To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer how many fines have been levied by the Financial Services Authority in each of the last five years.

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government

(1) whether the regulations required by the Sustainable Communities Act 2007 (Amendment) Act 2010 will contain a duty on local authorities to try to reach agreement with communities;

(2) whether the regulations required by the Sustainable Communities Act 2007 (Amendment) Act 2010 will contain a time limit for dealing with proposals made under the Sustainable Communities Act 2007;

(3) when he expects regulations required by the Sustainable Communities Act 2007 (Amendment) Act 2010 will be laid before Parliament;

(4) whether the regulations required by the Sustainable Communities Act 2007 (Amendment) Act 2010 will contain the right for town and parish councils to submit proposals under the Sustainable Communities Act 2007.

The Business Secretary's announcements will give more power to non-exec directors and shareholders to control pay in the private sector. The Government effectively discharge those roles in the public sector, so what measures is my right hon. Friend undertaking to control high pay in the public sector?

I will not give way again because the time would count against me.

Youth unemployment is a long-term problem and we need long-term reform to tackle it. That is why the coalition Government are right to introduce the pupil premium, which will enable young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who are on free school meals, as I was, to get a leg-up in life. It is right that the coalition Government are embarked on a programme of welfare reform. We already have in place the Work programme, which offers assistance to people who are unemployed after nine months or, for 18-year-olds, after six months. It is right

that we are raising the threshold at which people start to pay income tax. It is when people enter the jobs market for the first time that they are likely to be on the minimum wage or on low average earnings if they are working part time. The rise in the income tax threshold will disproportionately affect young people who are entering the labour market. It is also right that the coalition Government are massively expanding the number of apprenticeships. However, we also need short-term help for people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves unemployed because of the economic circumstances. I am therefore pleased that my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister has announced the youth contract, which will start in April, with 410,000 places over the rest of this Parliament, 160,000 of which will be wage subsidies of £275 per new job created.

What will help the young unemployed most is economic stability and recovery, together with the confidence that this coalition Government are putting in place the policies to deliver those two things. The low rate of interest that we currently have helps not only households but businesses that are seeking to expand. The Government have a clear focus on stable finances and growth. We should contrast that with Labour's somersaults, U-turns and ever-elastic bonus tax, which has no credibility as it seems to have funded every single promise that the party has made since the general election.

As the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) said, unemployment is a tragedy for every young person who has experienced it. I grew up in a community scarred by youth unemployment. I witnessed it among my friends-I even experienced it myself at one point in my career-and I do not want another generation to be blighted by it. The Government are taking action, and credibility is a key part of that.

Before the hon. Lady intervened, I repeated that I was talking specifically about 16 and 17-year-olds. The Library's youth unemployment statistics show that from 1992 to the current year the rate of youth unemployment has remained stubbornly at about 200,000, whatever the underlying economic conditions. For 16 to 24-year-olds, the broader group, the unemployment figure did not fall below 600,000, even at the height of the boom.

That makes it all right, does it? Is it okay to encourage the culture of corporate greed and excessive behaviour as long as people pay their taxes? Of course, the former Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), reduced the rate of income tax that those people were paying. All that Labour promised for shareholders was an advisory role to rein in such behaviour, whereas the Government have today announced binding votes for shareholders so that they have some control over the executives who are supposed to report to them for the value of their companies.

Youth unemployment needs to be set in the overall context of unemployment in the United Kingdom and in other developed economies. The overall unemployment rate in the United Kingdom is 8.2% of the work force. In the United States it is 9.1% and in the eurozone it is 10.1%. In many eurozone states, the rate is much higher than the average. Youth unemployment tends to follow the same trend. It tends to be roughly double the rate in each country. What is happening in this country is not unique among our main competitors.

Youth unemployment is also not a new problem. At least the right hon. Member for South Shields (David Miliband), who was with us earlier, has had the grace to acknowledge that under the Labour Government youth unemployment rose, even during times of strong economic growth and the longest sustained boom since the second world war. In the more than 20 years since 1992, the rate of youth unemployment among 16 and 17-year-olds has remained stubbornly flat and has barely changed, whatever the underlying economic conditions. [ Interruption. ] The hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) is shaking her head. I suggest that she looks at the Library's statistics on this matter, specifically for 16 and 17-year-olds.

