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Finance Bill

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I will not reiterate the point, as the Minister has heard it. It is all part of the argument that we are putting forward about the failings of both the Budget and the Finance Bill. The Bill does nothing to help savers and pensioners. Savers are still suffering from a 0 per cent. interest rate. There were some thoughts that savers might get some sort of help in the Budget or Finance Bill, but there is no sign of that. In a borough such as Bromley, which has the highest proportion of retired people in London, those people are hurting because they are not able to rely on any income from their savings. Pensioners also are not helped by the Budget or the Finance Bill because they are affected by the reduction in the funds available to them, and because so many of them have to buy annuities when interest rates are so low. There is also the problem, which has been so eloquently described, of the impact of the reduced contributions that people earning more than £100,000 will be able to put into pension funds. Those contributions enhance a pension fund almost disproportionately, and it is counterproductive to a stable society for pensions to be less good than they should be. Nobody, as far as I am aware, has referred to this: the ghost of Barbara Castle must be walking with her head in her hands through these halls, horrified at the damage that has been done to her occupational pension schemes. We have heard many contributions on the impact of the 50 per cent. top rate of tax. We talk about the disincentive effect on those who are genuine wealth creators, and I totally agree on that point. What we have failed to recognise, if I may gently point it out, is that that also impacts on head teachers and doctors—the sort of people on whom we rely for our public services. They have no option of moving money offshore. They will be disincentivised from trying to deliver better education and better health. I have been struck by the number of my constituents who contacted me about the impact of the fuel duty on their lives. They live in suburban London. I am the MP with the most railway stations in my constituency of any in the country. By most calculations, we should have good public transport. However, I do not fall into the category of those who believe that we have good public transport. Cars are as necessary in suburban Bromley and suburban Beckenham as they are in rural areas. We have an estate agent who depends for her income on commission. That commission will be eaten into in very hard times by the increase in petrol tax. No thought has been given to the impact that the tax will have on people who depend on their Motability cars, on the very tight income on which most people who are disabled have to live, or on pensioners, who are already on very tight budgets. That increased petrol tax, and the promises of more to come, will have a seriously adverse effect and help to isolate people who need to get out and make contact with others. Although the scrappage scheme is not included in the Finance Bill, it was announced in the Budget, and I have serious worries that its impact and interaction—