21 January 2025 – yesterday’s press releases

  • Unemployment: Reeves must scrap jobs tax
  • Southport Inquiry: Must get us answers to avoid future failures
  • WASPI: More than 300,000 women in Scotland “betrayed” by Labour decision
  • Welsh unemployment rise: Labour must scrap their Jobs Tax
  • Cole-Hamilton: SNP have left A&E in state of perma-crisis
  • McArthur: Community orders should be credible solutions to prison overcrowding

Unemployment: Reeves must scrap jobs tax

Responding to the latest figures showing unemployment at 4.4%, Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesperson Daisy Cooper MP said:

These latest figures are concerning. The government’s misguided jobs tax is already scaring off small businesses from hiring new people and being able to better serve our communities.

The Chancellor talks about growth but her Budget measures are acting as an anchor against just that.

After years of the Conservative Party’s economic vandalism we cannot see this new government repeat their mistakes. That is why Rachel Reeves needs to scrap her jobs tax to get our economy growing again.

Southport Inquiry: Must get us answers to avoid future failures

Commenting after Starmer’s press conference following the government’s announcement of an inquiry into the Southport murders, Liberal Democrat Leader Ed Davey said:

The Liberal Democrats welcome this inquiry, which must not shy away from asking tough questions about what went wrong.

This was an utterly horrific tragedy. My thoughts go out to the bereaved families, who lost three young daughters to such brutal violence. We need to ensure that such a senseless attack cannot happen again.

We must learn from these events, and the inquiry must urgently get us the answers we need to avoid future failures.

WASPI: More than 300,000 women in Scotland “betrayed” by Labour decision

Speaking ahead of a Scottish Parliament debate on compensation for WASPI women, Beatrice Wishart MSP has said her party will “fight for WASPI women” as data from the House of Commons library estimated that an estimated 331,780 women in Scotland could be affected.

The Government announced before Christmas that it will not compensate women hit by changes to the state pension age, despite backing campaigners in opposition.

Data requested by the Liberal Democrats from the House of Commons Library, using population estimates, indicates that 331,780 women in Scotland could be impacted by the decision.

Commenting on the data, Beatrice Wishart said:

These shocking figures show that hundreds of thousands of people in Scotland have been betrayed by the UK Government’s decision to not compensate WASPI women.

The UK Government has turned its back on millions of women who were wronged through no fault of their own, ignoring the independent Ombudsman’s recommendations, and that is frankly disgraceful.

For years, Liberal Democrats have pushed the government to fairly compensate WASPI women in line with the Ombudsman’s recommendations.

The Conservatives left our economy in a shambles, but pensioners shouldn’t be asked to pay the price. The Liberal Democrats will fight for WASPI women. The UK Government must urgently change course and rethink this shameful decision.

Welsh unemployment rise: Labour must scrap their Jobs Tax

Responding to the latest figures showing unemployment at 5.6%, up 2.3 percentage points on the year, Welsh Liberal Democrat Westminster Spokesperson David Chadwick MP said:

These latest figures are concerning. Labour’s misguided jobs tax is already scaring off small businesses in Wales from hiring new people and stalling our economy.

The Chancellor talks about growth, but her Budget measures are acting as an anchor against just that. This is especially true in Wales where our economy is more dependent on small businesses than in Scotland or England.

25 years of Labour rule in Wales has left our economy stagnant and the private sector employment in a much weaker state than other parts of the UK.

Rachel Reeves needs to scrap her jobs tax to get the Welsh economy growing again.

Cole-Hamilton: SNP have left A&E in state of perma-crisis

Responding to new figures showing only 62.4% of people attending A&E were seen within the 4 hour target in the week ending 12th January, while 3,544 people waited over 8 hours and 1,959 waited over 12 hours, Scottish Liberal Democrat Leader and health spokesperson Alex Cole-Hamilton said:

The SNP’s NHS Recovery Plan has completely failed. It was meant to improve conditions in our NHS, but if anything they have only got worse.

