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9.40 pm
Mr. Brooke: On behalf of the whole House, I congratulate the hon. Member for Northampton, South (Mr. Clarke) on a perfectly excellent maiden speech. I suspect that he made it easier for the Deputy Speaker to decide who should be called when a wide range of hon. Members--I am not referring to myself here--got up in what is necessarily a truncated Third Reading debate.
The proceedings on the Bill have been notable for the fact--this is a tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb)--that Bognor has, I suspect, been mentioned more often than the City of London. I have visited Bognor, but the most vivid thing I knew about it before these proceedings was an exchange between the late Duke of Norfolk and someone who asked him whether, when he was senior steward at the Jockey Club, he ever had a flutter. He said that it was wrong that he should ever make a bet of any sort in that capacity, but it was true that Lavinia, the duchess, did occasionally have a bet. "Does she do well?", the person asked. "Not really," said the duke, "I had to sell Bognor last week."
The Government's defence for the truncated proceedings on the Bill--the 12 working days that it has taken--has been that they are guided and governed by precedent, and that we have had just as much time as in past years; but the fact remains that, by having to take it day after day without intermission, the outside bodies have not had the opportunity to contribute, nor necessarily has there been any margin for those of my hon. Friends who sat on the Committee to be able to absorb advice. Frankly, the test will be whether the Government, who have defended the use of 12 days this year, use the same technique next year. If they were to use it again next year, the City of London would have much more to say than perhaps it has had to say this year, in these circumstances.
The Chief Secretary alluded to the Treasury to the long speeches, and various references have been made to the fact that those speeches were not wholly satisfactory. One of the consequences of the long speeches of Conservative Members has been the nature of the interventions that they have provoked and prompted. The interventions of Labour Members on both the Back and the Front Benches have been the most revealing way in which they have shown that they have not fully understood the Bill.
I close, because I want other hon. Members to be able to speak in the debate, with one exchange that I had with the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, with whom
I have had, broadly speaking, excellent relations throughout, although I acknowledge that there have been frissons.
On the subject of the windfall tax, I raised with the Economic Secretary the fact that one Minister had said that there was no difficulty at all in companies affected by the tax paying it out of their borrowings. Her response to me was that the Paymaster General had made it clear in other debates that the regulators had said that the utilities would have no difficulty in paying the tax without affecting their investments, but that was not the point that I was making.
The point that I was seeking to make was that it seemed to me to be an offence against the golden rule that the Chancellor had put forward in terms of his Budget that one should borrow for public purposes only if the money was to be used for investment and then oblige the utilities to borrow to pay the tax. That seemed to me an unfortunate imbalance and, although the Government have said that this is a one-off measure, I have an uneasy feeling that private borrowing will be used on future occasions.
Yvette Cooper:
I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, South (Mr. Clarke) on his admirable maiden speech. This is my speech as a maiden from the Finance Bill, or perhaps a Finance Bill virgin. Friends and family asked, "So how was it for you?" I have to say that it was a strange experience.
I shall give the House some examples. I took Opposition Members extremely seriously when we began proceedings on the Finance Bill. For example, they said that they did not have enough time to discuss the important measures in the Bill which deserved deep scrutiny. I looked at the reports of the Committee's proceedings in Hansard. In my earnestness, I even timed some of the debates. I counted the column inches, subject by subject.
Taking an afternoon at random--not one of those that included some of the more strange and exciting flights of fancy around the world and around the various members of the family of the hon. Member for Daventry (Mr. Boswell); it was slightly more specific--we had a two and a half hour debate, of which Conservative Members spent 40 minutes discussing how little time they had. That was 40 minutes that could have been spent scrutinising all kinds of measures that would have been important to the House. Instead, 40 minutes was spent discussing how little time they had. A further hour was spent on various trips around the globe, flights of fancy and matters adding, shall we say, colour, a full character list, a cast to the debate.
Taking a step back from the intricacies of the Finance Bill, which obviously needed to be scrutinised, we see the overall balance of the Finance Bill. I found two dividing lines between the Government and the Opposition. The first is fairness and the second is consideration for the long term.
On fairness, Opposition Members felt the need to defend tax relief for private medical insurance, something that helps only a tiny minority, rather than using the money to reduce VAT on fuel, something that favours everyone and that we can extend to all. The most important measure of all for fairness was the windfall tax, raising money to help the long-term and the young unemployed into work. Nothing could be more important to fairness and to helping people who are in most need of support, help and fair opportunities in Britain.
Then there was the long term. The Opposition tended to cluck and crow, and kept raising the issue of the long term. They said that the Government did not understand it. I found that the Opposition simply did not understand that the most important long-term issue for Britain and the British people is to get out of the traumatic long-term boom-bust cycle that has plagued the economy for so long, doing huge damage.
We saw that time and again in the debate about pension funds. Opposition Members simply could not understand that what matters for future pensioners is the long-term health of the entire economy; what matters is staying out of another recession, not swinging on the same old rollercoaster--up we go, inflation takes off, down we come again, and crash into a recession with repossessions and huge numbers of people losing their jobs and being forced on to the dole once more.
Opposition Members did not seem to take that seriously, but the Government are determined to do something about it. That is what the Budget is all about: that means the measure to give the Bank of England operational control of interest rates, measures for investment and measures to improve the capacity of the economy and to help the long-term unemployed back to work. All those things can help to improve the long-term sustainable growth rate of the economy.
That also means sorting out the public finances. I heard little about that from Conservative Members, yet sorting out the public finances and the level of borrowing in the economy are incredibly important matters, not only to encourage a balanced recovery, but to get it on a sustainable footing for the future--something that the Conservative Government failed to do.
After the last recession, borrowing rose to 7 per cent. of gross domestic product. That is a shocking level. Even next year, on the Conservative Government's forecast last November, borrowing would have been £12.2 billion, despite the years of economic growth. That is not a sustainable level. The Labour Government pledged to do something about it, and they are doing something through the Bill. The measures for contracting borrowing by £4.1 billion are important, yet we have heard little from Conservative Members about that or about what they would have done. All we heard was, "Why are you having a Budget? It is not needed." Presumably they would have been content with borrowing at unsustainable levels.
Conservative Members took the same attitude on individual measures throughout our debates. For example, they opposed the abolition of tax credits on advance corporation tax, but they did not tell us what they would have done to find that £3.9 billion next year. However, they were content with the cuts in corporation tax of £1.9 billion, but where would they have found that money? They supported the cuts in corporation tax, but not the measures that would raise the money to fill the
gap. Time and again, Conservative Members opposed measures to cut borrowing, yet they said nothing about how they would fill the gap and tackle the problem of unsustainable borrowing.
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