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Finance (No. 3) Bill

Let me draw Members' attention to the proposals of the Opposition Front-Bench team. Amendment 13 states:"““The Chancellor…shall review the possibility of incorporating a bank payroll tax within the bank levy and publish a report””—" not an unreasonable request, but a very sensible and measured one. Yet we have heard from Conservative Members and from the Minister in an intervention that they are reluctant to take that action. I guess that the Minister will take the same attitude towards the amendment proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), which similarly calls for a review. Neither of these measures calls for the City of London to be disbanded or for bankers to be put in the stocks and pilloried by the public—much as many members of the public might wish to do just that! However, given that many members of the public may have recently wished to do the same to Members of Parliament, perhaps we should not pursue that line too far. The amendments simply request a review, which is surely reasonable. I should be interested to hear from the Minister what is so wrong with a review or, indeed, with the idea of a bankers' bonus tax. When the Minister wound up our debate on 3 May, he declined to deal with the many good points made by Members about the value of such a tax. I think that that demonstrated a desire to avoid discussing the success of the approach taken by the Labour Government last year, which raised £3.5 billion for the Exchequer—far more than the Government's banking levy. I hope that the Minister will not ignore what has been said when he winds up today's debate. The Government's failure to repeat last year's bankers' bonus tax, combined with cuts in corporation tax which helped the financial services industry, amounted to a cut in tax rates for the banks. Meanwhile, those on the lowest incomes—families and other particularly vulnerable members of society—are being made to pay for the mistakes of the banking sector. The excessive behaviour of bankers, of which excessive bonuses were a symptom, caused a crisis that nearly brought down the entire financial system not just of this country but of the world. Amendment 13 states that the money raised by the tax"““would be invested to create new jobs and tackle unemployment.””" Members—including me, in interventions—have mentioned the importance of the future jobs fund and how well it was performing in bringing down youth unemployment until the Chancellor scrapped it in last year's emergency Budget. The fact that youth unemployment was approaching 1 million has sad echoes of what happened in the 1980s, particularly in the part of the world that my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) and I represent. People on Merseyside have long memories when it comes to the damage inflicted by youth unemployment, which peaked in 1985, four years after the middle of the 1980s recession. This year, activities are being organised to mark the 30th anniversary of the Toxteth riots, the appalling scenes in Liverpool during the summer of 1981, and the despair and misery that provoked that action. There are lessons to be learnt from what happened in the 1980s. We know from that time what goes wrong if we do not tackle unemployment, particularly among young people. Some members of my generation, and slightly older people, have never found long-term work. As young people they were never able to enter the jobs market owing to the difficulties facing those in their cohort: the lack of jobs that resulted from the policies of the Government of the day, and the way in which unemployment was allowed to rise to over 3 million. There are people, now in their late forties, who have never experienced secure employment. They have never established proper careers, and they and their families have never recovered from the experience of 30 years ago. That is why it is so important for us to find a mechanism that will help people to find secure employment now. My hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South rightly said that having a job was the best way of finding a job. I know of a number of people who were able to enter full-time employment as a result of the future jobs fund, because, thanks to the last Government's successful approach, they were able to demonstrate to other employers how successful they could be in employment. In an intervention on the Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Bristol West (Stephen Williams), I mentioned Professor Wolf's comments on apprenticeships. In her evidence to the Select Committee on Education, she made clear her worries about 16, 17 and 18-year-olds currently being most at risk of not participating in education, training and apprenticeships and about the long-term prospects of their finding work as a consequence of that. That is why it is important to have a strong and well-structured approach to employment for 16 to 18-year-olds. The evidence suggests that apprenticeships are largely being taken by 19 to 24-year-olds, and that there is a lag in respect of younger people taking them up. We must address that; we need to focus our efforts on younger people leaving school. We need to grow the economy and to ensure that there is a proper growth strategy. The Chancellor talked about the Budget being a Budget for growth, yet the latest figures show that the economy has flatlined for six months and there has not been sustained growth. Borrowing has increased by £46 billion, and the Government have resisted using fair measures, such as the bankers' bonus tax, to help to encourage job creation and to help the construction industry in house building and other activities that stimulate growth.