I am also pleased to hear that anybody in work is exempted. The Government’s case revolves around something with which I believe the Labour party normally agrees: working should always be worth while. In today’s debate, there has been more heat than light. If the Labour party, the Conservative party and the Liberal Democrat party all believe that it should be more worth while to work, we need such a provision to achieve the desired effect. It comes down to the last-minute proposal that there should be some regional differentiation of the cap. We are no longer arguing for or against caps—we all now believe in that type of headgear—but Labour believes that there should be different fashions of cap across the country whereas, on the Government Benches, the passion is apparently for uniform caps.

Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con): Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is difficult to set a cap if one is not prepared to name a level for it?

Mr Redwood: My hon. Friend is ahead of me in my argument. So far, I think I have carried an expectant and worried Labour party with me. Labour agrees with all the exemptions, agrees with the delayed transition and agrees that we need to make working worth while.

Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham Hodge Hill) (Lab): I was not sure whether the right hon. Gentleman was about to propose himself as the head of Ofcap in practice.

Mr Redwood: No, I like representing my constituents and I suspect that the two jobs would not be compatible. I am very grateful for the kind offer, however, and I notice that the right hon. Gentleman prefers the name Ofcap to Doffcap. As Labour has not yet put forward proposals to deal with the people it describes as fat cat landlords, I think it might well be a case of Doffcap to the landlords, as we seem to be discussing how much money we will route to the landlords through the housing benefit mechanism.

I suspect that if I strayed into the subject of proposals for the housing market and landlords, you would rule me out of order, Mr Deputy Speaker, but perhaps that is a debate for another day. There might be common ground on how we can get better value for the public money being spent while ensuring that we do not cut off the supply of housing, which would be a very stupid thing to do by clumsy intervention. We need more housing at an affordable level for people on modest incomes.

We are talking about a group of people on very modest incomes, and it ill behoves people on decent incomes, such as Members of the House, to be too mean about it. We have the conundrum, however, that we always want to make it worth while for those people to work. We all accept that there will be a cap, but, if it is to be a regional cap, before deviating from the Government’s proposal to the Labour proposal we would need to know what Labour has in mind for the total costings and how the proposal would work fairly within an area as well as between areas.

Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab): One thing that the right hon. Gentleman has not mentioned is that when we compare the working family with the non-working family, all too often in this debate we are not comparing apples with apples. The working family would have child benefit for their children on top of the wage that is constantly mentioned and, depending on the number of children they have, they might well qualify for child tax credit. We are not comparing properly, so simply saying that the situation is unfair to those working families gives the wrong impression. Does he not agree?

Mr Redwood: I thought it was now common ground that for a large number of people on certain kinds of benefit, work is not worth while. We are trying to solve that problem, so despite all those things that the hon. Lady truthfully reports to the House, we still have that problem, with which both parties are wrestling. That is why the Labour party is not here today saying, “There is no problem: we are going to vote against the whole thing,” but is here with an alternative proposal at the 11th hour—the last possible chance to consider this.

Let us go back to Labour’s argument on the regional cap. If it had come with a properly costed and working proposal, I might have been sympathetic to it, but we do not yet know from Labour what is the total package of money available. We have not even been told whether it wants to live within the budget that the Government have come up with for the proposal or whether it thinks the overall proposal is too mean. If it wants to spend much more, it will not solve the “Why work?” problem because provision will become too generous again and it will have a public spending problem.

Mr Byrne: Can the right hon. Gentleman tell us what the budget actually is because although we have heard some figures from the Minister today, he has not set out, for example, whether the grace period will cost any money?

Mr Redwood: Ministers are very capable of setting out their own figures. I do not have, at the top of my mind, all the detailed figures the right hon. Gentleman wants, which are properly things for Ministers to report to the House, but they have detailed the total savings overall and they are trying to live within that budget. As has rightfully been reported to the House today, they have given up some of the savings to accommodate the transitional period. It is entirely fair to ask the right hon. Gentleman, who is a specialist, as is the Minister he shadows, to tell us how much difference there would be in his proposals. Clearly, Labour has not yet thought through what the total should be.

