Oral Answers to Questions — Treasury – in the House of Commons at 2:30 pm on 12 October 2010.
What recent representations he has received on his Department's spending challenge.
Many, many people have got involved with the spending challenge review, and on the spending challenge website we received more than 100,000 suggestions from members of the public, including more than 60,000 from public sector workers. We also had correspondence across government, including 10,000 e-mails and letters to the Treasury alone. I know that many other Departments received similar correspondence. Finally, Ministers have been out and about across the country, and have had meetings in their Ministries with a range of stakeholders to make sure that we make the right decisions.
No, it is not too late for members of the shadow Cabinet to get involved with this process. They had an opportunity last night, as you remember Mr Speaker, on the Finance (No. 2) Bill, but they failed to take it. I think that that may be because they do not have the capacity or the courage to come up with their own suggestions.
Can the Minister confirm well-sourced reports that she has received Treasury advice to delay some of next year's proposed spending cuts? How, if that is true, does it square with the harsh cuts rhetoric that we have heard from Treasury Ministers since the election? Will she take this opportunity to confirm that it is her decision, and that of the Front Benchers, to stick with the £23 billion of cuts that we know they are planning for next year?
We are clear about what we need to do to sort out the last Labour Government's terrible legacy-a Government, incidentally, who left unemployment higher than when they took office. We will stick to our economic plan, which, as we have heard, the IMF and the OECD think is the right one, and it is the plan that stands alone, because the Labour party simply has no alternative.
Among her responses to the spending challenge, will the Minister bring into line the Local Government (Early Termination of Employment) (Discretionary Compensation) Regulations 2006, which have enabled four former Wiltshire council bosses to share remuneration of almost £2 million in their final 12 months in office?
We are looking at a range of ways we can ensure that we get the most value from every pound of taxpayers' money, and we will stop at nothing to make sure that we get there in the end. We are going through a difficult process with many difficult decisions, but we aim to ensure that all of them are tough, but still fair.
Does the Minister agree with her very good friend Sir Philip Green that one of the ways of spending money effectively would be for the Government to delay their payments to small business?
Sir Philip Green is one of those people I was talking about in my first answer: somebody who has got involved trying to come up with constructive suggestions on how we can tackle the fiscal deficit left by the hon. Gentleman's party. The bottom line is that we want to ensure that we support business. His party was against the package of corporation tax reductions that we brought forward in the Budget, which will support companies across this country. We also got rid of his party's job tax.