My Lords, I am enormously grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this relatively short debate. As your Lordships might expect, I did not agree with all the points, statistics and bits of data that were shared, and I will obviously have my own, but I will try to stick within my wheelhouse and stay within the realms of national insurance today.

However, I want to comment on the general thrust from the noble Lords, Lord Sikka and Lord Livermore, and the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer. It was just extraordinary. I feel really pleased that everybody has now come round to the Conservatives’ way of thinking that taxes are too high, and we need to think about reducing them and we must do so responsibly. I am grateful for that vindication of the Conservatives’ policy when it comes to personal taxes. We agree that they are too high, but of course many of the tax rises that are forecast to come into place—I absolutely accept that taxes will go up, although this national insurance cut reduces them—are already announced and baked into the figures.

I did not hear many noble Lords recognising the reasons why we needed to put taxes up—