Capital Gains Tax (Rates)

I will not give way because time is very limited. One thing that makes me most angry is the idea that we should spend the money and expect our children and grandchildren to bail us out. That is totally unacceptable. I said that the success of the Budget is not assured, but I welcome the many initiatives that the Chancellor outlined in his speech, including the reduction in corporation tax, particularly for small businesses. The Federation of Small Businesses announced that they will help more than 850,000 small and medium-sized concerns. Along with the FSB and the Forum of Private Business, I welcome the extension of the enterprise guarantee scheme, which will likewise help those small businesses. The FSB reckoned that a 1% increase in national insurance contributions would have brought about the loss of 57,000 jobs. So the previous Government's record continues. The issue is not only what they did, but what they said they would do. We need to take that into account. I am delighted that the Chancellor listened to our concerns about raising capital gains tax and that he has increased the threshold to £5 million from £2 million to further encourage entrepreneurs. All of that, welcome though it is, might not be enough to ensure that business has the available financial resources to produce the growth that we need. I am especially worried about that because some 94% of the people who work in the private sector in Northamptonshire work in small or medium-sized enterprises. I fear that they will not have access to the credit from the banks that they require to continue their businesses. Some 70% of the nation's creativity comes from that sector, and SMEs added 2 million jobs to the employment list at a time when UK plc was shedding 1.5 million jobs. Without that sector, we would not have had the jobs growth that we had in the five or six years before the beginning of the recession. We face some serious issues in ensuring that the SME sector receives the credit it needs to provide the growth that my right hon. Friends the Chancellor and the Chief Secretary require. The G20 agreement to force the Government to make sure that the banks to hold on to even larger amounts of capital flies in the face of our work in that respect, so I ask the Chief Secretary to look at ways of ensuring that the sector receives the money it requires. I want him to look at the levy on the banks to see whether he can allow some of that money to be spent on providing credit for the small business sector and I also want him to promise that he will look at ways of alleviating the £130 billion figure placed on us—seemingly by agreement—by the G20. I welcome the Budget, but I need my Government to recognise the need for SMEs to get the money they need to continue to grow to provide the jobs that we require.