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Finance Bill

My hon. Friend makes a good point, but she knows as well as I do that many people in County Durham are facing unemployment as a direct result of the spending cuts. Many of those people will be taken out of paying income tax altogether because they will not have a job. For Members to try to trumpet that policy, not realising the damage they are doing to regions such as the north-east of England, is disingenuous. I understand the argument made by the hon. Member for Gainsborough, which is that marriage is key in ensuring that we have the units that will lead to less crime, less social breakdown and so on, but—I am sorry—I do not accept that. The root cause of many of those issues is poverty. If we consider the examples given by the hon. Gentleman, as well as those given by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions when he toured his Glasgow housing estate, we can see that £150 will not make a great difference to lifting anyone living on such a council estate out of poverty or giving life chances to the young children who live there. We should address poverty, and, in my opinion, provisions to do with the tax system and marriage are not the way to do that.