Finance Bill

I thank the right hon. Lady for that. One great thing about the Red Book this time is that it does a distributional analysis. It looks at the effect of the Budget on various households by various deciles. It looks at the income figures as well as the expenditure figures. I personally believe that counting my daughter as poor because she has a low income and depends on me is a wrong assessment. Looking at the size of the household budget is a far better mechanism than looking at the income figures for identifying poorer households. Those assessments were all done in the Red Book. All I ask the Government to do is to go substantially further than is proposed in amendment 47, which is, frankly, totally inadequate. It simply looks at the impact of the VAT change in isolation. It ignores the fact that, three months later, a cost of living increase will not only wipe out the cost of the VAT but add a bit of extra money. I think the Government are moving in the right direction in trying to protect people on lower incomes, particularly those who, through no fault of their own, find themselves trapped in circumstances from which they cannot work themselves out of poverty.