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Finance (No. 3) Bill

My hon. Friend's region, the north-east, faces the highest unemployment in the whole United Kingdom, as I have mentioned, at 10.2%—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for North East Hertfordshire (Oliver Heald) says that that is our fault, so I presume that he has missed the fact that there has been a world banking crisis and that unemployment has risen in countries across the board. There are no arguments. As hon. Members on the Treasury Bench know, the Labour Government and my right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling) had a plan to ensure that we reduced public spending to help tackle the deficit, but the current Government's cuts in public spending are going too far, too fast and too deep. Their only alternative is to grow the private sector, which is good and positive and we accept that it needs to be done. The corporation tax cut before the Committee is one of the tools for doing that, and clause 4 is key to that strategy. We need to explore in detail what income will be forfeited as a result of the corporation tax cut, how it will attract businesses to the United Kingdom and encourage them to stay, and what the targets are for the creation of jobs on the basis of that cut for the future as a whole.