Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

Our point is there is a real need to prioritise as a consequence of higher energy prices that essentially make welfare payments and pensions more expensive to provide. if the Government wants to do that, which most people think it should, that is going to cost it a lot and that means it has to make choices relative to other things. There are many pressing things facing the country and this raises real questions about how that is going to be done. Of course, there are other ways of doing it. One could prioritise away from other spending programmes or increase taxes. Those are all ways of doing it in a sustainable way. The danger of just spending the money that we have is that would add to inflation in an already high inflationary environment and also make us more reliant on corporation tax, which would essentially be storing problems up for the future. There is a very important debate to be had about-----