There is another, very difficult, issue to consider with regionalism: there are big divergences in house and flat prices within, as well as between, regions. We should recognise this point, which in some ways makes this policy a bit easier to stomach than some on the Labour Benches suggest. I heard a former Westminster councillor saying that she had done some work on the situation of families who would be caught by the cap in Westminster. Naturally I was worried and wanted to hear what her answer was. She said she had found a considerable number of properties that she thought would be suitable for those families, quite close to where they were currently living, which happened to be rather better value than those in which they were currently living, supported by benefits. That seemed rather good news to me. Members from London constituencies will know that within London there is a huge variety of cost in property—often street by street, not merely borough by borough—so I do not think the proposal is quite as penal as some on the Labour Benches suggest. That makes it quite difficult to set a regional cap because such a cap might be no more appropriate as an average than the national cap.

Naomi Long (Belfast East) (Alliance): I thank the right hon. Gentleman for making this point, which a number of Opposition Members from Northern Ireland have concerns about. I represent a Belfast constituency and there are massive disparities between rents in the Greater Belfast area and those in more rural constituencies. If this sort of regionalisation was driven down to a very local level, it could distort people’s ability to seek work in the city or outside it.

Mr Redwood: I am grateful to the hon. Lady.

I am conscious that others want to speak so I shall not extend my argument further. I just want to make the point that in order to consider fairly what is an interesting proposal from Labour, the minimum we would need to know is the overall cost in comparison to the Government scheme and how these difficult problems of judgment within areas or regions would be settled. That is an important consideration.
 Mr Byrne: Presumably, the fact that homelessness will not be created, which is what the Secretary of State has argued over the past year, is the reason why he has had to find another £80 million—to solve a problem that does not exist. In direct answer to the challenge put by the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood), our amendment suggests that the right place to start this debate is by having a level for London and a level for outside London. That would begin to address the problem he is highlighting.

Mr Redwood: That is something we need to think rather more about, but unfortunately we have little time to do so. That suggestion might have been helpful, but there is also the problem of the big variety of levels within London. We need to know the extent to which the Labour party wants to validate the current high rents and whether there might be some other solution to the problem of very high rents that lies behind some of this difficulty.

The conclusion I must come to is that the best offer on this issue at this late stage is the Government’s. Something must be done to move things in the right direction and make it more worth while to work. All of us, on both sides of the House, are extremely concerned that in recent years, under both parties, although quite a lot of jobs have been generated a very large proportion of them have gone to people who have recently arrived, because they think the jobs are good enough and that the pay is high enough. There have been reasons—perhaps very good reasons—why people who are settled here and out of work have not wanted those jobs or been able to take them, but part of the answer must be that we have the wrong balance between benefit and work income, and we need to do something about that.

We meet today because we wish to influence our Government in what they are doing at yet another important European summit. The European Central Bank has bought the Europeans a little time by printing and lending unprecedented sums of money to a very weak European banking system, but those meeting would be wise to understand that that has only bought a little time; it has not solved the underlying problem. Indeed, there are two underlying problems. There is the inability of the southern countries to compete with Germany at the fixed exchange rate within the euro, making them poor and giving them large balance of payments deficits which they have trouble financing; and there is the big problem of the southern states’ debt getting ever bigger. Because their economies are malfunctioning, because so many people are out of work and because they cannot price themselves back into jobs, their debts and deficits go on soaring, and now in three cases member states of the euro area cannot finance those deficits in the normal way and have to be on life support from the EU and the IMF.

Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD): On the subject of the right hon. Gentleman’s support for the Prime Minister, will he join me in welcoming the Prime Minister’s remarks this morning in Davos, when he said,

“Let me be clear. To those who think that not signing the treaty means Britain is somehow walking away from Europe let me tell you, nothing could be further from the truth”?

