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National Insurance Contributions Bill

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply and the noble Lord, Lord Newby, for his contribution. We do not misconstrue the purposes of the Bill; we support projects that help to rebalance the economy, and we see that focusing in part on where there is high public sector employment in an area is one way of doing it. It is not the only way, but we have acknowledged that the Bill can make a contribution in that respect. The noble Lord speaks as though there is almost a huge divide between the excluded regions and those that are included. From the ONS public sector employment statistics bulletin for quarter 1 of 2010, let me run through the list of percentage by region of identifiable public sector employment. The point that I reiterate is that the spread between the regions is relatively narrow, and that London misses out on this basis. The north-east is said to have 25.1 per cent, the north-west 22.3 per cent, Yorkshire and Humber 22.6 per cent, the east Midlands 18.5 per cent, the West Midlands 21 per cent, the east 16.6 per cent, London 21.1 per cent, the south-east 16.8 per cent and the south-west 21.3 per cent. To chop off three of those areas, as though they are a completely distinct part of the economy with in no way the same reliance on public sector employment, seems incredibly flawed as an argument. It is not just a question of looking at little pockets within regions, as the overall regional statistics show a close match across the regions. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, said that we were talking about £1 billion for regional development—fine; no one is looking to take £1 billion away from the project. However, he again referred to ““more affluent”” regions. I am sure that parts of all regions are affluent, and parts of all regions are deprived and with high unemployment. One accepts that there are special challenges in some of the northern regions, and one would not want to detract the support available to those. Luton is in the east of England. It still has high levels of deprivation, but the spread across the region shows that parts to the east are distinct, with much lower wage economies, higher employment infrastructure deficits and real challenges. They are every bit as deserving of the benefit of schemes such as this as anyone else. The noble Lord rightly challenged on me on the costs. I refer to figures given by the Minister, but the purpose of the probing earlier—I note that the Minister remains coy on the point—was to question whether the allocation made will in any way be spent. I think that the proposition that underwrites the estimate is that this will support something like 800,000 jobs, and those jobs will have to be created outside the excluded regions by start-up businesses over a period that has about two and a half years to run. That is a tall order. If it can be achieved, great, but there is headway in the allocation to extend the scope of the scheme, and we support that. I have tried to deal with the points raised. We think that the provision is unfair. All regions should have the opportunity to benefit from this. We shall get to an amendment tabled by one of my noble friends shortly, following which there would be scope, through monitoring, to dampen down the scheme if it proved to be overheating. However, there is no sign of that. It is a pity that the Minister was not even able to give us an update; we are almost at the end of the year. Some £50 million is meant to have been spent, which would mean that at the very least 25,000 businesses would have signed up. I suspect that we are nowhere near that on the basis of the figures of 1,500 that were discussed a couple of months ago in the other place. Having said all that, we have had a brief but, I hope, full encounter on the subject, and I wish to test the opinion of the House. Division on Amendment 2 Contents 139; Not-Contents 200. Amendment 2 disagreed. Amendments 3 and 4 not moved. Clause 5 : Starting a new business Amendment 5 Clause 5 : Starting a new business Amendment 5 Moved by