David Laws (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

I said this morning that a couple of dogs had not yet barked in the Committee. This is one of the two dogs—the other was the issue of public sector pensions. I was tempted not to raise this particular issue because it has not been fundamental to the debate on the Bill and was a relatively modest part of the Pensions Commission proposals. Yet when we consider how much money is at stake in pension tax relief and how devastating the Pensions Commission’s second report was in its criticism of the Government on this matter, it would seem a little odd to complete our debate without at least touching upon this issue. In that report, the Pensions Commission concluded that pension tax relief is costly, poorly focused and not well understood. It is also true—and I anticipate that we will hear this from the Minister in a few moments—that the Pensions Commission said that it would be quite complex to change pension tax relief and did not make recommendations for immediate changes.

James Purnell (Minister of State (Pensions Reform), Department for Work and Pensions; Stalybridge & Hyde, Labour)

Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that the report actually said, on page 319, that it was “very complex”?

David Laws (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)

Yes, it said it was very complex but also that it would not recommend changing it in the short term—in other words, in the next few years. It did not say that it was so complex that people of the Minister’s brilliance and all those in the civil service, the Treasury and the Department for Work and Pensions could not start doing some work on this in order to produce a better system.

Therefore, I hope that the Minister will not use that as an excuse not to take this issue full-on, although I fear that he might. I anticipate a speech in which he will say that this is a matter for Treasury Ministers, not for his Department. He will say that this is extremely complex and difficult to deal with, that other changes to the regime of pension tax relief are taking place and that it would be imprudent to introduce other measures at the same time, as it might destabilise them. I have seen this speech outside; I have read it.

Despite all that, I will not be knocked off course. Not only did the Pensions Commission come up with this devastating criticism, but the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), in his evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee, said he very much hoped that this issue would be pursued. The Select Committee itself asked the Government to look into that.

What I want to find out from the Government today is not the bit about the complexity—because I know that bit, have already read it and am probably going to hear it again—but whether the Minister agrees with the conclusion of the Pensions Commission report that this tax relief is costly, poorly focused and not well understood. The main issue will not be whether it is costly or well understood, because we already have information on that, but how focused, fair or unfair it is. We have Government figures on the cost of pension tax relief and they are pretty significant, which is another reason why we could not leave this whole debate without airing the issue.

In 2005-06, the net cost of pension tax relief, after clawing back the money on tax from pensions in payment, will be approximately £14.3 billion. That must be something north of 1 per cent. of GDP, which is quite a lot of money. That figure has increased by almost £2 billion since 2004-05. It is up by something like £5 billion from 2001-02, which is a pretty significant increase.

If some of this week’s newspaper reports are correct that the demand for pension products is increasing as a consequence of the recent simplification of pension tax relief, we may find that the net cost of pension tax relief continues to rise quite rapidly in the future. Therefore, it is quite a large element of total tax relief and very large in relation to this whole debate.

We also know from the Pensions Commission’s excellent second report that pension tax relief is not well understood. Page 317 of the report provides two very useful charts, which show basic rate and higher rate taxpayers’ understanding of how pension tax relief works. Almost half of basic-rate taxpayers had no idea about their entitlement to tax relief on their pension contributions, 26 per cent. thought it would be better  than the basic rate and only 17 per cent. got it right at the basic rate. Higher rate taxpayers, as one might expect, were a little better informed about the enormous benefits of tax relief to them, but even there only 28 per cent. got it right that they would get a 40 per cent. rate of relief. Almost the same figure as for basic rate taxpayers, 27 per cent., could come up with no idea at all about what the tax relief was worth.

I hope that we can establish that tax relief is costly and that it is not very well understood. The issue is whether it is well focused and fair. Before I get an intervention, I should point out that it is a reasonable presumption within our tax system and, as I understand it, most other tax systems of developed economies that there should not be a double taxation of pensions. One should not be taxed on the income used to put into a pension and again on money as it is drawn out. That principle, in one way or another, is embedded in our whole savings regime. However, the Pensions Commission’s point was that we do not seem to have that kind of tax neutrality in relation to our existing system in the UK but, rather, an unbalanced system that seems to give greater relief to one proportion of the population. In crude terms, something like 50 per cent. of the tax relief goes to the top 10 per cent. of income earners and 25 per cent. to 2.5 per cent. of the income earners. That would not necessarily matter, if that simply reflected the amount of participation in pension savings by those two groups and the need therefore to neutralise the effects on taxation. However, it seems to be not simply neutralising, but actually skewing the tax system in a way that benefits people on very high incomes.

