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Finance (No. 4) Bill

If the hon. Gentleman had been listening earlier, he would have heard me explain that those people have already lost that money through the VAT increase. That is a stealth tax and a regressive tax, which always affects the least well-off the most. Many of the people who will get a little more in their pay packet because they will pay a little less tax when the personal allowance goes up will find that because of other taxes that have been implemented, they have lost that money already. Sadly, those people will not do so well. The personal allowance helps people nearly all the way up the income scale, particularly those in two-income families. Frankly, although it is an expensive measure, it is not a well targeted one. As I mentioned, I would have liked to keep the tax credits system, which helped those who really needed it and took account of people's different circumstances because it was based on the household income. There is nothing to incentivise people to put their money back into the local economy and nothing to encourage people to unlock their savings and help the economy. We had the car scrappage scheme, so that people who were planning to buy a car that would last them for the next 10 or 12 years would bring the purchase forward by a year or two to take part in the scheme. We did the same thing with the replacement of boilers. Those schemes were introduced specifically to get the economy going. What have this Government done? They have thrown out of the window the one such scheme that they did have, which was the solar panels scheme, under which people were unlocking £10,000, £15,000 or £20,000 of their savings and spending it immediately in the local economy. Even if the panels were not made locally, all the fitting work to install the solar panels was done by skilled plumbers and craftsmen, so the money went directly into the local economy. The Government completely messed that scheme up and destroyed the industry's confidence by incompetently changing the rules before the consultation was finished. They did not scale the scheme down in a sensible way, as the industry had asked. People in the industry accepted that the tariff would change over time, but they could not stomach being treated like idiots. The Government just said, ““We're going to change all this,”” even though people had invested a lot of money. Some people had spent £3,000 on a course learning how to convert from being an ordinary central heating plumber to a solar panel installer. Some firms had expanded for the purpose, and firms in my constituency are laying people off because of the ridiculous changes. What other scheme do the Government have in mind to get people to unlock their savings for an excellent investment that is environmentally friendly and provides local jobs? We have not seen such a scheme in the Budget. We have made some suggestions, but it seems that the Chancellor has ignored them. For example, we suggested a cut in VAT on repairs and improvements to houses. With the construction industry on its knees, that would have enabled plumbers, carpenters, electricians, plasterers and so on to find extra work, and people would have been encouraged to take on home improvements. What did the Chancellor do? The exact reverse. He slapped additional VAT on alterations to listed buildings.