---

Tax Credits

My Lords, I apologise for intervening again on the noble Lord’s contribution, which is extremely interesting. The IFS report goes into detailed analysis of household types in chapters 5 and 6 in particular, tracks them longitudinally over time and sets against that an array of different possible interventions available to Government—large family premium, CTC, working family tax credit and so on. The Institute for Fiscal Studies recognises, first, that incentives to go into and to stay in work are stronger in 2005 than in 1979 and that, secondly, notwithstanding all the other possible remedies—though some may be more effective than others—there is very little scope. Does the noble Lord agree that because of the trade-offs built into any system linking social and economic policy, government interventions would make differences at the margins that might be worth having, but that that does not mean—the IFS never says this—that tax credits as a policy should be abandoned as a result?