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Finance Bill

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am trying to put the idea of well-refreshed ejaculations firmly out of my mind. I was about to discuss the analysis by Howard Reed of Landman Economics and Tim Horton of the Fabian Society of the progressive or regressive nature of the Budget. They calculated the effect of the entire package, not just the tax changes. They included the distribution of the billions of pounds of extra spending cuts that had been announced, and then added an assumption of 25% cuts in departmental budgets. Their calculation showed that the combination of all the measures announced in the Budget that this Bill begins to enact will take £1,514 from the bottom 10% of households, which is fully 21.7% of their income. In sharp contrast, the richest 10% will experience an annual loss in income and services of £2,685, which is the equivalent of just 3.6% of their income. If there were 40% cuts in departmental budgets, as was briefed by the Chancellor and Chief Secretary at the weekend, the figures would be grimmer still. My right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), the Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, commissioned the House of Commons Library to conduct a gender audit of the plans. It revealed that women would bear a disproportionate amount of the pain in the Budget. Of the nearly £8 billion net revenue to be raised by the financial year 2014-15, £6 billion will come from women and just £2 billion from men, despite the fact that women have considerably lower levels of income and wealth than men. The analysis does not include the impact of the savage cuts in public expenditure that the Deputy Prime Minister believes are necessary, and which are now being planned and announced. As women make up more of the public sector work force and rely more on public services, they will be hit harder by the pay freeze, hit harder by the job losses, and hit harder by the decimation of public provision for the needy, especially in their role as carers. The Chief Secretary purported to rebut that earlier today by reading out a suggestion that the figures were not accurate because they assumed that all the family support is paid to women. It is not true that that assumption was made by the House of Commons Library. However, there are a couple of measures where the House of Commons Library has assumed 100% female receipt of benefits. That is the health in pregnancy grant and the Sure Start maternity grant. The Conservative party and the Liberal Democrats will have to learn that merely asserting as loudly as possible that the measures in the Bill are "progressive" does not make it true. Producing a distributional table on page 67 of the Red Book which appears to show that it is progressive does not make their assertion true either, especially when the Institute for Fiscal Studies demolishes it the next day by pointing out that it included all Labour's key progressive measures enacted before the election to safeguard lower- income groups, and that it conveniently stops in financial year 2012-13, just before all the cuts to family support announced in the Budget are due to be implemented. If the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats were so confident that these measures are indeed progressive, they would commit the Government to carry on publishing those tables—[Interruption.]