The motion links the issue of bankers' bonuses and youth unemployment. With my constituents in Bristol West, I agree that the levels of both are currently excessive.

I shall deal with bonuses first. Executive pay is meant to be the reward for company growth and shareholder return. Over the past decade, executive pay has gone up by an average of 13.6% each year, but the growth in the index of the top 100 companies on the London stock exchange has gone up by only 1.7% each year. Executive pay has vastly outstripped the underlying growth in the companies over which the directors have presided.

Bonuses, of course, are usually the worst manifestation of spectacular reward-sometimes for just modest return for the company's shareholders, or even a paltry return. Even worse, they can be a pay-off for corporate failure. Today my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills announced the Government's action to deal with that excess in the boardroom. The boardroom is the place where that excessive behaviour should be tackled and reined in, and shareholders need to take action in shareholder meetings.

The coalition Government will implement or consult on 10 of the recommendations of the High Pay Commission. Taxes, of course, have a role to play, but it is a subsidiary one. The behaviour itself needs to change. Under the previous Chancellor of the Exchequer, the right hon. Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling), the bonus tax was a failure according to the terms that he used to describe it when he announced it in the Budget. It was meant to curtail behaviour in the boardrooms of banks, but it failed completely.

At that time, the underlying rate of income tax and national insurance on the recipients of bonuses was 41%; under the coalition Government, the figure is 52%. When we factor in employers' national insurance, we see that roughly two thirds of the value of a bonus comes back to the Treasury. In addition, the permanent bank levy will raise £2.6 billion for each subsequent year of this Parliament, which is more in net terms than the bonus tax raised under the Labour Government.

The previous Government were, of course, in office for 13 years. They had ample opportunity to do something. I sat through five Queen's Speeches, in each of which a raft of legislation was announced by Her Majesty, but not once did I hear of an attempt to tackle corporate greed. Indeed, I would say that the Labour Government, certainly for their first eight years, positively encouraged corporate greed. We just heard from the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden). The Cabinet Minister to whom he reported in the latter years of the Labour Government, Lord Mandelson, said famously that he and new Labour were

"intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich".

It was the Labour Government who gave a knighthood to Mr Goodwin.

Yes. I thank the hon. Gentleman-an MP for Greater Bristol-for that intervention.

The other flaw in the planning system is that when permission is refused by a committee of local councillors, the applicant goes ahead and opens the business because they know that an appeal will take a long time. That is a loophole that Costa has certainly exploited and it needs to be blocked. We need to reform the planning process, but we must also reform local government finance.

The use classes have been mentioned many times. Surely, it is common sense that the A1 retail use class cannot apply equally to Tesco, Sainsbury's and all the other retail multiples and to Mrs Smith's corner shop; none the less, that is how our planning system works.

What we need is to let go so that we have more localism, so that local councils, whether Bristol or South Gloucestershire, are sufficiently granular at the local level to micro-manage what they want in their high streets. If they do not want any more supermarkets or chains, they should be able to say so emphatically, and there should be no ambiguity in the classes of use to allow the large companies to drive a coach and horses through local opinion and local democratic decision making. Local communities could then promote the shops that they want, and democratically elected councillors could block the sharp practices of the large multiples.

Finally, finance has been mentioned a couple of times. The uniform business rate needs to be reformed so that local councils can offer waivers to businesses that they wish to attract to an area. Gloucester road has shops with most uses, but it does not have a book shop, so perhaps a rate incentive would attract a book retailer to the area. Business improvement districts have made a

huge improvement to Bristol city centre, but I would argue that any shopping centre would benefit from a BID in which landlords are incentivised to take part as well. That is a key recommendation of the Portas report, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading, and which I have thoroughly enjoyed endorsing in this debate.

