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Finance (No. 2) Bill

I am sorry. I thought that the right hon. Lady was reading something. I am genuinely grateful to the Paymaster General for the way in which she responded to the concern about the impact of the Office of Fair Trading’s involvement in the initiative. She was magnificent. She now looks slightly puzzled. Each and every scheme approved under the initiative had to go to the OFT because it technically breached the terms of the Consumer Credit Act 1974. There was huge backlog of cases, and if the scheme had been abolished overnight—as was originally intended—many thousands of computers that had been earmarked for consumers would have been lost. Now, Evesham Technology will have four more months’ turnover at £1.5 million a month, so the Paymaster General’s action—for which I had to fight hard with her and the OFT—was really appreciated. She has enabled companies such as Evesham Technology to plan for the future, instead of being dumped in it very suddenly. I am genuinely grateful to her for that. However, a very worrying evil has been done. There is no doubt that those involved in the IT sector—often big multinational companies, not just small ones—have been shocked by the precipitate way in which this Government strategy has suddenly been torn up. I can tell the Paymaster General with absolute certainty that this will reduce industry support for working with the Government on such schemes. The industry will not be prepared to commit management resources and expense to such projects if the Government are suddenly to decide to throw them out. Sadly, I am not allowed to name the company involved in the scheme, but I can tell the Paymaster General that one multinational IT company that had earmarked a multi-million pound investment for an education IT partnership in this country has now decided to abandon it and to move to another of our European Union competitors. I shall call it a competitor for the purposes of this argument. So the abolition of the scheme has already had the effect of shifting the support of major multinational players away from this country. The manner in which the Government have abolished the scheme is having a serious impact. I am particularly sad that no replacement schemes have been identified or funded, and I am really worried that we will lose the infrastructure to deliver any future schemes that the Government might introduce.