It's Queen's speech day, for the last time in tis Parliament. What will be offered looks like an agenda of desperation focussed mainly on bribing parts of the electorate with their own pension funds and some modest reform of the pub industry. There could be little that constitutes a better indictment of both coalition and fixed term parliaments than this inability to deliver an effective programme of reform when there is nearly another year of parliamentary time available before the next election.
I wondered what I would do as a result. I stress, this is early morning musing stuff before I've even got as far as a cup of tea. I reserve the right to amend what follows, but it has, I think, to be better than anything that the government is offering. So these are my bills.
A Pension Fund Investment Bill. This would require all pension funds to invest in activities directly resulting in new economic activity as a condition of enjoying tax relief on their contributions. This could generate £20 billion for investment in the economy. Details here.
A Local Authorities Borrowing Powers Bill. Tis would permit local authorities, singly or in regional combination, to borrow to fund housebuilding. The bonds they would issue would qualify for investment under the terms of the Pension Fund Investment Bill.
The Local Authority Pension Fund Bill. This would allow the merger of UK local authority pension funds to create a combined opportunity to save cost and to permit the biggest opportunity for the creation of an active investor fund dedicated to regenerating local economic activity in the UK that we could have.
The NHS PFI Buy Out Bill. A Bill to create a new authority that would raise funding to buy out NHS PFI schemes at rates fixed by statute and to then replace PFI funding as a future source of NHS funding to prevent the excess cost and postcode lottery that PFI currently delivers.
A Tax Gap Bill. A Bill to require HMRC to properly research and appraise the tax gap and its causes; to set targets for its reduction, to provide independent oversight of its achievements, to provide a funding mechanism for achieving tax gap reduction goals and to require that a cabinet minister have direct ministerial responsibility for HMRC and tax gap reduction.
General Anti-Tax Avoidance Principle Bill. This is one I wrote earlier.
United Kingdom Corporate and Individual Tax and Financial Transparency Bill. Another one I wrote earlier.
A Gamekeeping Act. A Bill to make the shooting of protected birds on managed estates the criminal responsibility of the landowner. Another passion of mine which needs to be slipped in somewhere to protect hen harriers and other species new regularly shot on grouse estates.
A UK Banking Reform Bill. A Bill to nationalise the ownership of the UK's bank payment and clearing system and to licence commercial banks to use that system. The aim is to make sure we never have to bail out a bank again because it owns parts of the banking system without which the country cannot operate ever again. The nationalisation would be costless: the up front payment required for the licence to use the system would be the same as the compensation due for loss of ownership but the transfer of ownership would require the immediate right of access to banking data in the event of an insolvency to prevent loss to customers and the tax payer.
A Pay Bill. A Bill to firstly restrict the right to corporation tax relief on wages paid in excess of 10 times median pay and secondly to require the payment of a living wage, with additional resources being made available to ensure that this sum was paid. Responsibility for monitoring would be removed from HMRC, but access to its records for monitoring purposes would still be available.
A Council Tax Reform Bill. A bill to require the introduction of additional top end valuation bands for council tax purposes and to permit the charging of council tax at five times the normal rate on domestic property left empty except for reason of the owner's ill health for a period of more than 12 months. The Bill would also grant borrowing rights to local authorities e.g for school building.
A Railways Bill. A Bill to require the nationalisation of rail franchises on their expiry or cancellation by the franchise operator and to merge Network Rail and the resulting train operating companies into one integrated entity.
An NHS Reform Bill. A Bill to merge all NHS trusts and clinical commissioning groups within English regions into single organisations with a statutory duty to deliver integrated health care. Would include paving provision to bring social care into the same structure. The aim would be to ensure health care integration, to achieve economies of scale, to eliminate the massive duplication of effort, contracting and accounting the existing system entails and to improve democratic accountability by bringing these structures under combined county council control.
A Local Authority Education Bill. To bring all schools under direct local authority control and to end Foundation status to ensure the supply of integrated local education for the benefit of all in a community at lowest overall cost whilst enforcing inspection regimes, including on authorities themselves. Would also impose a requirement to provide adult education and skills training for lifelong learning.
I am sure there are more I could do: but I need breakfast now.
And this won't be today's Queen's speech, whatever happens.
NB Having had breakfast I realise I made a major omission:
A Green Investment Bank Bill. A bill to create a bank to fund major innovation in the UK economy with the power to borrow to provide the funds to do so. This is key element in the UK's industrial strategy.
