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Finance Bill

Thank you, Mrs. Heal, for that very helpful guidance. The point that I was trying to make—I certainly do not wish to make it at excessive length—was that amendment 8 asks the Government to consider the impact of the VAT reduction on""UK economic growth…the competitiveness of small and medium-sized businesses, and…the disposable income of low-income households"." My contention is that the benefits in those three areas and more widely would have been greater had the Government gone down the path of spending the money on a range of programmes. I shall not list those programmes, but they would have been designed to encourage our country towards greater environmental sustainability. We argued, and continue to argue even though the amount of money that we are arguing about gets smaller every day, that the money could have been spent on, for example, home insulation programmes, buying new rolling stock for trains or electrifying some train lines. That would have provided an opportunity for greater employment. It would have been a stimulus, but once we reached the end of the package, as the Government now envisage doing with the VAT reduction at the end of this calendar year, we would have had a lot of insulated houses, electrified train lines and new rolling stock. Instead, I am afraid that we are going to spend £12 billion or £13 billion and have precisely nothing to show for it except, arguably, some small, incremental, hard-to-measure benefits to some organisations. I fear that the review envisaged in amendment 8 would still not get us to the bottom of precisely what those benefits are. That is not £13 billion of public money spent wisely, especially as that money was not available. Borrowing was increased, by this year's figures, from £162 billion to £175 billion, but we do not have longer-term assets such as I have described to show for it. The Government talk about investment when they really mean spending, but under our plans there genuinely would have been investment as well as spending. They would have stimulated the economy in the short term while providing a longer-term legacy. For all those reasons, amendment 8 requests a comprehensive review, and the debate gives us an opportunity to consider when the temporary VAT reduction should cease. The Government need to answer the question of the hon. Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood)—it was on a practicality, but an important one—about whether it is wise to finish it at the end of December. The Government also need to address the wider points about whether the end could be brought forward and the revenue savings realised earlier. I hope that many hon. Members will contribute to the debate and that the Financial Secretary will accept the concerns that have been expressed in all quarters. I hope that he will take on board also the complete lack of enthusiasm of anybody in his party for debating this issue and defending Government policy. Perhaps, in the intelligent way for which he is well known, he will seek to arrive at a solution that is beneficial to the taxpayer and the economy as a whole.