Finance (No. 3) Bill

The hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) is getting a little tired and tetchy—the hour is late—but one should avoid using crude headline statistics. As another Yorkshire MP, I can tell him that when Labour was in power, my city—the city of York—saw the number of people in employment go up from 40,000 to 57,000. One reason why we had that increase in growth was the reductions in business taxation, so this is an important measure and the Committee needs to treat it seriously, rather than just dismissing it with crude and misleading statistics.