The whole debate so far has reminded me of when I was waiting to make my maiden speech, listening to potted descriptions of every town and city in the country, learning a lot about geography as well as politics. I shall now do roughly the same thing, talking from a city perspective about my Bristol West constituency, which covers the whole city centre and the shopping centres of Broadmead and Cabot Circus in the regional capital of the south-west of England. The constituency is also a patchwork of distinct neighbourhood shopping centres and high streets, bookended by Clifton village and Stapleton road, with the unique areas of Park street, Whiteladies road and Gloucester road running through the middle. Gloucester road may not be the oldest high street in England but it is certainly the longest. It has been argued in many media outlets that it is the greatest high street in England, with 2 miles of independent shops.

In the 1990s, as you will be aware, Madam Deputy Speaker, as a fellow Bristol Member, our city centre faced great challenges from out of town, but it has fought back. Bristol city council worked in partnership with the private sector and we have a new shopping centre, but more important, thousands of people now live in the heart of the city of Bristol. I do not think it has been mentioned in the debate that we need more residents in town and city centres. I certainly endorse the recommendations in the Portas report for town centre teams and for a presumption in favour of town and city centres in the planning regime.

High streets, whether in cities or towns, certainly face multiple challenges; indeed, as has been said, they are at crisis point. Rationing of parking spaces has been referred to. Control of crime is another issue, as is the switch to online retailing. Every time I make my traditional Christmas visit to the Montpelier Royal Mail sorting centre, I am struck by the sheer number of Amazon parcels of the books and DVDs my constituents are buying.

The other major threat to all our high streets and locally owned businesses comes from the large national chains and multiples. Supermarkets have been mentioned many times during the debate so I shall not say too much more about them, but I am probably the only Member in the Chamber who has experienced a riot in his constituency caused by the opening of a branch of Tesco. It took place over the Easter and royal wedding bank holidays in April last year. I certainly do not condone the antics of those constituents, but I very much share their frustration. Large businesses do not

work with the grain of local opinion. It was not that people did not want a Tesco; they just did not want another Tesco in an area where the brand was already at saturation point.

There are also national chains of bars, restaurants and cafes. They use their lawyers and large planning departments to circumvent local authority planning decisions. In my constituency, we have an example involving Costa Coffee-a brand owned by Whitbread, the brewers-which has opened three outlets in Bristol; in Gloucester road in my constituency, in Clifton Down and in Westbury village in the neighbouring constituency of Bristol North West. The company has flouted the decisions of Bristol city council; Costa's managing director wrote to me to say that Costa was "re-energising and revitalising" high streets and

"regularly complements independent retailers…to offer a wider range of choice."

That sort of banality infuriates local residents when they think they cannot work with the system to get what they want. We certainly need to reform the planning system to combat uniformity and promote diversity.

I congratulate my right hon. Friends the Chancellor and the Business Secretary on working together to provide a secure future for our banking sector and to put behind us the failures of the past. Uppermost in the public's mind from the past will have been the £45 billion bail-out of the Royal Bank of Scotland, and, given that it is now under state ownership, could not the Chancellor consider its break-up to establish a challenger bank on the high street for lending specifically to small and medium-sized businesses in order to provide the finance for future growth and economic recovery?

As a member of the Committee, I would like to put on the record my thanks to my hon. Friend for his patience in trying to reconcile the views of the Committee. On the point he is making, in addition to the separation of IPSA's regulatory and administrative functions, was not another stark factor presented to the Committee the extraordinarily expensive way IPSA administered a relatively small number of transactions and the fact that many other organisations, whether inside the House of Commons or elsewhere, could do that for much better value of money for the taxpayer?

The Minister has visited Bristol and he will know that the city of Bristol is not the same as Bristol city council. A pot of money will be welcome to help to solve the city's transport problems, but power over the entire urban area would be more welcome. Will the Minister endorse the case for an integrated transport authority for the county that used to be Avon?

That is an interesting point. The Chancellor said in the autumn statement that a study would be carried out so that we could assess the evidence and decide what to do in the future. I do not think that we should form any firm conclusions at this point, but I would point out that regional pay differentials are the norm in the private sector.

