John Hemming's Web Log

One reason used for HMRC to ask people to pay their tax credits back is the so called "no receipt" of the annual return. What it means is that if the annual return gets lost in the post then people have to repay all the tax credits and there is no way of changing this. I did win for one of my constituents mainly by threatening judicial review. However, I have been researching this and there clearly are a lot of similar cases. I have asked two parliamentary questions and my office has asked an FOI question to find out how many people fall into this category. The First PQ got a sort of "none" answer. So I rephrased it so they couldn't squirm out of answering it and got a "disproportionate cost" answer. This normally means the answer is embarrassing. Under FOI we got the answer "this information is not available at this level " we have appealed asking for the information from another level and will over time go to the Information Commissio...

The following document is now public, but I don't know where it is on the web so I am publishing it here. Conservative Liberal Democrat coalition negotiations Agreements reached 11 May 2010 This document sets out agreements reached between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats on a range of issues. These are the issues that needed to be resolved between us in order for us to work together as a strong and stable government. It will be followed in due course by a final Coalition Agreement, covering the full range of policy and including foreign, defence and domestic policy issues not covered in this document. 1. Deficit Reduction The parties agree that deficit reduction and continuing to ensure economic recovery is the most urgent issue facing Britain. We have therefore agreed that there will need to be: - a significantly accelerated reduction in the structural deficit over the course of a Parliament, with the main burden of deficit reduction borne by reduced spending rather than i...

Here is the debate in Hansard. It is often said that a week is a long time in politics, but in one sense that is wrong. Dealing with Government finance and the economy takes multiple years, so the problem that we had in 2010 will take at least eight years to resolve. People who interview me every so often say, “Oh, we have more cuts this year,” but those decisions were made in 2010 and they were driven by Government policy in the previous years. I shall quote a few comments about Government policy from 2005 to 2010 because they are relevant to this debate and the issue of budget responsibility in the long term. One person said in his memoirs: “However, we should also accept that from 2005 onwards Labour was insufficiently vigorous in limiting or eliminating the potential structural deficit.” That was Tony Blair, who was Prime Minister at the time. Lord Turnbull, who at one stage was the Cabinet Secretary, the chief civil servant, noted that excessive borrowing started to be...

Post Office Card Account Q: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions how many people in Birmingham collect their (a) pensions and (b) benefit payments through the Post Office card account.(John Hemming) A: holding answer UIN 53834 27 February 2006 The information is not available in the format requested. Information showing the number of DWP benefit and pension payment accounts paid by direct payment into a Post Office card account for each parliamentary constituency has been placed in the Library. (James Plaskitt, Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Work and Pensions) Departmental Procedures Q: To ask the Minister of State, Department for Constitutional Affairs if her Department will take steps to ensure that a photocopy of marked registers is kept locally for each constituency before the original is taken to storage. (John Hemming) A: The Electoral Administration Bill will provide that at future parliamentary elections, it will be the responsibility of electoral ...

I have been concerned about the impact of technological disruption for some time as you can see if you click on the link.  More recently the Bank of England have started to share my concerns Technological developments enable human societies to run with much less human work.  However, they have a number of hazards.   Although we cannot change things over night to deal with this we must make some progress working out how to respond. As I see it the issues are 1.   Finance and Equality One of the reasons why we are developing a more unequal society is the impact of technology.  There are low paid jobs essentially boosted by the living or minimum wage and then there are jobs that require rarer skills that don't.   We do need to work to avoid growing inequality here. 2.   Security Peoples lives were much more secure after the second world war and moving into the 1990s.  However, with technological change lives have become less secure.  ...

