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G20

My Lords, not surprisingly, I cannot agree with everything that the noble Baroness the Leader of the Opposition said, but I certainly welcome her remarks about Aung San Suu Kyi and about development at the summit, which is to the advantage of us all, including those countries that are most affected. I particularly cannot agree that the Prime Minister showed no leadership. Of course he showed leadership. On many of the achievements, which were common to many of those who attended the summit, we should all be extremely glad that they were agreed. There is a pledge to continue co-ordinated efforts to generate strong, sustainable and balanced growth, with an action plan setting out the policy actions that are needed to move closer to this objective. There are comprehensive quota and governance reforms to the IMF, instruments to strengthen global financial safety nets and so on. My right honourable friend the Prime Minister said that the meeting would not be an heroic summit, and it was not. The summit was meeting not against a background of crisis but against the background that the world needs to unite over growth, which is what I believe it did. The noble Baroness asked about climate change. The summit reaffirmed the commitment to negotiations under the UNFCCC and to a successful and balanced result in Cancun. We very much welcome the work of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing, whose report was published at the beginning of November. We agree that its recommendations should now be considered by Finance Ministers. In the summit, we also recognised the ongoing importance of green recovery and green growth. Leaders committed themselves to stimulating investment in clean energy technology, to energy and resource efficiency and to developing long-term energy strands. Of course the key to all this is growth. The noble Baroness and I will, I suspect, have to agree to disagree about the medicine that this economy has had to take and the reasons for taking it. She prayed in aid the Office for Budget Responsibility, yet it says that unemployment in this country will fall next year and every year after that and that employment will increase by around 1.4 million over the next five years. The OBR forecasts that public sector employment will fall, as it would have done under the previous Government, but by less than if we had not frozen pay and stopped the jobs tax. We will strengthen the economy by stimulating enterprise and jobs, by taking 880,000 people out of tax altogether, by having a £1 billion regional growth fund and the green investment bank, by cutting corporation tax and the small profits rate, by reducing new businesses’ national insurance in certain areas and by cutting red tape. We believe that this is the right policy to provide for the long-term growth, prosperity and employment prospects that this country needs.