Europe has been mentioned a few times today. It is worth our reminding ourselves that the European Union is the world's largest single market, that it is worth up to £12 trillion-the aggregate value of the EU member states-that it has 500 million consumers, and that

50% of British trade exists with our fellow EU members. At this point it is all the more important for the United Kingdom to play a full and constructive role as a member of the EU, and I know that the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr Davey)-who is present-plays an active role in financial services, energy, digital media and green technology. We want the single market to work in the interests of our country. Now is the time for our country to engage positively in Europe rather than hoping for some loosening of our relationship with the EU, let alone the catastrophic developments that would result from withdrawal.

The coalition Government have ambitious plans. We have restored confidence in our public finances and brought them under control, we have achieved international credibility, and we will stimulate economic growth and make work pay. These are difficult times indeed, but sustainable growth and recovery are on the way.

It is a great pleasure to follow the former Chancellor. We can contrast his thoughtful and authoritative approach with what we heard earlier from the shadow Chancellor, who has just left the Chamber. We are asked to believe that he cries during the "Antiques Roadshow", but anyone watching our debate would have cried with despair at the pantomime act we were treated to earlier. Before one of the shadow Chancellor's assistants gets up to tell me how many people in Bristol West receive child tax credits, let me tell the Labour Front-Bench team that people in Bristol West are far too smart to fall for the illusion that an increase of 5.2% in tax credits somehow amounts to a cut.

The state of the public finances has been mentioned several times. Before the coalition Government came to office, the deficit as a proportion of gross domestic product was 11.2%. In our first year of government, it was cut to 9.3%. According to the independent forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility, the deficit will be 4.5% at the end of this Parliament. We will have effectively halved it over the lifetime of the present Government. The Darling plan, if I may refer to it thus, has been mentioned several times during the debate. I seem to recall that its aim was to do just that-to halve the deficit over the lifetime of this Parliament-so let us not hear too much for the foreseeable future from Opposition Members about cutting too fast and too deep.

The coalition is bringing the deficit under control, which enables us to benefit from international confidence that we can borrow cheaply and service the accumulated debt that already exists in an affordable way. In 2010 our credit rating was similar to those of Italy and Spain, and the fact that it is now so much stronger is due to the decisive action taken by the coalition Government. That improved rating is important not just to the Government's Debt Management Office-although the billions of pounds that no longer need to be spent on servicing debt interest are now available to fund our priorities, whether they be pensions, education or the

health service-but to all our constituents and the businesses that employ them. Historic low interest rates are a monetary stimulus, underpinning domestic confidence and increasing spending and investment.

One of the coalition Government's key objectives is to make work pay in order to expand employment, and one of the key objectives that the Liberal Democrats have brought to the coalition Government is a progressive increase in the income tax threshold to £10,000 by the end of the current Parliament. That will make work pay for the low-paid in particular, and especially for women with part-time jobs, and it is fundamental to our commitment to fairness during the lifetime of this Government.

Last week, during a debate similar to this, I referred to the recommendations of the High Pay Commission. I was pleased when the Deputy Prime Minister said at the weekend that he hoped that the coalition Government would be able to implement many of those recommendations. We should also tackle tax avoidance in order to make it clear that, as well as rewarding the work done by those with low incomes, the Government are tackling high pay at the top of the income streams in the companies for which they may work.

Economic growth needs to be stimulated. I note that several Members with constituencies in the south-west are present. I am sure that none of us miss the South West regional development agency, but I have no doubt that all of us, especially those representing constituencies in greater Bristol-including the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Thornbury and Yate (Steve Webb), who is in the Chamber-will welcome the establishment of a local enterprise partnership covering the greater Bristol area, as well as an enterprise zone in my constituency to create new jobs in new media businesses.

Bristol will benefit from the regional growth fund, from Going Places funds, from the housing market stimulus, and from a new technology innovation centre. A couple of weeks ago, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills opened the National Composites Centre, near the constituency of my hon. Friend the Minister of State, and we are also to have a university technology college. Those are examples of real actions being taken by the coalition Government to stimulate growth, particularly in new areas of the economy.

