Finance (No. 3) Bill

I wonder whether Hansard is able to record irony in my hon. Friend's comments. Sometimes I wonder whether we need a new annotation in our proceedings, because I do not honestly think that he is showing sympathy. I think he is suggesting that even when there is an apparent reduction in bonuses, the sums of money involved are the sort for which our constituents would buy a lottery ticket in the hope of winning. If they won that amount it would change their lives tremendously, yet those life-changing sums of money are not even salaries but bonuses on top of salaries. I wish to talk about the rate at which the Government have chosen to set the bank levy, because it is a low rate by international standards. It is less than a third of the level that has been set in France, for example. Ministers will know that the rate varies in a number of jurisdictions, but I think that it is 0.25% in France. The levels involved are still quite small, but in Hungary it is 0.53%, in the USA it is 0.15%—although, as I said, it has not been enacted at this point—in Portugal it is 0.1%, and so on. It is to be only 0.078% here in the UK for short-term liabilities, and 0.039% for long-term liabilities, which is very small by international standards.