Finance Bill

The hon. Gentleman is quite wrong. The Leader of the Opposition made a careful and sensible speech for someone who had not had a chance to read the Budget. Everybody else who spoke in the debate had had a chance to read bits of it, and as we well know it is necessary to read the Budget as well as to hear it in order to understand what is going on. For understandable reasons, the then Chancellor was much prouder of the tax reductions than he was of the tax increases, and that needed to be filleted out from the documentation. I am just explaining what happened at the time. The Government have had a long time to consider the sensible criticisms that were made at the time of the Budget and subsequently. By now, Ministers must have done an awful lot of homework and figure-work on this problem; they must have been worrying away for weeks, if not months, on the 1.1 million. Therefore, I urge the Financial Secretary to share a bit more of her thinking with us in order to allay the fears among her own Back Benches and to deal with the sensible criticisms voiced by the Opposition. Above all, she needs to say to the 1.1 million people not just that the Government wish to be on their side, but that they will take a practical measure to try to assuage some of their grief.