We already know that in this country we have an extraordinarily unequal distribution of income, wealth and opportunity. There are question marks about whether social mobility has been declining over recent years. So, it is very striking and also bizarre and extraordinary that we should have a tax system that the Pensions Commission considers to be skewed in favour of those people with the higher incomes. The second report of the Pensions Commission points out this extraordinary situation, which we have been discussing throughout the Bill, where those people on very low incomes potentially suffer enormous withdrawal of benefits in retirement and therefore may have their incentives to save cut away from them. In the earlier debate the hon. Member for Eastbourne talked about the effect of means-testing essentially operating as a tax on saving.

At the same time, to those people who already have a lot of money, more is given. There is an extraordinary graph on page 313 of the Pensions Commission’s second report, which shows the impact of the tax advantages on returns from savings. Looking at it, one will see an extraordinary rise in the tax advantage of saving for those people as they go over the threshold for upper-rate tax. The Pensions Commission made the issue very clear on page 312 of the report:

“The benefits of this significant cost to the Exchequer are...extremely unequally distributed”.

It continued:

“But the overall message is clear: the beneficial impact of tax relief on the rates of return of savings is much higher for higher-rate taxpayers than for basic rate or lower-rate taxpayers. And this is not simply because tax relief undoes the higher  detrimental effect on rates of return which higher tax rates would impose on non-tax privileged saving: higher tax rate payers can achieve through pension savings higher post-tax rates of return than those enjoyed by basic-rate taxpayers”—

which includes those at the bottom end of the income distribution.

We have a bizarre, eccentric system. It not only uses tax relief on pensions to give a special bonus to those who already have a lot, rather than just neutralising the tax consequences, but it disincentivises saving among people with very little money, because there is so much means-testing. Enormous incentives to save are being given to people at the upper end of the income distribution. It seems bizarre that we should be giving massively generous incentives to affluent people while creating disincentives for people at the bottom end of the income distribution

James Purnell (Minister of State (Pensions Reform), Department for Work and Pensions; Stalybridge & Hyde, Labour)

I am following the hon. Gentleman’s speech with interest. I should be even more interested if he were to tell us what his policy was.

David Laws (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)

I shall move on to that. I am encouraged to go further. We published a policy last year—I am sorry that the Minister missed it—to reorganise tax relief on pensions so that tax relief is paid at the basic rate and the savings are recycled as a cut in the basic rate of tax. If the Minister has an alternative we will listen to it, because there are other ways of better using the money.

Our policy would avoid the current situation, from which most Members of this House will probably benefit. We can take the enormous benefit of 40 per cent. tax relief as we save, in the knowledge that many of us will be paying only the basic rate of 22 per cent. when we retire. A large proportion of the people who receive tax relief at 40 per cent. will pay only the basic rate of tax in retirement.

Figure 7.8 on page 313 of the Pensions Commission’s second report is an interesting graph that shows the average tax rate for people in different income bands in retirement. The average rate of about 20 per cent. applies to people on incomes of up to about £55,000 a year. Someone who has been a higher rate taxpayer during their working life has to earn an awful lot of money in retirement to miss out on that enormous freebie from saving in pension accounts. Notwithstanding all the criticisms that have been made of the Chancellor of the Exchequer for tinkering with tax relief on pensions, I should have thought that removing that anomaly, which enormously advantages the advantaged, would be extremely sensible for a Labour Government who are, on the face of it, passionate about social justice.

I know that the Minister will say that such changes are far too complicated, but in its contribution to the Select Committee inquiry, the Pensions Policy Institute said:

“Discussions between the PPI and practitioners suggest that reform”

of the type that we suggest

“would be possible. A review of value for money to the taxpayer of current and alternative systems of tax incentives for pensions and other forms of savings would help address a remaining significant policy issue.”

Elsewhere, the PPI has said:

“Discussions between the PPI and practitioners have indicated that it would be possible to resolve the problems identified in Lord Turner’s report.”

I think Lord Turner would acknowledge that he was hardly encouraged by the Treasury or other parts of Government to look in great detail at tax relief on pensions. One suspects that the Chancellor would have gone potty if Lord Turner had gone that far into the Treasury’s area.

