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Finance Bill

My hon. Friend makes a good point. The HMRC work force is being reduced, so we should look carefully at the tasks that people there are asked to undertake. I hope that the Minister will consider that point. There is a wider point in respect of the extension of the inheritance tax net. House price inflation means that more and more people in my constituency are falling into its clutches, with estate values reaching the duty threshold despite the increase introduced in the Budget earlier this year. The Land Registry reports that the average price of properties sold in the south Shropshire district in the first quarter of the year was £208,000. In the Bridgnorth district, the average was £214,600. In the same period, the average price of detached houses—and that includes most of the village properties in my largely rural constituency—was £264,000 in south Shropshire and more than £307,000 in the Bridgnorth district council area. As a result, the average houseowner in my constituency is likely to be caught by the inheritance tax threshold. Inheritance tax was originally intended to be a tax for the wealthy. It is increasingly hitting the average householder across the country. That is certainly the case in the Ludlow constituency. It is time that we looked at the tax as a whole, and stopped tinkering with extending it at the edges. My final point has to do with the direction in which the Government are heading in respect of inheritance tax, which is in stark contrast to the direction that our major economic competitors are taking. I was in Washington DC last month and I discovered that legislation is passing through Congress and they are debating whether the American equivalent of inheritance tax—they call it death tax, rather starkly—should be scrapped or substantially reduced. If our major competitors are planning to scrap inheritance tax, we should think carefully about whether it is appropriate for us to extend the net. Instead, we should perhaps accept the increasingly competitive nature of the global economy in which we all live and consider scrapping inheritance tax.