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Finance Bill

My hon. Friend will have seen the unemployment statistics that came out earlier this week, indicating that about 224,000 people joined the unemployment queues over the past three months. That takes the unemployment rate up to 7.9 per cent., which is utterly dire and takes us beyond the unemployment figures that the Government inherited in 1997. There are undoubtedly widespread concerns about unemployment which affect people's spending habits—not just those who have had the misfortune to become unemployed but their relatives, friends and neighbours, who fear for their own position.