We should not regard the Pensions Commission as having drawn a line under the issue with its conclusion that resolving it will be complex. We should note instead its criticism of the unfocused nature of the existing relief. In the Minister’s reply, I hope to hear an acknowledgment that tax relief is badly focused and that the door should not be closed to consideration of that issue.

Sally Keeble (Northampton North, Labour)

I should be very interested if the hon. Gentleman would again go through the proposals. I am unsure about the detail. I understand that pension relief on the contributions would be capped at the basic rate. Then would the money saved be provided to broaden the band that is only taxed at 10 per cent., or would thresholds be increased? Or would it go into other forms of support for pensioners’ income?

David Laws (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising that issue. There are a myriad different ways in which tax relief could be redesigned. It could simply be redesigned so that it was given to every member of the community at the same rate, rather like the proposal for personal accounts where everybody gets the same rates of pension tax relief. It could be that the money saved in that way is used to incentivise saving in some other way. Our proposal is to restrict relief to the basic rate and then to funnel that money back into reducing the basic rate of tax. But it could be used for many other things.

Sally Keeble (Northampton North, Labour)

For everybody?

David Laws (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)

Into the basic rate of tax for everybody. But it would be open to the hon. Lady and others to bring forward their own proposals. There are plenty of other ways of doing this.

I hope that the Minister will not only give us the guarantee that he regards pension tax relief as badly focused, but clarify the purpose of pensions tax relief and whether it is to give incentives to save or whether it simply seeks to deliver neutrality in the tax system.

Nigel Waterson (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Eastbourne, Conservative)

I do not wish to detain the Committee long, particularly at this late stage in our deliberations, but I could not not intervene in this debate.

I apologise—although I would not wish to lull him into a false sense of security—to the hon. Member for Yeovil that I missed the policy announcement he mentioned. As with buses, however, if you miss one Lib Dem policy announcement there will be another one along at any time, probably saying exactly the opposite. I am grateful for his confirmation that indeed his party’s policy is the same as it was before the last election, which is to remove the tax relief available to higher earners for making pensions contributions. He has twitched so I will give way. [Laughter.]

David Laws (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)

The hon. Gentleman clearly has not been following the twists and turns of Liberal Democrat policy as well as he should have been. This policy was passed a year ago. It was not the policy at the last election.

Nigel Waterson (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Eastbourne, Conservative)

I apologise again. I was only going on what his hon. Friend the Member for Northavon said in the House. In any case, it does not really matter, as there is no Liberal Democrat Government following that election and we are now looking to the next election.

So that my constituents among others can be absolutely clear about this, the Liberal Democrats would remove the tax relief on pension contributions for higher earners.

David Laws (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)

And reduce the basic rate.

Nigel Waterson (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Eastbourne, Conservative)

Yes, well, we await some of the detail. I am amazed, if that is the case, that the hon. Gentleman has not had the courage of his convictions because, if he does not mind my saying so, his rather mealy-mouthed new clause only talks about having a report whereas it seems to me he claims to have a thoroughly worked out, hard-edged policy, which I think he might just have managed to form into a new clause, but there we are. There is always Report stage to consider.

Speaking for my party, at this crucial stage where the last thing we want to do is remove incentives to people to save into pensions for their retirement, to start fiddling with and reducing the tax relief available is exactly the wrong way to go. The hon. Gentleman is wrong when he says it is not understood. It may be true, as he indicated, that a lot of people do not understand all the complexities and the detail but they do understand the central point that if they pay into a pension fund they get tax relief.

David Laws (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)

That is not the point I made; it was Lord Turner’s point. Does the hon. Gentleman disagree with Lord Turner’s suggestion that tax relief is poorly focused?

Nigel Waterson (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Eastbourne, Conservative)

Well, I agree with Lord Turner’s point that it would be, I think the phrase was, “very complex to do anything about it” but it is a luxury available to the hon. Gentleman’s party to have very complex policies because they are never going to be called upon to put them into effect in the real world.

We on the Conservative side of the Committee would have great reluctance in supporting any such proposal, even if it were actually contained in the new clause. We think it will not be well received at all among the many higher earners out there who are aware that there is tax relief and may well for that reason be saving in their pension. This is at a time when we are really worried as a party that, if anything, people need more encouragement to save into pensions, particularly with the coming of personal accounts and the whole issue of levelling down, which I will not go into again.

