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Occupational Pensions

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman to doing so for me. I entirely take the point. Markets go up; markets go down; markets go back up again. When they go down, it is like the tide going out—it reveals who was swimming without wearing any swimming trunks. When the market went down, it revealed the shortfalls in the provision that the Chancellor had made available and the problems that he had created. The system was growing before this Chancellor came into office, but now pension funds are closing. The majority of them are closed to new members, and two thirds of final salary systems have closed on his watch. Lord Turner has forecast the virtual euthanasia of final pension occupational schemes. The crown jewel of the occupational pension system has been successively plundered and sold off to the fences. The Chancellor inherited a system that was fairly taxed and well incentivised. The system was fairly taxed in the sense that it was designed so that people did not pay twice. Having paid taxes on their incomes and made savings—the companies in which they invest pay tax—people did not pay a further round of tax, which is what the complex system of advance corporation tax credits was all about. The tax credit reflected the value of the tax—when taxes went down, the tax credits went down. The bulk of the reductions reflected that, rather than being a cut in the credits without any corresponding cut in the tax for the most part.