Paul Johnson

Now, it could start to measure that.

But then how do you stop someone saying, well, I've got 35-hour normal working week, but for 40 weeks a year or 30 weeks a year, I'm working five or 10 hours.

as opposed to being a standard 40-hour working week.

I mean, what happened is there's been a reduction in tax on something called overtime, but incredibly difficult to implement on real tax.

Over time, one of the things I'm often and sort of researchers and economists are often accused of coming up with tax policy, which looks good on paper, but which wouldn't work in practice.

And I think this is one of those things.

I can see the point on paper, but I really can't see how it would work in practice.

So that's not a principled argument against it.

It's really sort of questioning whether it could work without creating masses of tax avoidance and evasion.

As I say, I mean, this is obviously not something designed to increase the size of the workforce.

It's designed to give more work to people who've already got work.

But the net impact is we're producing more as a country.

Well, again, and sorry to be sort of, you know, nerdy about this, that depends whether this additional overtime is replacing other people who might otherwise have had a job or whether it's genuinely additional.

What would one do?

Well, there are evidently no completely straightforward answers.

Otherwise, you know, someone would have done well.

So you need to look at all sorts of things.

I mean, you're talking in terms of tax and benefit systems.

So let's stick to that.

For the moment, there's clearly, whatever the government says, a problem with our disability benefit system, which is still seeing very large numbers of people coming into the system, most of whom are not in work.