James Purnell (Minister of State (Pensions Reform), Department for Work and Pensions; Stalybridge & Hyde, Labour)

I am tempted to say that the hon. Gentleman has given my speech, so there is no need for me to do so, but I shall gild the lily slightly by saying that I look forward to the “Focus” leaflets in Twickenham, Richmond and Guildford highlighting the importance of higher-rate tax relief, explaining to people how it works and how the Liberal Democrats are going to take it away.

David Laws (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)

And in Yeovil.

James Purnell (Minister of State (Pensions Reform), Department for Work and Pensions; Stalybridge & Hyde, Labour)

And indeed in Yeovil. I also look forward to seeing the detailed calculations that the hon. Gentleman will provide at his seminar. He rather gave the impression that he was going to be able to pocket £14 billion from this. As he well knows, the higher rate element of it accounts for only about a quarter, and there is no guarantee that the savings will materialise because, people being what they are, having lost one form of tax-advantaged saving, they might well find another to allow themselves to make provision for the future. Perhaps, therefore, all he will achieve is to shift money from pension saving into another form of tax-advantaged saving, perhaps housing. Given that the thrust of our debates has been to encourage pension saving, I am not sure that that would necessarily be a brilliant policy.

I am also tempted to read out to the Committeepage 319 of the commission report. I can see that you would be delighted for me to do so, Mr. Gale, but I shall just send it to the hon. Gentleman again so that he can read the bits that do not suit his argument quite so well, especially the bits that say that it would be very complex to make the changes.

David Laws (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)

Will the Minister give way?

James Purnell (Minister of State (Pensions Reform), Department for Work and Pensions; Stalybridge & Hyde, Labour)

Absolutely; it will give me time to find the place.

David Laws (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)

If it could be demonstrated that it was not very complex, would the Minister then be in favour of the change?

James Purnell (Minister of State (Pensions Reform), Department for Work and Pensions; Stalybridge & Hyde, Labour)

I did not have time to find the quote. However, the hon. Gentleman has again demonstrated that he is cleverer than the Pensions Commission and, indeed, John Hills, who looked into the matter in some detail. John Hills gave a lecture on this, which was posted on the PPI website—that is not the right quote. Here we are: the Pensions Commission said that it would be extremely complex to make the changes so long as there is a significant element of DB—defined-benefit—provision in the system.

The point is that, as is explained on page 319, which all hon. Members will read before the hon. Gentleman’s seminar, making the changes would deal a potentially fatal blow to defined-benefit schemes because of the extreme complexity that would be involved, the fact that individual tax obligations would have to be calculated—for every member, we think—and the fact that members who had significant increases in their salaries might be required to pay significant in-year tax bills.

David Laws (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)

Does the Minister agree with Lord Turner that pensions tax relief is poorly focused?

James Purnell (Minister of State (Pensions Reform), Department for Work and Pensions; Stalybridge & Hyde, Labour)

We are implementing the Pensions Commission’s recommendations pretty much in full, and they did not include making that change. If the hon. Gentleman wants to make policy suggestions that are potentially very damaging to final salary schemes, that is very much at odds with his previous concerns during our proceedings about levelling down. We do not think that that would be the right approach, and in that we follow the Pensions Commission. I suspect that he is trying to find a sum of money that he can recycle into something that enables him to make a simple claim about basic rate tax. I am sure that the money will be spent in a number of other areas as well, such as on increasing the basic state pension, and it might fund some other policy suggestions that the hon. Gentleman has made. I do not think that that is a practical solution, and neither did the Pensions Commission, and I urge him to withdraw the motion.

David Laws (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)

It has been an interesting debate, and this is the last new clause. I was not going to propose it until I got stuck at Basingstoke station on the way home one day, and had nothing better to do than read the Pensions Commission report. I then decided that it would be negligent to end this Committee without airing serious criticisms of the pension tax system. I anticipated, and wanted to flush out, just how conservative both sides were going to be. I wanted to test out whether all this new model Conservatism and Toynbeeism really added up to much. We found out from the hon. Member for Eastbourne that it does not. It comes down to a defence of traditional privilege: the traditional privilege of those highest earners in society who are tax-privileged and are getting an enormous subsidy to save in pensions. The Conservative party is still determined to defend that.

