---

Occupational Pensions

The Chancellor is carefully eliding and shuffling a few dates and events, so may I help him with his recollections? When he was shadowing me as Chancellor, neither of us realised that both of us were looking at the same proposition of a reduction on the tax dividend credit on pensions. In the Treasury, I discussed that proposition with my right hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Mr. Dorrell), who was then the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and in the Grosvenor House hotel, he discussed it with the current Economic Secretary to the Treasury and the hon. Member for Coventry, North-West (Mr. Robinson). We rejected the idea because we were satisfied that it would do damage to occupational pension funds. The Chancellor decided that it would not damage them, and he is still using the preposterous argument that it was responsible for the stock market boom that followed, but I seem to recall that the boom had something to do with the dot.com bubble in the United States. Is he still saying that the Grosvenor House mob came to the right conclusion, and that we came to the wrong one?