Meeting of the Parliament 04 November 2015
Tax credits work. They boost people’s earnings in a targeted way to really tackle inequality. They lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty and allow families to aspire to more than just making it to the end of the month or the end of the week. David Cameron has broken his promise not to cut tax credits, and working families are paying the price. In Scotland, nearly 350,000 families rely on the money from tax credits, with the average family being more than £100 a month worse off as a result of the cuts that are planned by the Tories. It is a rise in tax on the working poor, and 70 per cent of the money saved by this rise in tax on working people will come from the pockets of working mothers. In a few weeks, just before Christmas, families are due to receive letters on their doormats telling them how much they will lose. What a cruel way to break a promise.
I never thought that I would say this, but thank God for the House of Lords. Labour, working alongside cross benchers, led the defeat of the chancellor’s plans in the House of Lords, and he has been forced to think again. We must keep the pressure on the Tories to cancel their plans to cut tax credits but, if they ultimately refuse, we will stand up for Scottish families come what may. It was not just the Tories who made a promise to the people of Scotland. Both Labour and the SNP promised working families a break from Tory austerity. That is why we should use the new powers that are coming to the Scottish Parliament to restore the money lost from tax credits for working families.
Few members in this chamber could have been as vocal about this Parliament taking on more financial responsibility as the leader of the Scottish Conservatives. I have no doubt in my mind that, next year, the Tories will run on a ticket of tax cuts. However, they cannot claim, as they appear to want to, to be caring or compassionate Conservatives if they let George Osborne cut tax credits for working families. If Ruth Davidson does not intervene to stop that, she and her party will stand accused of introducing a measure that is even worse than the poll tax in Scotland. Anything short of that and the mask slips, and we will know that compassionate Conservatism is simply a sham.
We have been here before: the Tories make a cruel decision at Westminster, the Scottish Tories look awkwardly at their shoes, and the SNP does anything at all to avoid taking responsibility. That past decision was, of course, the bedroom tax, which is mentioned in the SNP’s amendment. For months, the SNP said that protecting vulnerable Scots from the bedroom tax just could not be done, despite Scottish Labour saying repeatedly that it could. We had the money and the power then, but the SNP did not have the political will to do anything about it. Vulnerable people had to wait a year for action by the SNP.
John Swinney—where has he gone?—has elected not to speak in a debate this afternoon about the tax choices that this Government faces. He eventually admitted that he could mitigate the impact of the bedroom tax, but he did not want to do that because it would let Westminster off the hook. What a shameful thing to say when he claims to be anti-austerity.
The reality is that the SNP set up constitutional excuses to avoid blocking the bedroom tax for as long as it possibly could. It had to be dragged kicking and screaming into this chamber to a decision by Scottish Labour. It is shameful that the SNP is attempting to play the same red herring yet again, but it should be careful: people saw through that the first time, and they will see through the SNP again.
The SNP Government is trying to claim that we cannot restore tax credits and protect working families, but we can. It is trying to claim that the new powers that are coming to Scotland will not allow us to make fairer choices on tax credits, but they will.