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Comprehensive Spending Review

First, let me thank my hon. Friend for the welcome that he gave—to repeat what I said —to what I implied about PFI, the contribution that the BBC will make and the very difficult choice that we all have to make in this Parliament about what is a fair settlement on Equitable Life. In particular, helping the trapped annuitants is an absolute priority and it is a good thing and, as I said, we found three times as much money as John Chadwick recommended. My hon. Friend raised two particular points. First, he mentioned ring fences, and although we call them ring fences, in the end they are about priorities. We have made a choice. As a coalition Government, we have chosen certain things that we are going to cut—obviously we have made some difficult decisions on welfare—but we have also chosen to spend more money on health care and the resources going into schools. Those are choices, and in the end that is what politics in a democratic country is about. We have made those choices, so I would not regard them particularly as ring fences, more as democratic choices. Finally, on the distributional impact, we have published distributional analyses in the book that I have published today—my hon. Friend will know that we are the first Government to attempt to do this—and I will very much welcome the Treasury Committee's inquiry on the spending review, which I know he will conduct. We have used the methodology that is used in many other countries to try to allocate the benefit in kind of public expenditure, as well as the direct income effect of some of the benefit changes. We believe that that shows this is broadly progressive, in that the top quintile pays the most and it is broadly flat across the other quintiles. The same is true of some of the annually managed expenditure decisions as well, on which we have also published tables. I very much welcome the Treasury Select Committee's inquiry and its work on this matter. As I have said, this is the first time the British Treasury has attempted to do this, and we very much welcome the Committee's input.