---

Preparing Britain's Economy for the Future

The Minister is shaking his head. Well, some concessions have been made and those businesses have been given a couple of hours to adjust, but why on earth was that date chosen in the first place? That decision was madness, and shows that the Government were not in touch with the very people they were trying to help. My next concern is the top rate of income tax. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said that the increase will gain "approximately nothing" in revenue. The increase was a gimmick designed to appease Labour Back Benchers—those very Members who are absent today. I was interested to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) discuss the increasing growth of Jobcentre Plus; it seems that the only place where people can get a job now is working for Jobcentre Plus, because it has grown to be one of the biggest employers for the Government. Unemployment is growing—it is currently 2.3 million and the CBI expects the number of unemployed to grow to up to 3 million. That is happening simply because we did not make arrangements to contain the scale of the economic downturn in time. In the remaining minutes available to me, I wish to discuss tourism, the portfolio that I follow. I am pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Hertfordshire (Mr. Gauke), whose constituency includes the wonderful little village of Aldbury, where I used to live, is on the Front Bench to listen to this, because it is important that all Members, on both sides of the House, understand the relevance and importance of tourism. That is glossed over in this House on a regular basis. Tourism is our fifth biggest industry: it is worth £90 billion, 200,000 small and medium-sized businesses make up our magnificent tourism industry, and one in four new jobs is created by tourism. Yet it could be argued that tourism does well in this country in spite of the Government, not because of them. It is faring better than expected in this downturn; ironically, because people do not have money in their pockets thanks to this Government, they are forced to consider a domestic holiday, rather than go abroad. That is not an excuse for the Government to say that they are pleased with the tourism figures, because that is not how the tourism industry would have liked its figures to grow. What this Government have done over a 10-year period is allow the infrastructure designed to support the tourism industry to get out of control. The hon. Member for Blaydon (Mr. Anderson) spoke passionately about the importance of the regional development agencies, but they have creased a confusing, overlapping and costly system that has wrecked our tourism industry. One or two RDAs have done well to promote tourism—the north-west's RDA is one example, but that is because it does not hold on to that money centrally. Nobody has heard of the north-west's RDA or the north-east's RDA, but they have heard of Blackpool and Newcastle. Those are the brand names that need to be promoted, rather than the RDA names, which have taken all the money.