My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I was coming on to exactly that point. This is a question about living standards: what is happening to the poorest in our society and where the burden should ultimately rest for sorting out the nation’s finances after the global financial crisis.
At the Budget last week, the Chancellor would have had us believe that people are on average £900 better off as well as more secure as the result of his policies. I have to hand it to him—he has been highly innovative in using a new measure of living standards to try to back up his claim, but it includes income to universities and charities. I do not blame him for trying, but he knows the truth, as do Members and the public, which is that people say time and again that they are worse off. A poll of 5,000 consumers’ responses to the Budget showed that three quarters of people have seen no improvement in their living standards. A Populus poll before Christmas found that only one in seven adults said they were feeling the benefit of recent economic growth.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) has said, wages after inflation are down by £1,600, and the combined impact of tax and benefit changes has left families on average £1,127 a year worse off. That was the context in which it was decided to reduce the additional rate of tax to 45p, giving millionaires a tax cut worth an average of £100,000, which is a huge sum of money by any standards. As I have just said, wages are down by £1,600 a year, tax and benefit changes have left people £1,127 worse off, and, as we heard in the previous debate, higher VAT has left people £1,800 worse off over four years. For people at the bottom end of the income spectrum, such sums are the difference between being able to put food on the table and to put clothes on their children’s back or not, while the choices for those at the other end of the income spectrum, who are benefiting from a tax cut to the tune of £100,000, are probably about the poshness of the car on the forecourt of their home, not the basic necessities of life and of survival. That is the important point for struggling families across our country.