John Healey: “The best thing we can offer a young person is not a benefit payment - it's a first job with training and a wage.”

5% represented a 'reasonable ceiling' on the tax.

Our social security system must always be there for those who can never work. But for everyone else, benefits should be a bridge to work, to wider participation, to a better life, not a trap that people can’t escape.

The money New Labour had in the nineties is simply not there now.

And every chancellor would say that’s for the budget, and I’ll set out my plans and the future route for government for this country at that budget.