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Finance (No. 2) Bill

Surely not. I look forward to my hon. Friend continuing. The hon. Member for Chipping Barnet did not tell us what she supported. She seemed to be using one of those throwaway phrases that seem convenient for the Opposition but are, in fact, very destructive. I urge the hon. Member for Rayleigh (Mr. Francois), who will wind up the debate for the Opposition, to find a constructive element. What measures in the Bill do the Conservative party support? If Conservative Members are honest with themselves, and, more particularly, with the House, they will say that there is a good deal in the Bill that they support. However, for tactical reasons, they do not want to admit that. If there are a good number of measures that they support, their reasoned amendment becomes less reasoned—opposition for opposition’s sake. I made an intervention on the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) when he was talking about productivity. The hon. Member for South-West Hertfordshire (Mr. Gauke) also intervened during the same passage of that speech. The right hon. Member for Wokingham accepted that productivity in the private sector was reasonable—I am paraphrasing him, so those were probably not his precise words—but said that that was not his point. He did not criticise private sector productivity when I put to him next year’s putative growth rate, which will go up to something like 2.75 per cent., which is above trend. He said that there was a problem with productivity in the public sector. I put to him the point, which he did not deal with, that it is very difficult to measure productivity in the public sector. The hon. Member for South-West Hertfordshire accepted that point in an earlier debate. What point was the right hon. Gentleman making? I suppose that it may have been a cheap political point. He spoke of the crisis in the NHS—a phrase that I reject out of hand as a cheap unsupportable gibe—but seemed to contradict himself by encapsulating in the crisis the idea of job losses in the public sector. I do not say that such job losses are an easy thing to deal with; we have all read the facts in the newspapers and heard them on the news, and we all have our own views on the matter. According to the right hon. Gentleman’s own logic, however, if there are job losses in the public sector, that means by definition that the public sector is becoming more productive because there are fewer people working in it. I therefore have no idea what exact point he was making. The right hon. Gentleman accepted that private sector productivity was good—I agree—but then confused his argument by pointing to the very fact that makes public sector productivity more likely than not. It seemed to me that the convoluted and overtly political point that he was making damaged his argument. It was rather cheap, and it is also rather representative of the poor arguments being made by the Opposition. Returning to my original point, is this opposition for opposition’s sake, or are there serious issues to be discussed here? That may become clearer in Committee, but that is when the Bill will be looked at in detail, clause by clause. On Second Reading we are dealing with the principle. It seems to me that the principle governing this Bill, and many of the Bills that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has brought to the House, is that it reverses the unfortunate, and sometimes tragic, history of the Treasury. I am talking about what is known as the dead hand of the Treasury. Traditionally, the Treasury was the Department that simply said no—““No, no, no.”” The Chancellor has made it clear that the Government cannot allow that, and now the Treasury has been part of the engine for reform. I welcome and applaud that, and I think that this Bill is an example of it. I shall pick out a few clauses that show how the Treasury has ceased to be a dead hand and become an engine for change. Labour Members would certainly argue that we are in government precisely to be an engine for beneficial change. There are four areas in which the Bill makes such changes. The first three are social measures, deregulation and what I will simply call business-friendly measures, and anti-tax avoidance measures, which in an intervention I called fair taxation. It is only right that those subject to regulation by the Finance Bill should pay as the democratically elected Government say they should, rather than avoiding their social and economic responsibility as corporate or private citizens. The final category is that of green measures, about which many right hon. and hon. Members have spoken. Health having been my main policy interest since I entered Parliament in 1997, I think that one of the major clauses is the one dealing with tobacco duty—clause 1. That might seem a routine Budget measure, but if we look at a range of Budgets, we see that it is not. Raising tobacco duty sends out the right message about tobacco consumption, as it is designed to do. It runs in parallel with a Department of Health measure, the White Paper ““Smoking Kills””, which sets out the number of avoidable deaths from smoking-related diseases per year. When the White Paper was being drafted, that figure was about 120,000, and I am happy to say that it is beginning to decline. It declines not by accident but through the Government expressing their will and taking a lead, and through the public being willing to follow that lead. Making cigarettes more expensive and raising from 16 to 18 the age at which people can buy cigarettes—a measure that I understand is coming on stream—is all part of the direction of travel of social change and reform. It is effective in preventing children from starting smoking, which is the key. Evidence is beginning to emerge that such measures are effective, and I welcome that. We are also helping those who want to quit to do so.