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Finance Bill

Our employment levels speak for themselves. When we take into account federal tax, state tax and county tax, we almost move into the realms of the Liberal Democrats’ proposal for a local income tax. The point that has been made about skills and research and development shows the contradiction between what appears in the Bill and in the reasoned amendment. We need to ensure that my constituents and those in the wider UK have the skills needed to ensure that a manufactured product or service can compete in the global market. Given our labour costs, it is impossible to compete on price with some of the growing economies and, indeed, some of the extremely well developed economies around the world. We need to compete on skills. For example, firms in India are doing tax return work extremely well. Information is sent to the firms, it is processed in India and completed tax returns are brought back to the UK ready to be signed off by clients. If a country is able to do such work at a cheaper rate, the only way we can compete is to ensure that the level of knowledge in the UK is much greater. We need to make sure—the Bill and previous Finance Acts have endeavoured to do this—that young people and all workers across the UK are able to acquire the skills they need.