Treasury and Work and Pensions

The hon. Gentleman is quite right. That is one of the first things that we have run into in developing our policy over the years. However, two layman judgments have always weighed on my mind when considering the problem. First, for God’s sake, nothing could be worse than what we have at the moment, as we all know from our constituency surgery experience. Secondly, with computerisation and integration available, although there are problems, surely it cannot be beyond the wit of civil servants and Ministers to find a way to reconcile such things, so that payments can be worked out properly later. Perhaps that is a triumph of hope over experience—perhaps I am the eternal optimist in such things—but we can do an awful lot better than we have been doing over the past few years. I want to make a further point about the argument that the Chancellor was addressing in his remarks on the purpose and the ends of fair taxation and expenditure. I do not think that in our political debate we should be embarrassed into shying away from the principle, as I see it, that a tax system should be progressive and that we should not resile from redistribution as a genuine and authentic aim of such a tax system—provided, of course, that we are in favour of a society in which those who are able to be entrepreneurial, to take risks and to generate considerable wealth are not held back and the state does not forget through the tax system those who do not find themselves in that position. My final point relates simply to pensions, which have been referred to during the debate, and wider environmental and energy matters, about which the Chancellor spoke. There is no doubt in my mind that we must contrast the way in which the Government have gone about pension reform—by setting up something under Adair Turner that carried conviction and credibility and that helped to begin to sow the seeds of all-party consensus that probably even a couple of years ago would have seemed like a mission impossible—with the way in which our future energy needs, particularly the civil nuclear role, has been handled, with no proper independent evaluation and no sense of confidence in how the issue is to be taken forward. In fact, in a rather unexpected speech to the CBI annual conference dinner, the Prime Minister more or less said that he had made up his mind and that that was essentially it. I do not know how, within one Government, there can be such a good example of a complex policy that goes beyond party politics being carried forward sensibly, while an issue that also fits all those difficulties is bounced in a way that ends up satisfying no one. That is why, with the likely transition at the top of the Government when this pause in normal political proceedings ends, I hope that we shall revisit some of the big issues and opportunities that, with the underpinning of a fairly benign economy—under this Government or a successor Government—we can do so much more about in achieving the socially just society to which we all aspire.