The SNP’s failure to improve conditions has left A&E in a state of perma-crisis for years. These waits are intolerable for staff and patients alike, we need to see urgent action to address this situation.

Scottish Liberal Democrats would overhaul the SNP’s failed NHS Recovery Plan, get you fast access to GPs and help people leave hospital on time through a new UK-wide minimum wage for care workers that is £2 higher.

McArthur: Community orders should be credible solutions to prison overcrowding

Scottish Liberal Democrat justice spokesperson Liam McArthur MSP has today said that the SNP Government must do far more to boost the number of community payback orders being issued and improve enforcement after new statistics revealed that numbers are at some of their lowest in a decade.

The Scottish Government’s Justice Social Work Statistics summarises the main trends in community orders and justice social work reports. The latest set of statistics found that:

  • In 2023/24, around 15,100 community payback orders (CPOs) were issued. This is the fourth lowest number in the last decade.
  • The number of unpaid work requirements successfully completed fell by 26% between 2014-15 and 2019-20, with the number of work orders in 2023-24 still lower than pre-pandemic levels.
  • Since the pandemic, a lower proportion of CPOs have been finished in the same year as they were imposed.

Mr McArthur said:

At a time when Scotland’s prions are bursting at the seams, it’s worrying that there are so few community-based alternatives being issued and completed.

Packing more and more people into prisons is counterproductive. It makes it very challenging for staff to work with inmates and successfully rehabilitate them to reduce the chances of reoffending.

Community payback orders are a key part of the solution because they can ease pressure on the system and ensure people get a credible alternative to prison time.

The Scottish Government must do more to boost the number of community payback orders and improve enforcement by ensuring they are completed. That’s how we can strike the right balance between punishing, rehabilitating and cutting reoffending.

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This entry was posted in News, Press releases, Scotland and Wales.
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11 Comments

  • Jenny Barnes 22nd Jan '25 - 10:44pm

    I’d be interested to know if Daisy Cooper thinks that just cutting taxes will create economic growth. Would that growth increase activity enough to compensate for the lost income? If not, how would it work? More borrowing & higher interest rates? Cuts to public services? Which ones?

  • It would be helpful if Daisy Cooper specified how she would make up the amount of revenue that would be lost if the so called ‘job tax’ was reversed……
    Would she tax something else instead ? We need to know.

  • @Jenny Barnes 22nd Jan ’25 – 10:44pm…

    Jenny Barnes, I’m not sure if you were the contributor who, listing Lib Dem promises, wrote ‘and a pony’…

    Daisy Cooper seems to be putting a ‘rosette’ on that pony..

  • Jenny Barnes 23rd Jan '25 - 1:55pm

    I nearly commented “and a pony” again, but … I like the idea of a pony with a rosette 🙂
    I know “everyone” thinks growth is the answer (on a finite planet?) but they seem to think it happens by magic. At least Gordon Brown pretended to have a theory : “post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory”
    This government, and it seems the LD parliamentary party, have nothing. See this article
    https://ifs.org.uk/articles/what-governments-theory-growth-nobody-knows

  • David Allen 24th Jan '25 - 4:23pm

    Cutting taxes to bribe the voters with thir own money was what Truss and then Hunt did, and boy did it not create economic growth. At the election, the Lib Dems bravely promised small tax rises, while Labour completely funked it and declared that no hurtful tax rises would happen. Now, Labour have finally bowed to the inevitable and found a way to raise taxes. For the Lib Dems to turn around and respond by proposing unsustainable tax cuts is irresponsible.

