Capital Gains Tax (Rates)

Nobody doubts the hon. Gentleman's commitment to relieving poverty, but does he think that the system that we have at the moment is perfect? Of course it is not. We are trying to create a fairer system in which there are real opportunities to create a society where people are given incentives to climb out of unemployment, despair and poverty. That is what this Budget is trying to do. It is right to speak for the poor, but it is also right to speak for the many people who earn and who are creating jobs. Rightly, this will affect everybody earning more than £50,000—by the way, everybody in this Chamber will be £1,500 a year worse off—so it is not simply the case that only the poor are paying for this. Everybody, all the way up the income tax scale, is having to pay for our difficulties and helping us to climb out of this mess. Everybody in this nation is having to pay, and that is absolutely right. I also like the fact that this Budget is starting to create the conditions in which we can have a fairer tax system in which there is less churning of money and less of a deep unemployment and poverty trap. By all means let us raise personal allowances, and let us then try to move towards a flatter and fairer rate of taxation. I will finish shortly, as each of us has very little time. First, let me make a point about much of the work that I was trying to do in the last Parliament to try to get efficiency in Government. We still have not got there. Does anybody think that we would have got into this mess if we had had a better Budget system? We need a triple lock. The Budget process that we have in this House is still not transparent enough. In the last Parliament, I tried to persuade the Liaison Committee that we should have a powerful Budget committee—a committee of this House—to which a Government Department should go when proposing to increase legislation. We should look at that and debate it in an open forum, not just have one minute per amendment, which is what we get with the Finance Bill. Does anybody think that our Budget process is, for example, as good or as powerful as the congressional one, whereby the President proposes and Congress disposes, and there are hundreds of hours of meetings? We already have a good audit process—one of the best in the world—in the shape of the Public Accounts Committee, but we do not have the equivalent of the PAC inside Government. Frankly, the Treasury has not been strong enough in resisting waste, inefficiency and incompetence in Government spending. The Treasury has been overwhelmed, and the process is largely paper-based. We need a kind of star chamber—a PAC—so that when my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, or any other Minister, comes up with a proposal, they have to go before it, in private, to justify that proposal and to be hounded by senior Members saying, "Is this spending efficient? Is it properly piloted? Above all, are we reducing complexity in Government?" Some of us think that complexity is so inherent in Government, with the civil service having this relentless itch always to try to control and regulate, that there is no way out of this, but I do not believe that. I believe that we can create a social security system which, although simpler, is fairer and provides more incentives. I believe that we can strip away whole areas of complexity. It will be a mighty task, but I believe, given all my right hon. Friend's experience and all the work he has done, that nobody is better placed to carry out that work over the next five years.