Andrew Selous (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; South West Bedfordshire, Conservative)

Is the hon. Gentleman aware that moderately senior nurses in the NHS and other people of that ilk are higher rate tax payers? Does he think they are hugely privileged people?

David Laws (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)

The hon. Gentleman should know that the people who are upper rate taxpayers are among the 10 per cent. richest and the most affluent people in the country. The idea that we should have a pension system that gives powerful disincentives to the poorest people in Britain not to save, and gives enormous subsidies and incentives to the richest to save is crackpot. Eventually, whether or not the other parties agree, we will end up with a grand consensus based on this little phrase from Lord Turner that we have got to change the system.

The briefing will change and the Chancellor of the Exchequer will become Prime Minister and decide that this is a good idea. The leader of the Conservative party in a cuddly moment will decide that it is something that he must support too. I look forward to hearing the hon. Member for Eastbourne and the Minister eating their words and commending me for my proposal to end the immoral and wasteful system of tax relief. I detect that I may not at the moment  command a majority on the Committee. With those deeply consensual words, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

Nigel Waterson (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Eastbourne, Conservative)

On a point of order, Mr. Gale. I do not want to detain the Committee long, but it would be wrong not to say a few thanks at the end of this constructive and good-natured Committee. The golden rivet has proved elusive, except for the concession made following the intervention of my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire on new clause 28. We can take that away and claim a success, although the hon. Member for Yeovil will even now be drafting a press release claiming that it was all his idea.

David Laws (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)

I have done it already.

Nigel Waterson (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Eastbourne, Conservative)

I should like to thank you, Mr. Gale, and Mr. Taylor, for your excellent chairmanship. I should like to thank our Clerk, who has striven manfully to keep our amendments in order, the Hansard writers, the police and the security officers and all the officials who have kindly supplied the Minister sometimes with the right quotations and sometimes not. They have supplied us all with loads of information and with loads of letters, but not all at the same time. I should like to pay an especial tribute to the Committee Office scrutiny unit who have laboured long and hard to deliver two, two-page submissions. I do not regard this Committee as having been a wonderful example of the new rules of written evidence, let alone oral evidence. But do not get me started on that.

I should like to thank all my hon. Friends and all members of the Committee. I should particularly like to thank my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire for his all hard work on the Committee and my own Whip who, sadly, is not here. I should like to thank my hon. Friend the Member for The Wrekin, who is not here either. I see from his biography that he is a member of the Miniature Schnauzer Club of Great Britain. I assume that he is out walking his dog today. In addition to his activities as a Whip, my hon. Friend is a bomb disposal expert—he has recently returned from Iraq—as well as working in the family firework manufacturing firm. Let us hope that he does not light the wrong blue touch paper.

We have been very honoured to have two very good Ministers. I looked on his website and saw that when asked what motivates him, the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington said:

“You need to keep the belief that there is far more good in the world than evil.”

Let us hope that this Committee confirms that view of life. The hon. Member for Solihull has experience as a prison governor and I hope that this experience has not  been too different. We established in a previous debate that the earnings link was broken when the Minister for Pensions Reform was still in primary school. There has been a great historical sweep in our debates.

I thank the Government Whip for whipping the Committee with an admirably light touch. The visits to the Liberal Democrat Santa’s grotto have been interesting; I hope that the Minister has kept a running tally of the spending commitments, the prize for which must go to the hon. Member for Northampton, North who came up with a modest, probing amendment that would have cost £14 billion. I wonder whether she has considered joining the Liberal Democrats.

The hon. Member for Yeovil seemed determined to upset every aspect of the electorate, particularly higher earners, except, of course, for the Christian Brethren who, as he conceded, cannot vote for him or, indeed, for anybody else.

Finally, I had a letter from the Minister this morning that contained a sentence that should send us on our way cheerful and happy. It said:

“Cross-party scrutiny of the Bill’s proposals is an important part of deepening the existing consensus around the future of the UK pension system.”

That is a wonderful sentiment. In our case, the deepening consensus has become rather more shallow and we shall return to some of the issues on Report. I take my share of the credit for delivering this Bill entirely according to its agreed timetable. Everyone has had their say; we have considered all the important parts of the Bill with full justice.

