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(Clauses 1, 4, 8, 189 and 209, Schedules 1, 23 and 33, and new Clauses and new Schedules relating to value added tax)

I shall make a few remarks about an important impact of the changes, which is at risk of going unrecognised. I think of that as the cluster impact of the changes. Our country does not have the same kind of people distributed uniformly across the United Kingdom. People of different ages cluster in different areas. I am deeply proud to represent the Wirral, not least because the area has a higher proportion of older people. It is a great strength of our area. They bring a large amount of expertise and stability, and we should not talk about people living longer as though it was a negative thing. I benefited from having grandparents who lived longer than they might have expected, and I cherished each of those relationships. With that clustering of older people comes a responsibility to pay attention to the issues that affect them. Even if that was not the right thing to do in and of itself, our local economy in Wirral is highly dependent on the income of pensioners. We have many small independent businesses whose relationship with their customers is important. They have regulars of many years' standing, and many of those people are retired and on a fixed income, so even if it was not the case that we should care about the needs of older people, the employment of the rest of us in the Wirral and the vitality of some of the local shops is related to the income of older people. Before I deal with the clustering of the local economy and the attention that Ministers must pay to how our economy works in practice, I want to make a few points about longevity and the increase in life expectancy that we are seeing. We must recognise that this is not a uniform phenomenon. Not everybody in our country is living longer in the same way. There is a social justice element. Poverty is still a pretty strong determinant of the length of people's life. People such as those in my constituency who have worked in manufacturing might not expect to live as long as those in relatively more affluent parts of the country. My constituency is very mixed, and there are people there who may not be able to expect to live longer as the average increases. That average masks different expectations. When Treasury Ministers make decisions about, for example, age-related allowances, I ask them to find out how those will impact on different parts of the country and different groups of people. The impact will not be uniform. We are not all uniformly living longer in exactly the same way. The NHS is a wonderful thing, but we still have a heck of a long way to go on public health to make sure that poverty does not limit people's life expectancy, as it has done in the past and still does.