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National Insurance Contributions Bill

I am happy to discuss macro and micro-economic issues with the hon. Gentleman. There is a clear divide between the current Government and the previous Government. We had a deficit reduction plan over three years. We would have cut public expenditure and made savings. In the Department in which I was a Minister in the last Government, we had earmarked £1.5 billion of savings over the next three years. We would have done that. There is a difference about the scale and depth of the cuts. The hon. Gentleman and I can argue about that, but he needs to recognise that, if he walks through the Lobby to vote against the amendment today, he will be denying new businesses in his constituency the ability to gain access to the scheme, while allowing areas with lower unemployment and lower deprivation, perhaps in parts of the north of England, which are not completely a desert, to benefit from the scheme. He has to wrestle with that issue. Let me advise him that however he deals with it, we have the ability to let the residents of Crawley know what he will do on the issue. He and others need to look at that. There is still time for him to vote with the Government today, but then to speak to the Minister privately, to get his colleagues from Kent, other parts of Sussex, Berkshire and Hampshire together, to get them to talk to the Minister, and to get the Minister to reflect on this in the other place, so that we can make the scheme much wider. Colleagues from London and I would give him credit for doing that. I put this to the Minister: the unemployment rate in London is higher than in the south-west, in my region and in that of the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards), in Wales. It is higher than in Scotland, the east midlands and the north-west, and it is above the UK average. The unemployment rate in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham was 6.8% at the last count. The rate is 7.7% in Tottenham, and 6% in Camberwell and Peckham; in Tatton, Richmond and Derbyshire Dales, it is under 2%. I have no objection to a scheme being developed to help create employment where employment is lost, but if the logic of the scheme is what the Minister has made it out to be—to deal with public sector employment —I should point out that at the moment 23 of the 100 constituencies with the highest levels of public sector employment are not included. It is to deal with unemployment, which is higher in the places that I have mentioned than in other parts of the country. The Minister needs to reflect on that in relation to what he has done today. The Minister does not need to listen to me; John Walker, the national chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses, has said:"““With small firms in the South East most likely to be working below capacity, this shows how wrong the Government is to not include this vital region, as well as the East and London, in its proposals for a National Insurance holiday…With 600,000 public sector jobs expected to be lost, stimulating private sector job creation…in small firms, will be vital to rebalancing the economy.””" The Thames Gateway London Partnership makes similar points:"““the data clearly shows that…the National Insurance Holiday is unfair as it excludes areas in the Thames Gateway which we believe would otherwise be targeted for government support.””" The partnership has helpfully shown—this backs up what my right hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Joan Ruddock) has said—that there are high levels of public sector employment in the London area, which would benefit from the scheme.