Mr Redwood: Of course the Prime Minister is right that we are in the European Union and all the time we remain in it we have to use our membership as best we can to protect the interests of the British people.

The main purpose of the summit must be to try to deliver greater prosperity and some growth and some hope to the peoples of Europe, because their hope has been depressed and their prosperity is being destroyed by a system that cannot conceivably work. The euro area is now locked into a system of mutually assured deflation, a mad policy, and the more those countries’ economies decline, the more the deficits go up, the more they have to cut. They cannot get themselves out by monetary means, in the way that the United Kingdom and the United States can, by creating more money in their system, and they cannot get out by having a competitive exchange rate.

Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op): rose —

Mr Redwood: I am sure that was the point that the hon. Gentleman wanted to make.

Mike Gapes: If the right hon. Gentleman is so against the austerity deflation policies in the eurozone, why is he supporting the austerity policies of his own Government?

Mr Redwood: Because, as I just explained, it is totally different if a country has its own currency and can use monetary mechanisms to try and grow its way out of the problems, and can establish an exchange rate that allows it to export its way out of the problems, which is exactly what these countries have to do, and are unable to do because they are locked in.

Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab): rose —

Mr Redwood: I have no more injury time available, so I need to develop my argument rapidly.

If those countries are to have some hope of prosperity, they need to solve the two underlying problems. It is obvious to most external observers that the way to solve the problem of competitiveness quickly is to devalue. Normally, an IMF programme for a country in trouble not only asks it to cut its budget deficit and reduce its excess public spending, but suggests that it devalue its currency and move to a looser monetary policy domestically, so that there can be private sector-led growth, export-led growth—the kind of thing it needs to get out of its disastrous position. That is exactly what those countries are unable to do. That is why the IMF should not lend a country like Greece a single euro or a single dollar. Greece is to the euro area as California is to the dollar area: it is not an independent sovereign state, and it cannot do two of the three things that a country needs to do to get back into growth and prosperity, because it cannot devalue and it cannot create enough credit and money within its own system.

We need to give honest advice to our partners and colleagues in the eurozone, around the European conference table—in private, not in public—that the only way forward, the only way to resolve the crisis for those countries that can no longer borrow in the marketplace at sensible rates of interest, is to have an orderly way of letting them out as quickly as possible, so that they can re-establish their own currency, their own looser and appropriate monetary policy and their own banking policy, and offer some hope to their subject peoples.

I am very worried that this is not only an economic crisis, this is not only a banking crisis, this is not only a currency crisis, but it is also now a crisis of democracy. The challenge, in countries such as Greece and Spain, is how the Governments manage to get buy-in to the policy of deflation, and cuts with everything, that is the only offering from the euro scheme and the euro system. We see in some of these countries now that the electorates do not choose the Government; the European Union’s senior players choose the Government. We see in some of these countries that the electorate change the Government but they do not change the policy. The new Government have to pledge to follow exactly the same policy, which does not work, in order to get elected and to be acceptable to the European Union, in order to carry on drawing down the subsidies and loans from within the European Union that have to be on offer to try to make the system operate to some extent.

I hope that the British Government will adopt the following position. I hope that they will say in public, whenever asked about the euro, that the British Government have no intention of providing any running commentary on the euro whatever, and have no intention of saying anything that makes the position of the euro worse, but will always give good, strong, independent advice in private. That should be the public position. It is too dangerous to say things. Most of the things that politicians say about bond markets and currency crises make the position worse, so the United Kingdom would be well advised to have a simple formula, which all Ministers use, that we are providing no commentary on the euro and we wish the euro members well in sorting it all out.

In private, we are important allies and partners of the euro area and the British Government need to give honest advice to try to get our continent out of this mess. I do not believe there is a single fix that can solve that problem for all the countries currently in the euro. Many of them went into the euro with inflation rates that were too high, with state deficits and debts that were too high, and with currencies that were not in line with the German currency. It was a huge error. The founders of the euro knew that there had to be very strict requirements; they broke them from day one.

