I will always follow the hon. Member for Walthamstow, so I shall pay great attention to what she has tweeted after the debate.
I have a lot of sympathy with any measures proposed to help support the growth of the credit union sector. A lot of things in the IPPR report are welcome and positive, such as the idea of having credit unions in post offices, Church of England facilities and so on, but with respect to all concerned I would say that those are hardly first-time-out occurrences of the proposals. A back-stop reclaim facility, through the benefit system, could also have some benefits.
However, the idea—this is the main point—that some huge one-off capitalisation of credit unions would help to facilitate their growth, is not right. Under the previous Government, we had the growth fund, and I am not here to diss that. It was a well-intentioned initiative and will have done a lot of good. Such things are also eroded over time, however, and by definition if one has a big one-off capitalisation one ends up having to address a slightly more costly part of the market, which contributes to that erosion. What we need to do to help support and facilitate the growth of credit unions is what this Government are doing. We are trying to get them on to a sustainable footing with modernised systems, working collaboratively together to get the marketing and branding right so that the sector does not need a subsidy for ever but reaches a scale at which it can address more and more consumers, meaning that fewer and fewer consumers need or want to access the types of lenders we have been discussing today.