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Finance (No. 3) Bill

May I associate myself with amendment 30, which I also signed? For my constituents, £250 means a lot. It is a lot of money in terms of paying daily bills, but it is also the difference between some children having a summer break this year and not. I hope the Minister responds positively and examines that matter, but I will give him this assurance: if we do not have positive assurances from the Government, we will be back time and again until that money is paid. I wish to speak to amendment 14, which is in my name. The amendment simply proposes that, as we determine personal income tax rates for the coming year, we look carefully at their impact on inequality. The proposal is from various lobbies in recent months, from religious groups, churches, welfare rights groups, trade unions and other civil society organisations, which have expressed their anxiety about inequality in our society. Like them, I believe that our country is disfigured by inequality and the extremes of wealth and poverty. Consequently, I believe that we should use every legislative weapon possible to address it. I mentioned some of the extremes of wealth and poverty in the earlier debate on executive pay—some top executives earn a salary that is 145 times the average salary of their workers. The Government's assessment of wealth distribution last year showed that the total wealth of the top 10% of the population is now 100 times that of the bottom 10%. The simple reason is that the poorest have so little wealth. In 1986 in the UK, the richest 1% held 25% of marketable wealth. Twenty years later, that had risen to 34% of total national wealth. The poorest 50% had gone from holding 11% of the nation's wealth to holding just 1% today. That is not solely the result of economic trends or globalisation—it has been Government policy, largely in the 1980s and 1990s, to pursue the systematic redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, and the last Government at least held back the tide for a period. Taxation policy has a key role to play in addressing inequality and I note that the Treasury Committee quoted Wendell Holmes' popular dictum that tax is the price we pay for a civilised society. I agree, but civilisation has a range of definitions, one of which is that we should not live in a society that is so starkly unequal--