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Finance (No. 3) Bill

We will make further announcements as and when necessary, but we are publishing much more information on distributional analysis than any previous Government have. It is right to do so, and to take steps to ensure that the House and the whole country can debate such matters with as much information presented in future. A striking contrast can be drawn with regard to one policy—the doubling of the 10p rate—about which the hon. Gentleman and the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) had concerns. It was difficult to obtain any information on that policy's impact, although we have learned in recent weeks that much of the information about that was available to Ministers at the time. Amendment 30 seeks to provide a one-off £250 reduction in the tax liability of all public sector employees earning less than £21,000. In the June 2010 Budget, we announced a two-year pay freeze for public sector workers earning a full-time equivalent of £21,000. That is one of the many difficult choices that we have had to make to help put the UK's public finances back on track, and it does not mean that we do not value the work done throughout the public sector. All Members know that those in the public sector work hard for the benefit of society. However, pay freezes of this sort save jobs. Given that we are having to constrain public spending and given that the fiscal deficit requires cuts, a pay freeze will help to mitigate the effect of those cuts. Because we recognise that the freeze will be hardest on the lowest-paid public sector workers, it was announced in the June Budget that those earning a full-time equivalent of £21,000 or less would receive an uplift of at least £250 in both years of the freeze. Both the Labour party's manifesto at the time of the last general election and the 2009 pre-Budget report announced a 1% increase for public sector workers across the board, apart from the armed services. No distinction was made between the low paid and the high paid. Under a Labour Government, none of those earning less than £21,000 a year—including nurses, teaching assistants, police community support officers and hospital porters—would be receiving a £250 increase.