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Finance Bill

No, I do not think so. Those who benefited were those who took out assurance policies such as life assurance. I pressed the hon. Member for Fareham to agree with me a number of times about that and eventually, on my fourth attempt, he did. Unless the Conservative party is willing to put up the £500 million to pay for an alternative proposal, I think that the hon. Gentleman and I are agreed that tax advantaging life assurance products through pension tax relief is not the way forward. If so, we were right to sort out the problem at the earliest opportunity. We did so, despite the fact that in the period before we took our decision, we were not pressured by Opposition Members or anyone else to do so. As I said, we put transitional arrangements in place, which were widely communicated to the industry and, I think, welcomed by it as a way of sorting out the difficult pipeline cases. Indeed, we were praised by the ABI for so doing.