Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Bill

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Monday 22nd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Paul Goggins]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. If a looked-after child aged 16 or 17, perhaps studying and working part time, was in a position to make a modest contribution to their own fund, that would be a good thing. Looked-after children have to be more resilient than any other people in our society, so it would be good for them to learn about the importance of managing money and planning ahead through the medium of that child ISA or a savings account to which they and others may contribute. That could make them even more resilient, and looking back to the time when I worked with such young people, the opportunity to sit down with them and work out their money management would have been a great way to do it. I think that that suggestion has great merit, and if the young person could also contribute, that would be a very good thing too.

My proposal would require the Government to open accounts for about 20,000 looked-after children each year. With additional top-ups of £100 for those who remain in care for a year or more, as I have described, we are talking about a total annual sum of some £6.6 million. We can argue about whether child trust funds are a sensible way to spend half a billion pounds, and the Government have taken a view that is different from that taken by my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn and those of us on the Labour Benches, but I put it to the House that a scheme that would deliver a savings account for every looked-after child in the UK who had been in care for more than three months, at a cost of less than £7 million, would be a good way to spend public money. The young person would get the money when they were 18. It could be an important part of care planning, as I said in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun, and would promote resilience. It would send a clear and strong message to the young people concerned that we owe them an obligation and are prepared to support them in a practical way.

I hope that the Minister will provide a positive response not only to the precise content of my amendments, but to the proposal in general and the need to do something, either here or in another place, that will put in the Bill something tangible for looked-after children. What I propose is modest, but it could make a real difference. If the Minister is prepared to act and make that clear, that would be good news for looked-after children. It would demonstrate that, whatever differences there are in this place over the Bill, when it comes to looked-after children we are prepared to sink those differences and do something together.

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to pass comment on the Opposition’s continued attempts to retain child trust funds. I am struck, in particular, by the nature of their opposition: rather than concentrating on the effectiveness or otherwise of child trust funds as savings vehicles, they appear to have reduced their argument to one about generic usefulness. There seems to be a growing objection to abolishing child trust funds, because somehow the Opposition have inadequate confidence in the junior ISAs or child ISAs that are due to replace them. That is particularly concerning.

I remind those Members who sat on the Public Bill Committee with me, and inform those who did not, of a quote from the director general of the Building Societies Association, Mr Adrian Coles, who said:

“let us not pretend that we need to rely on the Government or the public sector to do all of this. The 49 building societies and other mutuals offer about 100 children’s savings accounts in the free market, which have been pretty successful over the years”.––[Official Report, Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Bill Public Bill Committee, 2 November 2010; c. 26, Q67.]

I know that in Committee concerns were expressed that the customers who take out ISAs might be the more affluent or the more elderly. It was made clear at the time that 12 million people on incomes under £20,000 have ISAs, and that 40% of them are under the age of 44, compared with just 20% who are over the age of 64, so any concerns that younger families are not sharing in ISAs are unfounded.

I was particularly concerned when I heard continued doubts about the ability of families on lower incomes to cope with the financial complexity of an ISA. We need to trust people. A great deal of work is going into financial education—an increasing amount. It is a trend initiated by the previous Government, and I congratulate them on that. We are building on it, so we can have confidence in ISAs as a potential future savings vehicle.

Another reason for opposing the abolition of the child trust fund was the impact that that could have on the needs of families with disabled children. I was shocked by one of the statements by the shadow Minister, the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), when he said that

“the proposal for providing 8,000 week-long respite breaks each year for disabled children in England . . . trivialises the nature of the child trust fund”.––[Official Report, Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Public Bill Committee, 9 November 2010; c. 228.]

I found that a disquieting comment. I do not regard respite breaks for children as trivial in any way, shape or form.

[Mr Hanson]

There are two points about those discussions in Committee about which the hon. Gentleman is aware. First, the abolition of the child trust fund takes away a resource that is applicable in Scotland, Northern Ireland, England and Wales, and replaces it with a provision that is available only in England. Secondly, provision for respite care is entirely different from building a capital asset for individuals at the age of 18. That was the objective of the revised proposals from the Minister.

[Paul Maynard]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that effort to bring clarity. None the less, I regret the use of the word “trivialise”, if only because I have spoken to many families in my constituency with disabled children. When speaking just a fortnight ago to one family who had benefited from the family fund and had their first holiday in five years, the mother broke down in tears.