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That would have my vote.
You managed to offer more hope before breakfast than any of the 3 main parties have in 4 years.
I would add to the Tax Gap bill: that HMRC have free budgetary reign to recruit more tax collectors provided they pay for themselves in increased net tax take.
I think that’s a given – but I agree
Actually – I might require a better ratio than one to one
A great list. A heroic list. Polls suggest a majority of voters would support many of them.
It’s a pity we don’t live in a real democracy, and are are represented every few years by a bunch of self-serving professional politicians who wouldn’t know a noble cause if they tripped over it, and whose only ambition is to get, or to stay in power.
Food banks in the UK! We can do better than this.
The Buddhist philosopher Allan Watts explains all you need to know about economics, and why Austerity is madness :
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vvBKR5GPCWc
There is some good news though http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/03/theresa-may-fresh-powers-organised-crime-associates isn’t there Richard?
They will be quaking in their boots
Mind you who I think to be organised crime and who she does may not coincide – a matter, maybe, of greater significance
How about correcting the dreadful destruction of the Welfare State and to work toward full employment?
I think I have tried to provide funding for the latter to therefore help solve the problem of the former
That is my preferred approach
We need a Job Guarantee scheme that economists of the MMT school like Mosler/Wray/Galbraith propose. The call them ‘transitional jobs’ which get a living wage-not the crap we have now where people work for nothing whilst trying to live on £71.50 a week if that hasn’t already been sanctioned!
“My Queen’s speech”
You have a different queen from the rest of us?
Why do you think bringing social care into the NHS (and away from local authorities) would improve democratic accountability?
I’ve been in quite a few negotiations over the past couple of years on behalf of local authorities with the NHS (doing s75s and other collaborations, mainly). In any proposal, we (the local authority) have always been streets ahead of the NHS in our interest on how the proposal would affect the local population.
The fact that we have elected members (and they don’t) makes the difference.
If you are interested in democratic accountability, you should be arguing for integrated health and social care (yes, a good idea) to be run by the local authority. The NHS can help fund it, provide support (e.g. clinical support in the monitoring), and that’s about it.
That’s the way the wind is blowing at the moment anyway and I know of at least 3 directors of Adults Services in major councils would agree with me.
Sticking it into one big centralised (probably London based) organisation is not a good idea, in my opinion.
I am specifically demanding local control of these NHS bodies – I thought I made that clear?
I resent the fact that does not exist now
Sorry if it was not obvious
And will any councillor vote for the closure of a hospital- even if that made rational health care planning sense? My experience of Local Councillors was that they were political!; rather interested in getting re-elected; had difficulty understanding health service needs. (As were MPs). What the Health Service needs is to get ALL politicians as far away from it as possible.
I love your belief in democracy
What do you prefer? Neo-feudalism?
Yes, on re-reading it, you did say that, sorry.
It is happening anyway bit by bit, though a Bill would speed things up.
Local authorities now largely view the NHS as a sugar daddy, with vast pots of cash, capability for clinical support, and good for not much else. There are a number of factors pointing to the slow death spiral for the NHS but this is just another one.
Local authorities have already got borrowing powers and power to issue bonds – what they need is for the Government to remove the cap on borrowing against the money in the Housing Revenue Account.
Agree totally re council tax bands but these can be changed by regulations – you don’t need a bill for this – and I’d be wary of 500% council tax on empty properties *and* fairer bands. There can be a lot of good reasons for properties being empty – e.g. death of the owner and inability to sell (or let), or the fact that the property has just been bought for renovation after already having been empty for 11 months.
Sorry if I used shorthand
I am not wary of high council tax charges on let property: they need to be priced into the market, which is why they are not sold
In my opinion, some good very ideas here,some good in principle but the devil being in the detail, and a few not so good like nationalisation.
The Council Tax is the most regressive tax we have. It doesn’t need reform, it needs scrapping. We cannot continue ad infinitum with bands based on 1991 values. At some time there has to be a full revaluation exercise. Valuing land is far easier than valuing the whole property and can be continually updated using modern methods (as they do in Australia and Denmark). If that’s too revolutionary, better to bring back the old domestic rating system. That was far fairer – but, of course, tory voters living in the leafy suburbs, saw that it was abolished. Remember what replaced it?