Work and Families Bill

The hon. Gentleman may attack the CD-ROM proposal, but we have regular meetings with small businesses to look at what can be done. We have set up Employee Direct, particularly for small businesses, to see what can be done about the burden of regulation and to try to make sure that we ease it. In the context of direct payments, much has been made of the cost of such payments. In its response, the CBI attacked us, saying that we were trying to hide the figures. That is the not the case—the figures are on the website and have been placed in the Library. HMRC took a great deal of advice from a specially convened advisory group of payroll experts who were representatives of both large and small employers, payroll bureaux and software developers. HMRC’s own analysts also carried out extensive analysis that was published on its website when the 2005 pre-Budget report was published. Having given the House the headline figures, which demonstrate why a direct payment scheme would neither offer good value for money for the taxpayer, nor offer employers the savings that they might have hoped for, I will briefly explain why, even if we opted for a direct payment scheme employers would still be left with administrative responsibilities.