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Finance (No. 2) Bill

I thank the hon. Gentleman for conceding that we have tried to be constructive about the matter. I welcome the fact that as a former Minister in the Department of Trade and Industry, he has put that on the record. Those canny Swedes thought of that possibility, too. They realised that as technology moved on, particularly in such areas, the list would need to be reviewed regularly to make sure that the definitions remained current. It should be perfectly possible for us to do that too. We come up with an inclusive list and an exclusive list and we review them periodically—say, once a year—to make sure that the definitions remain current. That seems, to coin a phrase, not to be beyond the wit of man, or indeed woman. To summarise, the HCI scheme has been important in spreading computer literacy among our population, including the lower paid, in order to help our country compete in the 21st century. As such, the scheme should be retained and not effectively wound up, as the Government propose. It should be possible to devise a revised version of the home computer initiative that allows the scheme to survive for its intended purpose, while introducing safeguards to combat the alleged fraud. If the Scandinavians are able to do that, I see no reason why we could not do it as well. The situation is a good example of the old maxim, ““Where there’s a will, there’s a way””. The key question is whether there is a will on the part of the Government to save the scheme, or whether the Chancellor is so desperate for the £300 million in revenue which the Treasury’s Red Book estimates would be raised by scrapping the HCI scheme from 2006–07 to 2008–09. Will avarice take over, and will the scheme be cancelled regardless of its obvious merits? Option 2 in the Treasury’s regulatory impact assessment would allow the scheme to survive on a honed-down basis. If we do not hear a convincing argument from the Government tonight—I do not find the digital inclusion team convincing—we shall simply assume that the money that the Chancellor is hoping to recoup has taken precedence over all other considerations and that a financially desperate Chancellor, who loves to talk about the technological revolution and the need to promote a high skills economy, has simply taken the cash. That decision is doubly detrimental, because it will damage our ability to compete in high skills industry with the likes of China and India in the 21st century. I urge Ministers to draw back from that course while there is still time and to work co-operatively with other parties, industry and scheme users to save that very important scheme. I shall listen to the Paymaster General’s reply with genuine interest in the hope that, on behalf of the 500,000 scheme users and the 2,000 employees who will be directly affected, common sense may yet prevail and that that particularly bad decision by an analogue Chancellor may yet be reversed.