Sir Albert Bore has referred to the "jaws of doom". This he has done when central government are cutting the spending power of the city council by 1.11% in cash terms. Nationally the figures are 1.7% (across England). At the same time the council has decided to put up the wages of all council staff paid under £7.20 to £7.20. This is called the "living wage". Many people who earn less than this get tax credits. Hence it is substantially a swap between central government costs and local government costs. They have also included the 16-21 year olds. Hence some of them have had increases of 75% or 85%. It is a nice policy in the sense that it is being nice to people. However, because they propose also to ensure that contractors do the same they wish to find £10m per annum for the same policy. At the same time they want to raise more council tax by charging people on JSA 24% of the council tax. The council could find £10m pa by sacking over 300 additional st...

One of the threads of the General Election debate both in Yardley and nationally is what is happening to the more vulnerable people in society. All the vaguely rational parties (and I include part of the Labour Party in this) accept that we need to get government finances under control. The government has income (from taxes and levies etc) and spends money on services (the NHS, police etc). As it stands when the expenditure exceeds the income we have a deficit that needs to be borrowed each year. The government sells fixed term bonds which pay interest each year and then after a number of years the government pays back the capital. Each year also the government has to reborrow some money to pay of the bonds that mature in each year. If the government has a surplus (after paying interest) it can reduce the amount of debt by issuing less debt than it pays off. The government has been benefiting from being able to reissue debt at a lower interest rate.  This has reduced the ...

My EDM 400 FAMILY TAX CREDIT REPAYMENTS 23.06.2005 Hemming, John That this House notes that there is a substantial problem with the hardship caused by the clawback of overpayments of family tax credit; and calls for no clawback to occur until the weekly amount of clawback is agreed verbally, by email or in writing by the recipient Relates to the biggest problem that people face who are on tax credit. The government decides how much money to take from people without talking to them, starts directly debiting it and waits until they squeal. I wrote a letter to Dawn Primorolo (Paymaster General) on 22nd June, resent it on 12th July because of no response and a month later have still not had a response. I am going to find where her office is and deliver it in person this time. Much that there is a lot of chaos dealing with tax credits if they changed the system this way it would not cause so much personal grief.

The link is to the evidence session from the Procedure Select Committee. Questions are being asked of Chris Bryant MP (Rhonnda) who is Harriet Harman's deputy (ie the Deputy leader of The House). The enquiry is into written questions. In essence what he says is that if a minister refuses to give a proper written answer to a question then the solution is to beat the government at the next general election. This issue about the refusal to explain the details of policies is at the nub of how things go wrong so many times. Apart from using the Freedom of Information act it is difficult to find out precisely what is going wrong by using parliamentary procedures. If we don't know what is going wrong then we cannot fix it. The theory is that the legislature holds the executive to account in between elections. To hold to accounts requires asking questions and getting answers. However, at times the government simply refuses to answer. Here is an extract Q70 John Hemming: I think it i...

Over the weekend we had the demonstration by Fathers 4 Justice. Today I attended a meeting of Tax Credit Casualties. What we have is the state intervening with families to cause chaos. With TCC there are cases where someone has to pay all their tax credit back simply because their annual return got lost in the post. Fathers 4 Justice are a form of offshoot of Families Need Fathers. Both of these arise from the capricious nature of the Family Justice system in the UK where the outcomes are frequently not rational. F4J are not very clear on what they want. That in part arises from the secrecy of the system which prevents people from learning about the multifarious miscarriages of justice. What we need to do is to open up hte system to scrutiny to enable proper accountability. That applies also to Tax Credits.

The comments by Lord Turnbull and Tony Blair are key simply because the former was the top civil servant and the latter the Prime minister at the time when things started going particularly wrong for the country's finances. I have extracted elements from Tony Blair's memoirs which basically talk about the economic problems we face now and how they were exacerbated by the government whilst he was Prime Minister and then when Gordon Brown took over. They speak for themselves. However, basically he accepts that a) The financial problems were exacerbated because Labour overspent. b) That making serious cuts is inevitable and that Labour cannot challenge the overall envelope of public spending. c) That Labour should have put up VAT. d) That a Labour - Lib Dem coalition was a non-starter. e) That the target public spending of 42% of GDP is actually not that low. He argues that Labour should avoid going into opposition mode. From p679 onwards The economic crisis, strangely enough, ...