David Laws (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)

Further to that point of order, Mr. Gale. I thank you and Mr. Taylor for chairing our proceedings in such an excellent way and for your tolerance and patience throughout the last three weeks. I thank the Clerk, the officials who supported the Ministers and the Committee, the Hansard reporters, the police and others. I also thank the hon. Member for Northampton, North for her expensive probing amendments which, as I said earlier, allowed me to triangulate between those and the Gladstonian candle-end pinching of the hon. Member for Eastbourne and to find myself firmly on the rational centre ground of British politics.

We enjoyed the contributions made by the hon. Member for Eastbourne and his dry and frequent wit, and those made by the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire, who was always rational and constructive in managing the debate. We also enjoyed the Ministers’ contributions; they did not concede very much, but it was done in a gracious way, and he gave way frequently and with great tolerance. We look forward to Report and to Third Reading.

James Purnell (Minister of State (Pensions Reform), Department for Work and Pensions; Stalybridge & Hyde, Labour)

Further to that point of order, Mr. Gale. This has indeed been a very constructive and pleasant Committee to be part of. I hope that it will be seen as having added to the consensus. There are some issues to which the hon. Member for Eastbourne wants to return on Report, but, particularly in respect of the clauses on the state pension, I hope that there is broad agreement on the direction of travel in the reform of the pension system in the UK.

I was lucky enough to go out with the local Pension Service recently to see their work in action. We visited  the home of a wonderful 85-year-old lady and on the way in, the gentleman from the local service turned to me and said, “How shall I explain your presence here? Shall I say you are a Minister or a trainee?” He then looked at me and said, “I think trainee is probably more credible, don’t you?”

The lady asked me to open a can of condensed milk for her, which is not something I had done before I must admit, certainly not with the implement that she pointed me towards. I did not know how to use it and decided to use brute force instead, with the result that I spilt condensed milk all over her kitchen. On that occasion, my trainee status cover was not blown.

That was a long segue into an acknowledgment of the fact that both I and my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington are both trainees here—this is our first Committee as Front-Bench Members and we have been delighted to have learned along with everyone else. Indeed, I would like to start by thanking my ministerial colleague for all his expert, overshadowingly brilliant, support during the Committee. He dealt with a large number of important clauses.

I would like to thank the Conservative Front-Bench spokesmen for their constructive and serious approach to our policies, as well as for their wit in describing many of them. I would also like to thank the hon. Member for Yeovil for being such a gracious butt of the jokes of the hon. Member for Eastbourne throughout the proceedings and for ensuring that we have been able to use all of our 12 allotted sittings. It would have been a shame had we not been able to do so. Without his contribution, we would definitely not have used a number of the sittings that the Conservative Front-Bench Members asked for.

I would also like to thank our Whip, who, as the hon. Member for Eastbourne said, is the crème de la crème of Committee whipping. He is a most experienced Whip and has dealt with us with a very light touch. He only once said to me that I had made rather heavy going of a clause, which I took to be a nuclear warning given his normal approach to such matters. I can only apologise for new clause 2, which I know is embedded in the memory of your co-Chair, Mr. Gale.

In particular, I would like to thank my officials, who have done a brilliant job. If we have appeared like a duck across the surface of the water without too much stress, it is only because they were furiously paddling underneath—they stayed up till all hours of the night dealing with people’s amendments. I hope that the Committee will join me in thanking them, as well as the drafters of the Bill. They have given us a Bill far more comprehensible than is normally the case.

I would like to thank the Clerk and all his staff as well as the members of Hansard. Not least, I shall finish by thanking all the organisations that provided so many of the briefings and amendments, and the police, who have prevented great hordes of Bosnians, the Plymouth Brethren, mothers over 60 and, in the last sitting, a whole horde of upper-rate taxpayers from invading the Committee. Without their protection the Room might have been stormed, although I cannot see them—ah, there they are, fighting off hordes of higher-rate tax-paying nurses!

Finally, I thank you, Mr. Gale and Mr. Taylor, for your brisk and effective chairmanship. I wish everyone a very good weekend and half-term break.

Roger Gale (North Thanet, Conservative)

It is one of the wonderful eccentricities of Committee work that we always end with five minutes of points of order that are totally out of order. But then, as points of order on the Floor of the House are usually out of order, I suppose that it is a convention that the House has established. As we have been completely out of order, I am interested to note that the Committee feels that I have been tolerant. Clearly, I shall have to look to my laurels.

On a more serious note, I add my thanks to the staff and Officers of the House without whom we could not do our work. I also thank every member of the Committee for making this a congenial and constructive event.