My Lords, the noble Lord is of course absolutely correct. He is also aware that the number of people in the Chamber is normally in inverse proportion to the degree of support for a measure. The fact that the Chamber is largely empty just shows how popular this measure is.
The noble Lord slightly chided the Government on the fact that the regional employers’ NICs holiday had not been as effective as we had originally hoped. That is undoubtedly the case. However, it did support over 90,000 jobs, and I suspect that the people in those jobs think it was a pretty good scheme. It certainly did not have the scale of effect that we were looking for. Although that was in no small measure because of the overall economic environment into which that programme was launched, having a nationwide permanent scheme rather than a temporary targeted scheme is likely to make the impact of the scheme that much more difficult.
The noble Lord also slightly chided me on the fact that we were not bringing in the abolition of employer NICs for under-21s quicker than 2015. That is largely because of the need for computer systems to be changed. The view taken by HMRC in consultation with business was that it would be extremely difficult to get all that sorted out by next April, which would be the alternative.
The noble Lord also said that it would be impossible to accurately assess the impact of the scheme because we had not introduced it on a pilot basis. Of course the conundrum is that, if you do something on a pilot basis, you are only allowing a small proportion of the overall audience that you seek to affect to be part of that pilot. Particularly with the employment allowance, we wanted to make the scheme available to everybody as soon as possible. As the FSB survey suggests, we are confident that it will be effective.
I agree with the noble Lord that quite a lot of the implementation of this legislation will obviously be done by secondary legislation. The primary legislation is already pretty complicated; the secondary legislation will be even more technical. We will be very happy to discuss our approach to that with him when we get to Committee.
For today, the Government believe that the Bill does and will enable the reduction of taxation of labour nationally through the employment allowance, and provides support to employers of under-21s. As I have said on several occasions, the Bill is good for growth and good for jobs. I commend it to the House.