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This government recognises that for too long, economic growth in our country has been too concentrated in London and the south east.

But no other major developed economy has such a gap between the productivity of its capital city and its 2nd and 3rd cities.

In order to raise revenue, which is required to fund spending commitments I am making today, it will rise from 10% currently, to 12% from next June.

I suspect that I will prove no more adept at pulling rabbits from hats than my successor as Foreign Secretary has been at retrieving balls from the back of scrums.

And we will introduce a new penalty for those who enable the use of a tax avoidance scheme that HMRC later challenges and defeats.