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Finance Bill

Last night, I received an e-mail from one of my constituents, who said:"““I am one of the unfortunate people who will be hit by the abolition of the 10 per cent. tax band. I am a single man of 30 years, on a salary of only £13,000 a year working full time as a teaching assistant. I cannot afford to have a home of my own and am still living with my parents. If the Labour Government say they will support or help those hit by this ridiculous fiasco you bet that I will not be one of them as a single man…Please make my comments known in Parliament.””" I am delighted to have the chance to do that, because my constituent is representative of a number of people in my constituency who have been in contact with me, and of others across the country. It is extraordinary that in his final Budget as Chancellor, the Prime Minister, having cast around for people to raid for revenue, should have alighted on the least well-off who are employed. He has always said, and asked us to believe, that work is the best way out of poverty. What kind of message does it send when those who are targeted are precisely those who are in work but who are earning the least possible amount? Is that a wholesale reversal of his mantra over the years? There is an almost grotesque irony in the fact that the group hit hardest by the increase in tax are people on the Government's official poverty line. The amount at which a single person will be hit is £149 a week; £145 a week is the official poverty line for a single man. The Government have targeted those on the poverty line to raise revenue. Of course we can argue about whom we can best help when distributing the Treasury's occasional largesse, but for people in the Treasury to have a discussion about which people should be tackled and hit hardest, and come up with the answer that it is low paid people on the poverty line, is so extraordinary that it beggars belief. On how the issue can be resolved, of course the review that has been mentioned will no doubt involve discussion of tax credits and the question of how we can put more money into child tax credits. However, as my constituent made clear in his e-mail, there are people across the country in deep poverty who do not have children. Their poverty should be our concern, just as other people's poverty is. Child poverty is to be tackled, but adult poverty is booming. Severe poverty—people on incomes of less than 40 per cent. of the median across the economy—has hit a 30-year record under this Government, and is increasing all the time. Surely our aim should be to rescue them from poverty, as well as to tackle child poverty. We should not get into a situation in which we can take adults out of poverty only by making them dependent on their children. That is not right, and it is not a sustainable way forward.