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• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

I just want to briefly return to this business of definitions, because some mathematicians have calculated that one of the reasons why there are so many variations in different countries about what is defined on the 60% median of people in poverty is because, quite simply, if you change your tax structure slightly, if in Britain the Government were simply to tax slightly more heavily those just above the poverty level, you could, at a stroke, to use an old phrase, remove half a million people from poverty. Now, even if we accept these definitions, and I appreciate, Kate (Kate...

• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Would you all support the idea, then, of removing from tax, the poor, as other countries are gradually doing? We should stop taking money away from the ones we are defining as poor, which leaves them poor, and creates dependency upon the state, while still worrying about the number of and the percentage of people in poverty. Surely, we should strip out their tax, get rid of their taxation, remove it. Many of them will then immediately not be poor. Surely we would all agree with that.

• Question by: Peter Hulme Cross
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Mr Faulkner and panel, going back to your opening remarks, I very much concur with what you said, because it squares with my own personal experience. The businesses are prepared to invest in training of their staff when things are prosperous; when things are not so prosperous they cut back, and training is one of the first things to go. At the moment we have a situation in London where unemployment is rising, where the closure of small businesses, according to the VAT figures, is actually more than those businesses which are opening, so, we seem to be in a...

• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Do any of you know how our Structural Fund for Objective Two or Three, in London has been used to deal with things like poverty? Anything you could point to: that is a marvellous idea, or that is a very bad idea?

• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Obviously you all know my opinions on the EU and Structural Funds. It is a very bureaucratic, arthritic way of getting back a tiny proportion of the money that we have to give to the EU. Would it not be nice to have all of that money here to be able to do the things we would like to do with poverty, with unemployment, and so on? It's not an ideal way, and are we not going to lose a lot of that in the next aspects of funding, because a lot of the accession countries are going to take...