I raise the matter not to have a go at the shadow Minister, but to highlight one of the wider issues that was illuminated in Committee: the difference between the accessibility of an asset that is locked away until the young person is aged 18, and the changing needs of families with disabled children—and of looked-after children, for that matter. If we are seeking to target the child trust fund at those in the community who are the most vulnerable, who have the most chaotic lives, who are subject to the most pressures, to whom unexpected things occur, is it truly sensible to tie them into something that can be delivered only when the individual reaches the age of 18?

[Cathy Jamieson]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the situation should not be an either/or? We should be able to give day-to-day help and support to the most vulnerable, at the same time as allowing people—for example, looked-after children and people who have disabled children—to build a capital asset that will be available to them when they enter adulthood.

[Paul Maynard]

I agree entirely, and I wish that during the evidence taking in Committee and in the debate, we had had an either/or discussion, rather than an “and, and, and, and yet another idea” discussion. We had far too many shopping lists and not enough recognition that hard choices had to be made. It is important to recognise, as Marc Bush from Scope did when he gave evidence to us, that delivering an asset at age 18 is not the solution to the problems faced by families engaging in the transition of their child from childhood to adulthood, when faced with a complex disability. That starts at age 14 and can continue to age 30. The hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) recognised that when I intervened on her, and that was a useful move forward.

When we are discussing the future of child ISAs, I hope it is taken into account that families who are particularly vulnerable may need access before the age of 18. Locking the ISA away until age 18 is not always the best solution.

[Kate Green]

rose—

[Paul Maynard]

I will give way, for the last time.

[Kate Green]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. He is right to say that if the junior ISA can offer that flexibility to disabled children, it would be a useful enhancement—I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response on that—but does he accept that another advantage of the child trust fund, which he and I would welcome in the junior ISA, was that it delivered extra money to more vulnerable children in the double payments that were available to children from low-income households or with disabilities, for example?

[Paul Maynard]

I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention. One of the joys of the Bill is that I have learned so much from her about progressive universalism. She is right that the progressive element is being removed. However, it has struck me that it is as though I have been locked away on Moonbase Alpha for the past fortnight, because there seems to have been no recognition on the part of the Opposition that we are operating in a much more stringent financial climate. The hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern), who is no longer in her place, dismissively said at one point in Committee, “I recognise that there has been a debate about the deficit and all that sort of thing.” I found that regrettable.

We are operating in a situation in which we have to make financial savings. Rather than having a discussion about whether the child trust fund is the most appropriate use of public money, we have continually debated why we should do this, and this, and this, and then something else, and something else again. At no point did we discuss the crux of the issue: whether the child trust fund was the best use of public money to help those most in need in our society.

I welcome the fact that the Minister is having discussions with the right hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins). I hope something comes of that, but I remain concerned that the Opposition’s determination to try to save child trust funds is based on an outdated notion that only those savings vehicles provided by the state can provide a solution. That is not the case.

[Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield) (Lab)]

The child trust fund has a dual purpose—not only to give the young person a lump sum, but to nurture in them a savings habit for life. Some 74% of those eligible have taken up the responsibility of the child trust fund account. It is the most successful savings product on the market; ISAs and pensions fall well behind that figure. It is simple—much simpler than opening a deposit account—and it gives people a nudge to save.

Nearly a third of parents and grandparents have added to the fund, and the poorest 20% have added a higher proportion of their income to it. However, even for young people whose families do not contribute, the practical demonstration of saving in the account is invaluable. Organisations such as the Personal Finance Education Group, which works in schools, structure their lessons around it, certain in the knowledge that all pupils will have received a statement annually on their birthday, and that all pupils have such an account.

The very universality of the scheme provides a useful and practical foundation for learning and for influencing behaviour. In addition, it is especially useful for looked-after children and children with disabilities, who receive extra premiums. For looked-after children, it is a practical example of the state acting as parent and attempting to improve their prospects at 18—an ambition that all parents have for their children—by providing a lump sum at one of the most difficult periods of their lives, a time of transition that is difficult for any teenager, but especially for those leaving care.