It will not solve the problem to sign up to some new constitutional pact that says that a country down on its luck, unable to borrow money, running out of cash, will be fined. Who will pay the fine? The answer is that the fine would have to be lent to the country in trouble by the very people who are fining it. It is so preposterous that I find it very difficult to believe that serious people can sit round a table, negotiating such an instrument.

They should cast aside the draft instrument. It is irrelevant; it cannot work. They should sit down in private and work out how to get non-competitive countries out of this mess before even more damage is done to their economies and their democracies.

The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Mr Mark Hoban): We are working with banks on the details behind the national loan guarantee scheme. We have set aside £20 billion to enable the rates that are charged to small businesses to fall by up to 1%. The utilisation of the scheme will very much be driven by the demand from businesses for debt finance.

Rachel Reeves (Leeds West) (Lab): We introduced a bank bonus tax to get some money back from the banks. The Government refused to go ahead with it and, instead, gave the banks a tax cut this year. That is not acceptable, and that is what the motion is about.

The Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (Vince Cable): My right hon. Friend is right to stress the central role of shareholders and to remind us about the conditions according to which the head of RBS was appointed and the contract negotiated. Of course, the problem is not just with pay; we are now also having to consider the problem of knighthoods that were awarded for appalling behaviour in British banking.

The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Mr Mark Hoban): My right hon. Friend is, as is often the case, spot on. There is no requirement under the proposal for us to build High Speed 2.

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1.1pm

Mr Redwood: Will the shadow Minister bring us up to date with Labour thinking on the IMF having more money to lend to save the euro? Does Labour think that it would be a good idea because it would promote growth, or a bad idea because it would damage the British budget?

Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op): We are all waiting to see what proposals come forward. The Chancellor has said that he will come to Parliament and let us have a say on many of these things. Indeed, perhaps the Minister can help us out with the timing of those proposals—[Interruption.] If he would care to listen to my questions, perhaps he could also tell us when we will get the Bill to enact the European financial stabilisation mechanism permanent bail-out fund. We are all waiting for that. The eurozone countries are supposed to be rolling together the European financial stability facility and the EFSM into that permanent arrangement, but as I understand it we will have to legislate for that. Will he tell us when that will happen, because it is related to this question about potential IMF funding? We need clarity from the Government—and from the IMF as well.

The Leader of the House of Commons (Sir George Young): I understand my right hon. Friend’s concern. We announced on Tuesday the establishment of the West Lothian commission, which will look at a range of options. For example, with issues that affect only England and Wales, one option would be that only English and Welsh MPs voted on such matters. In my view, that would be an appropriate rebalancing of the constitution to take account of the fact that in Scotland they have their own Parliament in which issues are resolved on which English MPs cannot vote. It seems somewhat perverse that Scottish MPs can vote on those very same issues when they apply only to England.

The Minister for Europe (Mr David Lidington): I have to say that it is unusual to find my right hon. Friend looking to the example of the former Soviet Union for inspiration. We have looked across Government very carefully at what the consequences of a eurozone break-up might be, and one of the key differences between now and 20 years ago is that the economies and the financial systems of Europe are much more closely interlinked now than they were then. It is certainly our judgment that it would be damaging to the British national interest were a collapse of the eurozone or a prolonged recession in the eurozone to take place.

The Secretary of State for Scotland (Michael Moore): The right hon. Gentleman asks an important question. I am sure that it is one of many that will be at the heart of the debate about Scotland’s future when we come to the referendum itself, but for now I want to ensure that we can get on with the proper substantive debate.

The Secretary of State for Transport (Justine Greening): No construction contracts will be let during this Parliament, and my understanding is that the spend over the course of this Parliament will be in the region of a couple of hundred million pounds.