It is truly a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Margot James), who is a mighty champion for our small businesses that are trying to access international markets. It is no wonder that her region leads the country in increasing exports to developing and developed nations around the world. She spoke most eloquently about the benefits for small businesses and echoed some of the points made by my hon. Friend the Minister about the impact of the Bill on the willingness of employers to add to their labour force.
I want to focus on the Bill’s impact not on the quantity of people who will be employed but on the price of labour, and on how the Bill might be used to implement some of the efforts to create a living wage across the United Kingdom. The Treasury team have come across a useful tool in implementing that change, and it is up to them to see how much courage they might have to move forward with this initiative to achieve it. That marks the difference between those on the Opposition Benches, who wish to posture over changes in the economy on employment and wages, and Government Members, who are interested in taking action to achieve change.
If I may, I shall consider the record of the previous Labour Government. As we have heard often today, the Labour Government were interested in increasing the tax on employment, and indeed went into the general election calling for increases in the jobs tax. Despite the words we have heard today, we have not heard one word of apology from the Labour party for saying at the last election that the right way to increase employment was to increase the tax on jobs. Still no apology on that, but it was part of a pattern that impacted negatively on the price of employment.
Labour abolished the 10p tax rate. It created a tax credits system that was an incredibly complex way to give people a post-tax income on which they could live. Any of us with constituents who have been caught up with tax credits when they went wrong knows how hard it is for families when the tax credits office claws those tax credits back and savings have to be found. Why on earth was that system a good system? Underpinning it—