Mr. Ted Fletcherasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he will itemise the estimated cost to the State, in a full year, if 52,000 steel workers became unemployed under the following headings: (a) cost of redundancy pay, (b) loss of income tax, (c) loss of national insurance contributions, (d) cost of flat-rate benefit, (e) cost of earnings-related benefit and (f) cost of supplementary benefit.
§ Mr. BiffenNo, a redundancy of 52,000 steel workers would initiate complex adjustments in the labour and capital markets. It would not be possible to trace these various adjustments even after the event, so any estimates of their size would be unverifiable. More fundamentally, the Exchequer cost will depend on the rate at which new jobs are created and unemployment falls back to the level it would have reached without these redundancies. I am not prepared to speculate what the impact on the Exchequer of the redundancies might be, or the Exchequer cost of preventing the redundancies by further injections of public money.