It is worth looking back at 2010 before we look forward for 2011 and onward. locally The last case reference of 2009 was 13945 and the last reference of 2010 is 17452. That is over 3,500 cases handled for people in Yardley. These vary as to how many people are affected and how important the cases are to those households. Constituency casework is important so that an MP can see what is actually happening as opposed to what they are being told by Civil Servants and Ministers. It also allows people a last resort which is at times their only way of getting their issues resolved. Thanks are due to my constituency team. This year they have had to cope with some unusual situations including protestors shutting the office down. However, they have all done a good job for Yardley. There have been no personnel changes during the year. The biggest local issue is the redevelopment of The Swan. We agreed to forgo the inflation/interest on the money due for the local park in order to speed up the...

I was always amazed that the Labour Party got away with accepting a loan from Bernie Ecclestone that effectively changed the law on advertising smoking. Bernie got "access" the ability to influence the argument rather than a formal legislation for loans deal. The end result is, however, the same. We now have a mass of issues Bernie Ecclestone's Loan for a law change - seriously bad in terms of governmental integrity. Patricia Hewitt's overall mess with the NHS - a very bad consequence for the population as a whole Charles Clarke and the prisoners. I cannot really understand how he is hanging on. This is clearly within his direct remit. Phil Woolas and the claim that the government have no policy assumption about the Council Tax. Tony Blair, Lord Levy and Loans for Peerages - now where has that gone The War in Iraq. We must not forget this situation. Overpayment for pharmaceuticals, Labour do get funded by pharmaceutical companies. See Guido The general refusal to ans...

Question 1 Could you please tell me how many tax credit manual payments were made during the month of May 2005. Answer Around 43,000 direct manual payments were made in May 2005. Question 2 Could you also tell me what proportion of payments were made manually each month since April 2004 and what the cost of the manual payment process is. Answer The proportion of direct payments (%), excluding payments via employers, made manually since April 2004 is shown in the table below Apr-04 0.27% May-04 0.16 Jun-04 0.15% Jul-04 0.19 Aug-04 0.20% Sep-04 0.22 Oct-04 0.32% Nov-04 0.33 Dec-04 0.24% Jan-05 0.30 Feb-05 0.30% Mar-05 0.28 Apr-05 0.36% May-05 0.30 Jun-05 0.27% Jul-05 0.28

There was a quite reasonable statement from the Paymaster General (Dawn Primorolo) about Tax Credits today. The problem is that if you have a responsive system which changes as people's incomes go up and down then you will end up with some overpayment. These overpayments may from time to time need recovering. There needs, therefore, to be a system for this. The problem with this is that the government merely take the money out of people's bank accounts and wait for them to complain. Many households are very marginal from a cash flow perspective and cannot afford this. What the government should do is agree the repayment rate before clawing back the money. I have written a letter (follows) to the Paymaster General to call for this. Letter to Dawn Primorolo I understand that currently you are stopping clawback if a dispute is raised. Would it not be better to only claw back when the recipient has agreed the clawback rate? Hardship is caused when the clawback rate is too high....

The Home Office, the NHS, Tax Credits, The Child Support Agency, the Ministry of Defence, Single Farm Payments ... etc etc. It is quite clear that the Labour Government are "not fit for purpose". They have been in government for 9 years and although some positive things have been achieved, there are still many areas that are chaotic. That comes from their concentration on spin and concealing problems rather than substance.

It will take some time to pin this issue down. However, what I have found so far is that the Insolvency Service is selling people's debts. It writes a letter to them saying we are selling your "debt for £xxxxx (we do not know how much it is". This, of course, causes rather a lot of confusion. I could understand the concept that they are sub-contracting in part the process of working out how much the debt is. However, to tell someone that they owe some money, but they are not sure how much it is, and it has been sold to someone else and then that they may have to sell their house, is a bit cruel. This must affect a few thousand people nationally. Tax Credits appear to still be mired in chaos.