I am grateful to my hon. Friend for mentioning the position of low-paid workers. People on the minimum wage were mentioned in the debate, and we will have halved the tax bill of someone on the minimum wage. That is a real contribution to their standard of living.
I say to my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives that we cannot find the savings that we need by excluding the social security budget from them. The two biggest things that the Government spend money on are public sector pay, which has already been the subject of a separate measure, and social security benefits. The two together account for a vast swathe of public spending. When we need savings, we cannot ring-fence social security. What we can do, however, is try to do things gradually.
I want to explain why some of the figures for people’s losses that have been quoted are far greater than is truly the case. My hon. Friend mentioned someone who is in and out of work, and the typical time on jobseeker’s allowance is three months. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) asked me to give some examples of cash figures. We are talking about an uprating of perhaps 80p a week or so below inflation in one year, so maybe £2.50 a week below inflation over a three-year period. For a typical person who is out of work for three months, which is the median spell on JSA, the difference will therefore be a tenner a month, or £30 to £40 over that three-month period. That £40 is a lot of money to someone who is unemployed, but the typical experience is that someone has three months of unemployment and then finds a job. We are about to cut people’s income tax bills by £600 a year, so that person might have, say, £3 a week less while unemployed, but the typical experience is for them to be unemployed for a relatively short period and then get a job, so they will benefit from all our other measures.