Finance Bill

Well, my Lords, the noble Lord refers to an article based on an official’s response to questions. I do not have any comments on this. What would his level of criticism be of a Government who proposed changes to the fiscal rules without the Chancellor going before the other place to indicate such a significant matter? Of course these matters are to be debated in the proper fora. The idea that I am meant to reply to remarks that are three months old, a newspaper story published today and no real evidence on such a colossally important matter, and that it would be vouchsafed to me as a Treasury spokesman in the Lords to make such an announcement, is a flight of fancy. I am not going to dwell on this issue any more. I have been speaking on it for 11 minutes, when noble Lords are eager for my responses to all the issues they have raised in the debate. They will have to let me get on. The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, suggested that the drive towards fairness in the system had been mortgaged by the position of the 10p tax rate. The error contained in that matter has been acknowledged and I cannot deny the Opposition the opportunity of making as much of it as they do, but there is a suggestion that that vitiates a decade of government concerned with budgetary fairness. The sole definition of the poor was made by the noble Baroness when she said that people who own older cars might be caught by vehicle excise duty. Let me say that the Government’s definition of poverty is that which they inherited from the previous Administration. That is what the Government have been concerned with in our strategy of taking pensioners out of poverty as far as we can and reducing child poverty significantly. This Budget has been another step along that road. It would be as well if noble Lords recognised those virtues. The noble Lord, Lord Vallance—