For children with disabilities, the scheme provides an asset that allows them to take advantage of life opportunities or to invest in whatever they see as their priority. It is unfair to remove the scheme without a full impact assessment of groups who may be disproportionately affected, such as families with disabled children and people with disabilities, especially as the Demos report showed that the emergency Budget had a substantial financial impact on families with disabled children.

It has been suggested that a junior ISA may replace the child trust fund, but I cannot believe that it will provide an adequate replacement, even if a seamless transition in January 2011were possible, which has been disputed by a number of experts in the savings field. An ISA primarily benefits taxpayers and higher-rate taxpayers in particular, so what advantage does an ISA offer to a non-taxpaying family? Equally, the simplicity of the child trust fund product has been praised.

I have worked with people to whom ISAs and other financial products have little relevance, with people who need support to open a basic bank account and with people who have no notion of opening a deposit account. I urge Members, therefore, to retain the scheme in some form—even if only for looked-after children, children with disabilities and the poorest third of families—and not to scrap it completely. I urge Members to support the amendments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Maynard]

I welcome this opportunity to express my views on the concept of saving gateways. I listened with interest to the shadow Minister expressing his desire to save them for the future, but in his defence he missed some of the key pieces of evidence that we heard in the Bill Committee. I should like to remind him of some of that evidence. Adrian Coles, director general of the Building Societies Association, told us:

“No building society had committed to offering a saving gateway”.

Eric Leenders, executive director of the British Bankers Association, said that there were

“only a couple of providers who felt that it was suitably beneficial for them to provide the account”.––[Official Report, Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Public Bill Committee, 2 November 2010; c. 34, Q98.]

The Post Office would participate only if provided with taxpayers’ subsidy. It will cost £300 million to continue with the scheme.

There was a great deal of debate in Committee about the possibility of the fourth link in that chain being credit unions, and I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue) for her assiduous advocacy of their cause. In a way, she was quite right. I was impressed to hear how many credit unions there were in Makerfield. I think she said that there is one at the end of almost every street, or certainly within walking distance for most of her constituents. We have a very successful one in Blackpool, too, but they would not be available for this purpose in the many parts of the country where the credit union movement has yet to implant itself fully, so we would be left with the kind of postcode lottery against which the shadow Minister was fulminating in the previous debate. We cannot have it both ways.

[Bill Esterson]

The hon. Gentleman describes a lack of credit unions in certain parts of the country, which is precisely why the opportunity to have the saving gateway is so important. Does he not appreciate that Government input into helping lower-income families to save is exactly what is needed to provide the necessary impetus?

[Paul Maynard]

Unfortunately, the hon. Gentleman’s point was not borne out by the evidence of Mark Lyonette of the Association of British Credit Unions Ltd. He was quite clear when he said of the saving gateway:

“None of the credit unions built their business plan around it, so I don’t think its withdrawal is a threat to the health of credit unions.”––[Official Report, Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Public Bill Committee, 2 November 2010; c. 52, Q149.]

It is important to ensure that we give credit unions what they want, and that is why we are seeing reforms to the Credit Unions Act 1979 enabling them to work with more than just individuals—they will now be able to work with interest groups, social enterprises and the like. We should not therefore allow the Opposition’s statement that credit unions have to be involved to obstruct the fact that this scheme will cost £300 million to continue. This might cause some Opposition Members to roll their eyes and shake their heads, as they did earlier in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton), but we are now living in a very different fiscal situation. The shadow Minister was quite right: the Government have changed, and we now have to take tougher financial decisions. We cannot justify spending £300 million on a saving gateway that will not be universally accessible across the country because there simply are not enough commercial providers willing to provide it. This is not a debate about a group hug, or about trying to encourage everyone to save more. We all know about those things.

I have been delighted to hear the hon. Member for Makerfield talk about Brighthouse, of which there is a branch in my constituency. I almost thought that she must have sneaked into my surgeries, because her tales about her voters’ problems with Brighthouse were the same as mine. However, I do not think that the saving gateway is the answer to the problems that many poor people face in getting access to cheap credit. It is not the answer to the problems we have been discussing. It fails the test that I raised on Second Reading—a test that I call my rhododendron test. The Opposition have a tendency to fixate on a single item of legislation that they believe will somehow solve all the problems in the world, but I am afraid that the saving gateway, however popular the pilots might have been, has not been popular enough with the providers that we need to ensure its success. That is why I support the Government’s decision to remove the scheme.

