Finance Bill

I support new clause 1, which bears my name. If my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) presses his motion to a vote, I will support it, because I believe that this is our last opportunity to say clearly to the Government that what they did initially was wrong. We then thought that they had accepted that it was wrong, because they made some changes which we welcomed. However, 1.3 million people—according to figures from the Library and the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which I believe to be correct—are still waiting for help. If the new clause is not accepted tonight, there is no chance that anything will be done to help them before either the next Budget or the next general election. Given that we have a Treasury team and many civil servants and highly paid officials and consultants working on Treasury matters, it is sad that during the period between the previous changes and the current Budget, they could not come up with a solution to compensate 1.3 million people for their loss. Admittedly that number is very small as a proportion of the overall population, but it nevertheless represents some—although not all, as my right hon. Friend said—of the poorest paid people in the country. We would have loved to table an amendment or new clause tonight that did come up with a solution, but the nature of debates such as this makes that impossible. Notices have been delivered, and the Government Whips have told us how terrible it would be if the new clause happened to be passed. I find that strange. We have been told that the new clause is dangerous: that it would restrict the Government from collecting any income tax for 2009-10, with an estimated cost of £140 billion. We have been told that the services on which the public depend will be put at risk. Do we really believe that if this measure were passed, the Government could not go off and do what they did when the banks were collapsing? The Chancellor was up all night—all weekend—sorting things out and finding a solution. Are we really saying that that could not be done if this measure were passed this evening?