Dear Mr Brown...

It's all about how we're going to pay back the £697.5bn Britain owes. Everyone has got their ideas. Simply put, the country needs to create jobs and get people spending. Here's my idea.

Raise the minimum wage.

It obviously would not completely pay off the huge sum but there are so many reasons why this would help. Firstly, as a part time worker myself, if I earned more money per hour I would work less hours. Presuming my colleagues follow this philosophy too, my employer would have to employ more staff to cover the spare hours, meaning that people currently unemployed would have a job and pay taxes instead of receiving benefits.

Secondly, one of the main problems at the moment is that many unemployed people find that they receive more money in benefits than they would if they worked full time. Lowering people's benefits would only make poor people sink further into poverty, but raising the minimum wage would mean that more people would want to work and keep their jobs because they are better off for it. This would also mean that jobs which are often taken by foreign workers would be more appealing to British people.You might not clean toilets for £4.83 an hour, but you might do it for £7.50 because by the end of the day you would have earned half again what you would have earned.

Another benefit of significantly increasing the minimum wage would be that people would be more likely to be able to pay off debts and not have to lose their houses or go completely bankrupt. It would also mean that people have more spare cash available to spend, which would mean that jobs would be created in areas such as manufacturing, distribution, retail, etc. This would affect a large proportion of people in the UK in different areas, different classes and with different skills, not just poor people.

I am also very strongly in favour of abolishing the 'development rate' for people aged 18-22. I would actually go so far as saying it is absolutely disgusting that a 21 year-old doing the exact same job as a 22 year-old would be earning a pound an hour less, roughly £150 a month. If the 'development rate' was brought into line with the rest of the country, then people aged over 18 with rent to pay or a child to feed would actually be able to survive and wouldn't have to live on benefits and those without responsibility would have a better chance of getting on the property ladder.

This would obviously be extremely unpopular with employers but I propose that changes are made to business rates, perhaps even getting rid of them completely in favour of a fairer system based completely on profits and business size without taking the size of the premises into account.