  • Mick Taylor 24th Jan '25 - 5:19pm

    There is a truth that far too many politicians choose to ignore. You cannot have decent public services if you continually cut taxes and promising to do so is irresponsible and misleads the electorate.
    To be fair to Daisy, LibDems have offered alternative sources of revenue with taxes on excessive bank and social media company profits and we did so at the election.
    The real problem is that cutting taxes has become a universal mantra and so much so that companies now believe that rising taxes means cutting jobs instead of accepting lower profits. There will always be companies on the margin for whom ANY increase in taxation may be disastrous, but that is not true of most companies, many of whom could absorb the NICs increases and accept lower profits and returns for shareholders, but choose instead to play politics by cutting jobs.
    One of the most egergious tax cuts by the Tories was lowering the NICs paid by the employed, thus reducing the cash available for pensions.
    I look forward to the day when LibDem leaders and MPs put on the big trousers and explain to the electorate that tax needs to increase in order to pay for all the things voters want, like decent pensions,propser social care, the NHS, clean water, regular and cheap railways and other public transport and so on.
    Otherwise, when the day comes that a LibDem leader gets the keys to No 10, we don’t have to behave like the scrooge like Labour Party under Keir Starmer.

  • @Mick Taylor. According to the OECD, the tzx-to-GDP ration in the UK increased from 32.7% in 2000 to 35.3% in 2023. I agree with you that we can’t have good public services and keep cutting taxes, but it seems the reality is we don’t have good public services despite taxes having actually overall gone up! Political parties like to talk about cutting taxes, but it rarely happens in practice (Liz Truss’s madness being an unusual exception).

    You seem very blasé about expecting companies and shareholders to accept lower profits – but in most cases those profits are nothing more than, how entrepreneurs and business owners (including people who are effectively self-employed) make their living. I wonder if you’d be so keen for people who are employed to accept lower wages? (Yes I know there are a few well publicised companies who appear to make huge profits. They tend to be well publicised in part because they are the exceptions though).

    I very much doubt that businesses are deliberately cutting jobs in order to ‘play politics’: That would be an absurd strategy for any business that wants to earn a living. Far more likely, any businesses cutting jobs are doing so because they have judged that it is not affordable for them not to cut those jobs. Very few people like making their colleagues redundant!

  • @ Simon R. I don’t know why you’re bothered about the taxGDP ratio “has grown to 35.3% in 2023”. That’s the level Mr David Laws, not the most left wing member of the 2010-12 Coalition, was calling for back in 2012.

  • Peter Martin 24th Jan '25 - 11:05pm

    It’s generally speaking true that if we want better public services we need to pay higher taxes. However, we need to understand why. The Westminster government isn’t like a local council albeit on a larger scale. So, what might seem the obvious answer isn’t the correct answer.

    The government increases taxes in order to create unemployment in the private sector. It can then increase its own spending to re-utilise the spare labour on what it wants to spend. Taxation is a way of shifting resources from the private to the public sector without creating extra inflation.

    This might seem a statement of the obvious, but it indicates that the present government is on the wrong track by claiming that increased growth will “pay for” a larger public sector.

    If we do somehow manage to have economic growth everyone will be, on average, better off. Therefore the people we need to recruit for our expanded public sector will be more expensive than they have might been otherwise. Existing public sector workers will also want increased incomes to match those in the private sector. Growth won’t, in itself, allow government to increase the relative size of the public sector.

    This is not to suggest that we shouldn’t aim for an increased GDP. But its going to be difficult to make everyone better off in the sense that they’ll have more holidays and better cars. They be better off because they’ll have cleaner rivers , better railways, better health and social care etc.

  • @David Raw: I’m not bothered about the fact that overall taxes have gone up per se, as I’m quite comfortable with the idea of paying a bit more in order to get better services. But I think we should be very concerned by the fact that taxes have gone up at the same time as a widespread perception that public services have worsened – because that strongly suggests that things aren’t at all as simple as the pay more, get better services mantra that progressives tend to believe. I suspect the missing thing is that we’re not thinking enough about the efficiency with which services are delivered or whether the Government is trying to do the right things. I want better services, but I don’t think we should just be constantly calling for tax increases without first checking whether the money is actually doing something useful, being well spent, and not disappearing into a black hole of, Government spending being somehow wasted.

  • Peter Davies 25th Jan '25 - 7:56am

    I think efficiency is talked about a lot. The problem is that while Rachel Reeves says “NI will rise” and it rises, Wes Streating says “The NHS will get more efficient” and it doesn’t.

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