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Finance (No. 2) Bill

I thank my hon. Friend for that contribution. The Paymaster General’s case can best be described as citing a number of instances of abuse. She referred to a few websites and that was about the extent of it. In the course of my remarks, we can test exactly how much abuse there has been, and then the House can take a decision before we enter the Lobbies. Let no one argue that the home computing initiative does not benefit people on modest incomes. The Trades Union Congress, companies such as Intel and others have clearly demonstrated that it does. As for the take-up of the scheme, it has taken off in the past year or so and has proved particularly popular in the national health service, with more than 100 trusts and hospitals across the country promoting the scheme to their work forces, including King’s College hospital, the Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire strategic health authority, the West Midlands ambulance service and even the Sedgefield primary care trust—I hope that that is not the reason why the Chancellor wants to get rid of it. A number of charities have adopted the scheme, including St. John Ambulance, the Institute of Cancer Research, the Royal London Society for the Blind and the Motivation charitable trust, which works with people with a mobility disability and is based in Bristol, not far from the constituency of the Paymaster General. The scheme has been adopted by a number of private sector organisations, including the British Chambers of Commerce, the Great North Eastern Railway and Yorkshire Water. In total, according to the HCI Alliance, more than 1,000 public and private sector organisations have adopted the HCI scheme to date, often with local trade union support, to help to improve their employees’ IT skills. All of that will be put at risk if we do not delete clause 61.