The hon. Lady will know perfectly well that the Labour Government never forecast poverty rates. She was a Work and Pensions Minister with—if I remember rightly—responsibility for child poverty, and never once forecast poverty rates, but in opposition she suddenly believes that this Government should do so. We will publish the annual figures that show the effects of all our policies and the state of the economy. That is what the public want to see.
Another question that resonates with my hon. Friends in the Liberal Democrats is why are we taking money off poor people and giving it to rich people? That is a summary of what was said. I worked for the IFS for nine years and have the highest regard for it, but, to be clear, when the IFS does its numbers, it does not count almost all the taxes on the rich we have introduced—it cannot, because it uses household surveys, to which the rich do not, on the whole, reply at all, partly because they are too busy salting their money away in Swiss bank accounts. [Interruption.] Not any more they won’t —we have tackled Swiss bank accounts to the tune of several billion pounds. We have increased the main rate of capital gains tax to 28%, which is a substantial increase.
The Labour party focuses on the wages of millionaires as if millionaires are those who earn a £1 million wage. However, millionaires on the whole are folk who have capital gains and properties. They pay stamp duty. They try to avoid paying tax, but we have been cracking down on that, and there is a further clampdown on pension tax relief. The vast majority of those gains for the Government are not counted in the IFS figures. The overall impact is that we are taking far more from the rich than Labour ever would have done. I can therefore assure my right hon. and hon. Friends that this is not a question of taking money from the poor when we could take it from the rich. Even the Budget that reduced the
higher rate of tax from 50% to 45% raised many times more in other measures. As we have heard during the course of the debate, the 45p rate, which Opposition Members tell us they find morally repugnant, is 5% more than the Labour Government levied in 13 years.
Amendment 12 would create a vacuum instead of a policy. It would give us no credibility in the financial markets and drive up interest rates when we want to keep them low. Amendment 7 would reinstate the RPI, which even the official statistician says is not up to international standards, and cost £2.5 billion a year compared with the Government’s plans. I have no doubt that amendment 10, in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives, is well-intended, but unfortunately it would tie the Government in to an above-inflation increase in 2015-16. The Liberal Democrats would not choose that as a priority, but I can assure him that the Bill, on top of the decisions the Government have made to prioritise the poor, will mean that benefits will rise in line with earnings over the period since the financial crisis. My hon. Friend wants that through his amendment, and that is what we will deliver through the Bill.
I therefore urge the Committee to reject the amendments and support the Bill.