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Finance (No. 3) Bill

I thank the House for its indulgence. I was at a meeting of the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government so I missed the beginning of the debate. I shall try to be as brief as possible, because I am sure that Government Members will have heard the compelling case made by my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) and my colleagues and will have been won over by the powerful arguments they articulated. Those outside the Westminster bubble sometimes question what we as Members of Parliament do in this place. I am sure that there are moments when even we wonder what it is all about and why we parliamentarians put ourselves through the rigorous demands of elected office. I realise just how privileged I am to be here and to represent not only the people of my community, for whom I have the highest regard, but a great city such as Liverpool, and then I have the opportunity, such as the one put forward tonight, to change the lives of ordinary people and realise that my time here is anything but wasted. High-cost credit is exactly the sort of issue that I got involved in politics for in the first place. The issue is totemic, as it represents the sort of fight that I hear politicians talk about all the time in this House. The word ““fairness”” is bandied around the Chamber like confetti. Even the Prime Minister claims that coalition policies are about fairness. Although I point to the juxtaposition between the reality and the rhetoric, today is an opportunity for Government Members to put their money where their mouth is, because this really is about fairness.