[Yvonne Fovargue]

I want to talk about the abolition of the saving gateway and the disappointment felt not only by the putative savers but by the credit unions, which thought that it would have a massive impact on the sector. The credit unions put a large amount of time and money into designing and introducing their product because they believed that the scheme had cross-party support. While matching the money is important in incentivising savings, it is not the only factor involved; in fact, it is not always the most important factor in influencing people to save. As we have heard, ease of access to a financial institution cannot be overstressed, and to use the existing credit unions at the heart of the community and to encourage the growth and development of the sector via this product was seen as vital. Indeed, Mark Lyonette said that encouraging people to save with credit unions was the issue. People are used to credit unions giving out loans, but the important thing is to provide them with products that encourage people to save.

The message that has been endorsed by the Government via the scheme is that even a small amount of savings matters, and that cannot be overstated. Most people do not deliberately set out to be in debt, but life events—such as the loss of a job, accidents, disability or even something as simple as the cooker breaking down—can cause debt. A small amount of money saved can act as a buffer, and people can then feel more in control and have more confidence. The value of that feeling cannot be overestimated.

It might be conventional wisdom that people should pay off all their debts before they start to save, but I take issue with that, as do people from the credit unions. As I said, events happen. The washing machine might break before someone has paid off the cooker, and if there is nothing to fall back on, the spiral of debt gets faster and deeper. That is when people turn to the legal loan sharks who charge more than 2,000%, or the actual loan sharks who prey on the vulnerable who have no resources. It is vital to provide a mechanism to remove people from the spiral of debt and make it easier to save. We know that people want to save for such events. Otherwise, why would so many people have saved with Farepak, a scheme that they believed was safe? If we could provide a trusted, easily accessible, local savings vehicle to encourage saving, we would prevent a considerable amount of human misery as well saving the health service a considerable sum for the treatment of depression and, in some cases, attempted suicide due to debt. A small amount of investment now could prevent a huge amount being spent later, and I urge the Government to reflect on that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kerry McCarthy]

Sorry, Mr Deputy Speaker. I assumed that they had all been grouped together.

Let me make a general point that links back to amendment 3 and the need to retain the grant. This is not just a matter of putting the £190 into people’s pockets so that they can spend it either on improving their diet during pregnancy or on items that they might need when the child is born. We need to bring people in so that they access professional health advice at the 25th week of pregnancy or, as we have debated, earlier in pregnancy. That is really important and there is nothing to replace it. The Government seem to have no suggestion on how to bring people in through the door and ensure that we increase the number of women who access such advice if the health in pregnancy grant is not used as a trigger mechanism. If the Government will not accept amendment 3 or any of the other amendments that call for more time and a review of how the grant works, will the Minister at least tell us how we can ensure that more women access professional advice on their health and the health of their unborn child during pregnancy? The grant was designed to tackle a serious issue and it is being abolished in its early stages. It is a shame to abandon the project at this stage.

[Paul Maynard]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to speak about the health in pregnancy grant, which of the three items covered by the Bill caused the most consternation in Committee and on the Opposition Benches. It certainly appeared to cause confusion in the Opposition’s arguments.

I have noted even today that there has been a slow, gradual erosion in the totalitarian position taken early on by the Opposition that the health in pregnancy grant was the most wonderful thing imaginable and could not possibly be trampled on. There has been a gradual slip back and quite a few Opposition Members have claimed that the grant was somehow misnamed and that, had they only called it something different, it would have all been all right. I must take them back to what the previous Prime Minister said when the grant was introduced. He said that he had received “powerful representations” about the

“importance of a healthy diet in the final weeks of pregnancy”.

He was very specific. He said the “final weeks of pregnancy”—not early in pregnancy, halfway through, in the 12th week, in the first week, or in the 25th week. The grant was well named, because it did precisely what the previous Prime Minister intended it to do.

The debate is not about the benefits of maternal nutrition, either. Everybody in the House agrees about the importance of proper maternal nutrition, but, clearly, we are divided on how that is best achieved. The Government do not believe that the health in pregnancy grant is the way to do it.

