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Finance Bill

The Minister is wrong to provoke me on this issue, because, in citing those figures, he does not tell the House that this Government have been masters of off-balance-sheet financing. They have allowed the most colossal pension fund liabilities to build up and have not put them on to the Government balance sheet. The Government and their friends around the world have legislated to make every company put its pension deficit on to its balance sheet, on the ground that in due course that deficit will have to be paid for—partly out of company contributions and partly, we hope, out of asset gains—so it is necessary in order to understand the trading position of every company in the country. However, the Government do not do that for their own balance sheet. They produce a balance sheet with just the Government debt on it, very narrowly defined, and do what the Minister just did by saying, ““Aren’t we wonderful? The debt burden seems to be quite low by international standards.? However, the debt burden would be a minor part of the problem if they had to account in the same way as plcs. The Government would have to put £700 billion on to the balance sheet for the accumulated pension deficit in the public sector.