester (which is what London is getting!)

Other Issues
We also spoke to the Mayor about some of the pressures on our local hospital services, all of which are experiencing to a greater or lesser extent problems with capacity and finances.

We also spoke about how we can make sure that the decision making bodies in Greater Manchester are politically representative of everyone in Greater Manchester, and in particular spoke about how decision making bodies for the fire and police are being brought together

Please let us know if there are issues you would like us to raise at future meetings.