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Occupational Pensions

The hon. Gentleman is agreeing. Well, it is his own book: it is a good source. The Government had to find some tax that they had not told anybody about in order to fill the shortfall. They may also have suspected that there was a kind of structural deficit and they had to do something about it. He refers to that as well, I think. But the key thing was that the Government believed that they had to raise some money without raising any personal taxation. It had to be corporate taxation and this move was the easiest way because it would raise an astonishing £5 billion per annum—and nobody would understand it apart from a few anoraks in the House and a few people in the pensions and accountancy industry. It was the original, and most profitable, stealth tax. That is how it all emerged. A sadness is that the Government turned out not to need the money. It was the beginning of some extremely bad forecasting that they made in subsequent years. They were not able to anticipate where the dotcom bubble in America was going to take us. Nobody did; I did not when I made my remarks about recession. They began to run massive unsolicited and unexpected surpluses. It was years before they needed the money. Sadly, nowadays they are still spending about £6 billion a year and no one can find an easy way of getting out of this continued drain on pension funds. They did what they did to raise the money and because it was stealth tax. It did terrible damage to the pensions industry, pensioners and the legitimate expectations of many of our constituents. I listened to the Chancellor defending himself and saying what a great decision it was and how he would make it again. He allowed fancy to run away with him. He was plucking things from the air to a quite extraordinary degree. The idea that I had used the argument that we were going to go into recession against him was nonsense. That came when the Governor of the Bank of England was raising interest rates and the Chancellor was raising taxation at precisely the same time, when we were already slowing down the economy. My right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude) and I were unlucky: all that happened was that the economy went flat. There were two successive quarters of stagnation. We never went into recession. But that was later. Corporation tax was used in mitigation. In my last Budget, I reduced the small companies rate of corporation tax—quite the reverse of what has just been done by the Chancellor. My recollection is that the Government did not cut corporation tax until 1998—and they did not actually cut it. They took the headline rate down by 2 per cent., but they altered the method of payment to quarterly on advance estimates so that the cash flow into the Treasury was increased by what they did to corporation tax. It is bizarre to use that excuse. Until very recently, the Labour Government had been raising corporate taxation incessantly during all the time in which they had been in office. The Chancellor then went into even wilder fancies by saying that corporate profits had risen as a result of the decision. I cannot for the life of me understand how corporate profits rose. As has been pointed out, the inescapable fact is that the decision, on international financial reporting standards calculations, has cost at least £100 billion over the years. The cost is now running at £6 billion a year. Compared with the previous arrangements, 20 per cent. of the dividend income of pension funds is being sacrificed to the Treasury. Whereas nine out of 10 members of occupational pension schemes were in defined benefit schemes when we left office, only one in 10 is now in a defined benefit scheme. It is estimated that deficits in the pension industry are running at about £100 billion, which is exactly the figure that has been extracted so far by the tax. The reaction to this is relevant. The way in which the Chancellor gets carried away by using different time scales to make his points, clutching at figures from the past and making wild assertions about what has happened casts serious doubts on his judgment and where we were going. Yesterday, the Secretary of State for Defence came to the House in almost as big a pickle. He had made a quite appalling error of judgment, but he admitted that he had made a mistake and actually apologised for it. Had he not admitted that he had made a mistake, he would have been roasted alive on the Floor of the House, so he made a sound political judgment. I am afraid that the Chancellor’s instincts are totally different. The very fact that he is criticised makes him defend his decision more vigorously by using wild arguments to justify it. He seems oblivious to the fact that although the decision was not the only cause of the problem—there was also longevity, the fall in stock market values and the mad regulation and valuation—he has done great damage to the pensions industry and his judgment was seriously—