The debate is certainly not about timing. We have a range of alternatives: the Healthy Start vouchers, the maternity grant, and the Sure Start facilities. The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) focused in particular on access to health care advice. I entirely agree with her about that, but she cannot avoid the fact that the Healthy Start vouchers are linked to attendance with a midwife.

Furthermore, the idea of the health in pregnancy grant was to provide access to health visitors, but one of the previous Government’s innovations that I wholeheartedly approve and wish to build on is the family nurse partnership schemes that operate in about 50 different councils. They specifically offer the access to advice for the most vulnerable that the hon. Lady was talking about. I simply do not understand her obsession with the health in pregnancy grant as the sole mechanism through which we can access advice. There are already multiple pathways to that advice—pathways that are more successful. I even think that there is a family nurse partnership in Bristol. Such schemes target the most vulnerable in society from the moment of conception until well past birth. This is far more expensive, I accept, but that is because it is a targeted intervention.

I do not accept the hon. Lady’s argument that we need to retain the health in pregnancy grant because it gives access to health advice. It is not the sole pathway for that.

[Kerry McCarthy]

The hon. Gentleman mentioned the family intervention project, and he is right that it does some valuable work—including some valuable work in Bristol. Does he have any idea how many families receive that advice and how many have been brought within the scheme compared with how many people would have received advice through the health in pregnancy grant?

[Paul Maynard]

It is actually called the family nurse partnership, but I assume that we are talking about the same thing. I know that in Blackpool it has worked with about 200 families in the past year. The numbers are clearly far fewer than those who could access the health in pregnancy grant, but once again the hon. Lady is returning to the debate that we have had over and over again about the universal versus the targeted.

[Dr Daniel Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the difference with schemes such as the one in Bristol that he and the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) mentioned is that they can show tangible results, whereas the health in pregnancy grant can show no tangible evidence of how it has been beneficial?

[Paul Maynard]

I agree entirely. That is a very fair point. It was never clear whether the Opposition believed in universality or targeting. It seemed to depend on which amendment they happened to be pressing at any moment in time. It was part of the incoherent approach that they seemed to have to the debate.

The previous Government never tackled the issue of how it took up to eight weeks merely to process a health in pregnancy grant claim. The money often came through not in the 25th week but in the 33rd week—well beyond the time at which there was any hope of achieving real dietary change.

I specifically tackled the hon. Member for Bristol East on the issue of usefulness versus effectiveness. When she said in Committee that this was a useful grant, I asked her how she defined useful. She mentioned access, which I have dealt with, but never really dealt with the issue of effectiveness. That was my concern with the Opposition’s argument. At no point did they try to evaluate properly how effective the scheme was. I know that many amendments were tabled asking for such an evaluation, but all along the Opposition’s rhetoric was to use the word “useful” rather than “effective”. At no time did they argue that the scheme was effective, so we were left with not very much more than the shadow Minister trying to argue that it was nice to hand out other people’s money to other people. It might well be, but that is not a firm or solid foundation on which to build a health in pregnancy grant.

I support the abolition of the grant for the simple reason that we have a number of alternative mechanisms to support families who need assistance during pregnancy. The grant was not paid out at the right time in pregnancy, in my view, and I do not believe that it has achieved its goal. I do not believe that we would even be able to provide the evidence if that were the case. I wholly support the Government in what they are trying to do.

[Kate Green]

I am very sad that the Government have brought forward proposals to cancel the health in pregnancy grant. We have heard this evening and during the Bill’s earlier stages a number of criticisms of its structure. We have heard that it is paid at the wrong time—too late to have a significant impact on maternal nutrition and well-being—and that the money could have made more difference, even pre-conception, to low-income women of child-bearing age. We have heard that it misses the point and that women fritter it away on shoes and going to the spa. That might be true of a minority, but for many others the grant makes a crucial difference at a time when family finances become tight.

The Opposition have been asked whether we are not confused about wanting the grant to be universal or targeted at low-income and more vulnerable women. We are not confused. We are clear that we want a universal grant for all the reasons that we believe in universality: it is more effective at reaching the most disadvantaged, more cost-effective and simpler to administer, and it is easier to know when one is entitled to claim. We accept, however, that if we have to settle for a reduction in spending on pregnant women then, for a time at least, a targeted payment would have enabled us to keep the structure of the grant until it became affordable to offer it again on a universal basis.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sheila Gilmore]

There are, indeed, choices to be made: there is a choice about the kind of society we want to live in, and there is a choice about how we resolve economic problems. Members on the coalition Benches want the public to believe that there is only one show in town, which is that we have the worst deficit in peacetime and that we have a situation that was entirely caused by the last Government spending too much over too many years. That is the only argument they want people to believe, but let us just unwind a couple of years.—

[Paul Maynard]

rose—

[Sheila Gilmore]

I am not going to take an intervention just now.

