Capital Gains Tax (Rates)

No, I will not. As we have heard time and again this evening, housing benefit cuts will throw people out of their homes. It is apparently assumed that those people can move from one end of the country to another to find employment, but slashing public sector spending by 25% in every Department will surely result in further job losses. Here we are, throwing people on to unemployment benefit while at the same time cutting the welfare state that is designed to assist them. That will have an impact on areas such as mine, in which there are high levels of public sector employment. Why does my area have a high level of public sector employment? Because a certain previous Government removed its one major industry, the coal industry, many years ago. We have struggled to find incoming investment and employment to compensate for those job losses, and, as has been mentioned, when the coal industry was being closed down the Government of the time encouraged workers to go on to incapacity benefit rather than unemployment benefit because that reduced the unemployment figures. We therefore have a legacy of higher numbers of claimants of incapacity benefits such as disability living allowance. As for the idea that we will bring in a medical test for DLA, the conditions for DLA are based on care needs. They are based not on the medical condition of the person claiming, but on whether they require care throughout the day or night. The introduction of a medical would therefore remove a lot of people from that benefit, probably unjustly. Why have the Government decided to cut at the ratio of 80:20? Why does the cut suddenly need to be so great? The hon. Member for Peterborough made the point that this is a Conservative Budget. The Conservatives have, with the co-operation of the Liberal Democrats, taken the opportunity to attack the public sector and the welfare state, just as they have done in the past. This is simple opportunism to cut the welfare state and the public sector work force.