You are:

Birmingham, Edgbaston

 

View candidate responses for Birmingham, Edgbaston to our public service pledges.

Gisela Stuart (Labour)

Thank you for this and I have tried to work with your Union as much as possible to ensure that particularly the low paid public sector workers are protected.
You know that the Tories will cut hard and deep and I very much hope that come election day you will feel able to support me.
 
Best wishes
Gisela

Roger Harmer (Lib Dem)

Thank you for writing to me regarding your five pledges for public services.

My position on each of the pledges, is as follows:
 
1. I pledge to work to ensure that public services are properly resourced and delivered by the public sector and that there are no further local office closures, public sector job cuts or privatisations.
 
Liberal Democrats support the underlying principles of your call for quality public services, but the current economic climate will require some degree of public sector restraint. We cannot therefore guarantee that there will be no public sector job cuts or local office closures.
 
2. I pledge to support measures aimed at closing the UK tax gap including recruiting HMRC staff and ensuring tax loopholes are closed
 
The Government estimates that there is a tax gap of £40bn over half of which could legitimately be classed as straightforward tax avoidance or evasion. To tackle tax avoidance and evasion Liberal Democrats will introduce a tax anti-avoidance principle to ensure that people pay the amount of tax prescribed not just by the letter, but the spirit of the law.
 
Liberal Democrats will also create a rule which looks through transactions so that properties which have been transferred as part of a company still have to pay Stamp Duty Land Tax. Finally, using resources freed up from among other things removing 3.6m people from income tax through our reform of the tax system, we will invest in anti-evasion capabilities within HMRC. The key focus will be to find those who work outside the tax system and bring them into it.
 
These proposals may well require more staff but this would be funded by commercial rate charges levied for pre-clearance services. In addition, by reducing the number of people in the income tax system, we would expect to free up a considerable amount of staff time.
 
3. I pledge to support civil service national pay bargaining and to press the government to offer pay increases to public sector workers at least in line with inflation
 
Liberal Democrats have already announced a unique policy for public sector pay. As we pay down the budget deficit, public sector budgets are inevitably going to come under ever greater pressure.
 
If we are to prevent widespread job losses in the public sector their will have to be pay restraint.Liberal Democrats will therefore cappublic sector pay rises at £400 per person for two years to limit the growth of the public sector pay bill while ensuring fairness for teachers, nurses, police officers and other public sector workers. By capping pay rises in this way we will ensure that those with the lowest salaries receive the highest percentage increases.
 
Every public sector worker will be eligible for a pro-rata pay rise of up to £400. This is the equivalent of a 2% pay rise for someone on £20,000 a year, but a 3.3% pay rise for someone on £12,000 and a 0.4% pay rise for someone earning £100,000. This cap will be in place initially for two years. £400 is a pay cap not a guaranteed pay increase to everyone. Within the £400 pay cap pay will be negotiated as under the current system.
 
4. I pledge to honour the 2005 commitment on public sector pensions and defend the rights of existing members of the civil service pension scheme
 
At present, all bar one (the Local Government Pension Scheme) of the public sector pension schemes are unfunded. This means that rather than the contributions paid by the employees and employers being invested to pay for future pension payments, they go to the Treasury and are used to pay current pensions. This means nothing is being saved or put aside to meet future pension costs because all the money is used to pay the pensions of people who have already retired.
 
In recent years the cost of the pensions of those who have retired has been larger than the contributions coming in from current workers and the Treasury is having to use tax receipts to plug the gap. This year plugging the gap will cost the Treasury an estimated £4.1bn, twenty times the amount it had to pay in 2005. Predictions are that this gap will only grow wider.
 
In addition, those who do best out of public sector pensions are not low paid teachers or nurses, but rather high-flying civil servants, judges and NHS execs who receive large increases in their salaries at the end of their careers.  Liberal Democrats will therefore immediately establish an independent commission, along the lines of the Turner commission which looked into other pensions issues a few years ago, to examine the long-term future of public sector pensions.
 
We would ask the commission to look, on a scheme-by-scheme basis, at issues such as pay levels in public and private sector, relative job security, the level of contributions that scheme members already make,  the structure of pensions in retirement, scheme retirement ages, the way in which benefits are calculated and the cost of the scheme to the taxpayer.
 
However, Liberal Democrats believe that a pension promise made should be a pension promise kept. We are therefore committed to not making any changes to pension rights that have already been accrued by public sector workers.
 
5. I pledge to campaign to ensure any changes to public services are only made after proper equality impact assessments have been conducted and their findings implemented
 
Of course it is very important that the equality implications of any reforms are fully taken into account.
 
With best wishes
 
Roger Harmer
 
Councillor Roger Harmer
Liberal Democrat Candidate, Birmingham Edgbaston
 

Phil Simpson (Green) 

I had thought along with other Green Party candidates I had pledged my support for thios excellent PCS Union campaign.  I know a number of my colleagues in London have been more active in their support but please add my name to those fully supporting all 5 pledges.