That is exactly the point that I am making. Businesses are much more likely to employ people if they have some certainty about the overall cost of employment—not just wages, but on-costs such as expenses. Within that, national insurance is a very significant cost, and providing an element of certainty over the next four or five years is therefore extremely important.
Let me now return to a point that I was making earlier about signals. When I was Deputy Mayor for business and enterprise at City Hall, a position that I occupied for three and a half years, I was in charge of foreign direct investment. My job was to go around the world encouraging people to come and invest in London and the south-east. One of the things I learnt from that experience was that signals from City Hall about what we were willing to do, and how welcoming we were likely to be to particular companies, individuals or investors, was critical to whether they wanted to come. In that context, an element of certainty and predictability, not just political and legal—we are seen to have that around the world—but fiscal, was absolutely vital