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Tax Credit Overpayments

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Michael Jabez Foster) on securing this debate and on the customarily clear and cogent way in which he put his case. He was generous in his praise for tax credits, and I think that he is right to point out how many people benefit from them: more than 11,000 families and nearly 19,000 children in his constituency, as of April. They have done a very effective job in helping people into work and to move up the employment ladder. I heard his case for a more backward-looking system, which would indeed simplify the computation of allowable tax credits. The problem with that is that the system would become much less flexible. At the moment, one of the strengths of the system is that if, for example, someone suffers a fall in income during a financial year, the system can respond quite quickly. If it just looked at the previous year's income, that would not be possible. However, I understand his case.