I recall that three years ago, at the beginning of the recession, people were predicting how high unemployment would rise, how difficult things would get and how high our deficit might be. Unemployment did not rise nearly as high as predicted under the Labour Government, and I will tell hon. Members why: because we were putting in money as part of an economic stimulus. Yes, we borrowed to do that but we did so because it was the right thing to do. We were told that it was the right thing to do by the junior partner in this coalition throughout that period. I remember those debates before the election—

[Sheila Gilmore]

I was thinking about the public debates on television involving the Chancellor and the would-be Chancellors. I recall what the Liberal Democrat spokesman on finance said, and he put forward a completely different perspective from the current Chancellor. There was no agreement.

Members on the Government Benches may disagree with what I am saying, and I am happy for them to do so because that is legitimate in politics. We have a different view of how to do things, but that does not mean that our view is so unreasonable that we are not even allowed to put it. We are hearing that we are not allowed to argue any of these points and that we are not supposed to say that we would make different choices. The Minister gave this one away when he said that these measures would not really harm people; he said that the saving gateway had not even started and so nobody was being harmed, which is why it is an easy cut.

[Paul Maynard]

How does the hon. Lady respond to the point that there were no willing providers of the saving gateway? No matter how successful her party’s pilots were, no building societies were willing to make that provision. It is all very well her saying all this, but the gateway was not going to take place in reality; it was just going to take place in her own private make-believe world.

[Sheila Gilmore]

If the hon. Gentleman looks at all the evidence and the research, he will find that it is clear that this was going to take place—[Interruption.] It was going to take place because there were providers who were going to do it—[Interruption.] I do not know why he is waving his hands in the air—we could do that too. There were credit unions that wanted to get involved, as did two banks. The complaint made in Committee was that because only two banks wanted to get involved, there might not be enough access points. I have suggested other access points and I described the debate that took place when the housing association movement, with which I was involved, wanted to be one of the ones that would help people to make payments into a saving gateway scheme. That argument does not hold up.

We have heard a number of distortions of the evidence. We were told that the NCT thought that the money should go on women buying food, rather than saving, but we should recall that Belinda Phipps, the NCT’s chief executive, has written a foreword to the book that I mentioned earlier entitled “Asset Building for Children—Creating a new civic savings platform for young people”. It was written by two people, one of whom is Phillip Blond, who believes very strongly in the child trust fund; he believes that saving is very important and he suggests that we should have stuck with this arrangement. He does not say that it was without its faults—this is not a case of saying that it did not have faults—but he devotes a paragraph to saying that although it could be improved, that does not mean we should throw it out completely.

Some of the debate, particularly in Committee, was interesting and covered a lot of important material. If we want to do the best by people, we would not simply reach a point where, without looking at the wider context, we say, “Right. We have to make some savings now. Let’s just chop this, this and this.” It may be that we could have improved some of these schemes and they could have been differently focused. However, that is not the debate before us, but the stuff that has been thrown up in the course of it; the debate before us deals with the fact that either we have these schemes or we do not.

Labour Members believe that we could run our economy differently and that we do not need to cut so far and so fast. On that basis, we would be able to decide which things we wish to keep in place and which things we might want to save. I could talk about all sorts of savings that I might want to make, but I would also want to talk about the balance between savings and taxation. There are legitimate debates to be had about that.

We do not need to accept proposals that harm some of the most vulnerable in our society and the long-term view. It is astonishing that the Conservatives, in particular, whom I always understood to believe in saving, should not want to go ahead with the saving gateway. In 2003, it seems, the present Chancellor said:

“We think that having savings…gives people a stake in society, gives them independence, encourages self-reliance and bolsters the freedom of the individual against the overbearing state.”—[Official Report, 15 December 2003; Vol. 415, c. 1345.]

He has clearly changed his mind.