Only today my hon. Friend the Minister has had to table written statements blocking tax-avoidance schemes in derivatives, loan relationships and capital allowances and many other measures. A general anti-avoidance rule would back up the plethora of anti-avoidance measures that this and previous Governments have had to introduce. The coalition agreement provided for a study of a general anti-avoidance

rule. The Treasury now has that study; will my hon. Friend give me an assurance that it is under urgent consideration for implementation at the earliest opportunity?

He can shake his head and then he can deny that youth unemployment was 650,000 in 1997, and after one of the longest booms in Britain's peacetime history the Labour Government left behind 930,000 young unemployed for this Government to deal with.

For pensioners, the autumn statement confirmed that the basic state pension will be increased by £5.30, the biggest cash increase in the history of the state pension. That increase comes about because of the triple lock that the coalition Government have put in place. Let us remember another policy choice that could have been made. In 2000, when the previous Government were in office and when earnings rose by 4.4%, the CPI was 1.2% and inflation was 1.1%, which measure did the previous Labour Government choose? They chose the lowest, producing a 75p pension rise. That was at a time when the budget was in surplus and we were in the middle of a boom. In these difficult times, the Government have done the right thing by pensioners as well. No wonder that pensioners were left out of the motion that has been tabled today.

The motion mentions a squeeze, but the biggest squeeze that could be inflicted on citizens in our country-the 29 million people in work-would be on their mortgage payments, their debt interest payments, and the loans of the businesses that employ them, if the international markets were to lose confidence in this country.

The motion says that the government are "out of touch". There is some cheek, some chutzpah, at the heart of a motion worded in that way by a party formerly led by Tony Blair, alongside whom the architect of new Labour, Peter Mandelson, said that he was "intensely relaxed" about people becoming filthy rich. If the shadow Secretary of State wants to see who is out of touch, I suggest that he and his colleagues look in the mirror, because it is they who are out of touch with reality.

I have taken two interventions.

There was pressure from certain quarters not to make that increase, but the coalition has done the right thing and stuck by its promises to the poorest people in society.

On children, which the motion also covers, tax credits for children are being increased-given all the rhetoric, one would swear they were being cut-by the rate of inflation, 5.2%. In the long term, we want to transform the life chances of the poorest children in society, through the pupil premium and extra child care for two-year-olds announced in the autumn statement.

For young people, the Government are putting millions of pounds behind increasing apprenticeship places. The right hon. Member for South Shields (David Miliband) did not want to take my intervention on youth unemployment-

I have taken two interventions. I will not take any more.

The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions referred to another reform that the coalition Government will introduce-universal credit-to sweep away the labyrinth of benefits and tax credits that are a legacy of the last Labour Government. In the autumn statement, the Chancellor confirmed that working-age benefits and benefits for disabled people would be increased by the full CPI rate of 5.2%, which puts into the pockets of the poorest in society extra cash that they will spend almost immediately in their local communities.

As my hon. Friend the Pensions Minister says, they did not understand that their own Chancellor was financing election populism on the backs of the poorest workers in society. Let us have fewer lectures from Labour Members on how to treat people on low pay in work.

I recommend that the hon. Gentleman looks at the High Pay Commission report, which is an excellent document containing many recommendations for controlling executive pay. I urge the Government seriously to consider many of those recommendations, including on the revolving door of non-executives on boards of companies effectively determining each other's pay, where some of the most serious breaches occur.

On hard-working families, to which the motion refers, the Liberal Democrats' No. 1 policy commitment at the last general election was that, in order to make work pay, we would raise out of income tax those on low earnings and those working part time by increasing the income tax threshold to £10,000 over the lifetime of the Parliament. Progress towards giving effect to that aspiration is being made throughout this Parliament. Let us contrast that with the last Budget of the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) in 2007, when, just before becoming Prime Minister, he financed an income tax cut through a tax rise for the poorest in society. I remember watching Labour Members waving their Order Papers and cheering that income tax cut-