Finance Bill

I can say little more than my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) or my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey). I rise with considerable sadness and with a quizzical outlook. I want to hear some answers from Treasury Ministers to some fairly obvious questions. Two and a half years ago, the 2p reduction was made to the basic rate, and the 10p rate was removed as a means of funding that. I do not understand why it is so difficult to track down the real losers. If there are 1.3 million losers, I would have thought that the finest minds in the Treasury working night and day would have been able to identify who they were and what the impact on them has been. What numbers have been crunched and what decisions have been made to try to do what the Government set out to do when they realised their mistake? Why did they not go further on earlier occasions to deal with a running sore, something from which we cannot hide? We have made some of the poorest people poorer. That is unacceptable, but it is something that we can rectify even at this late stage. I intervened on the hon. Member for Fareham (Mr. Hoban) to say that if only we had spent more hours dealing with tax avoidance and fewer hours making the poorest poorer, some Labour Members would feel that our time here had been well spent. Even at this late stage Ministers must realise that they must do something. They face the possibility of a large rebellion tonight; that has been coming for the last two and a half years. There have been various skirmishes but tonight it is for real. It is a question of poverty and of trying to make the case for those who have been made worse off by a change that was not thought through. At the time some of us thought that it was a pure gimmick. There was a debate to be had about whether the 10p rate was the most appropriate way to try to help the very poorest in our society. Part of the problem that I have is that we do not know who these 1.3 million people are. They are not a group; they are individuals—I will not go into the question of there being no such thing as society. However, this is not one homogenous group. There is a need for measures to deal with these different people even at this late stage. I am looking for Ministers to come clean on this. What measures have they explored to try to help those who have been hit? Those people have written to all of us, which makes it so much more difficult. We cannot say it is those who are 16 to 18, or 18 to 21, or single pensioners—women largely—aged from 60 to 65. Many of those are in that group but they are not the totality. There are others. My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Lynne Jones) mentioned couples with no children who are in this group and feel particularly hard done by because they have struggled to stay in work and to earn a decent living. They saw the 10p rate as a good way of rewarding them.