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Finance Bill

I am disappointed that the Paymaster General has chosen to paint as bad people those who use trusts that were perfectly legal tax-planning devices when they were set up. As I said earlier, those people have come out with their hands up; they have accepted that the trusts did not work and they now want to exit from the system. The Paymaster General’s remarks did not address the fact that the Government have already acted to offer relief to many of those people. We cannot have a situation where some of the people who set up trusts are bad people and do not deserve relief, while others are good people who can elect to escape from at least the economic effects of the arrangements that have been put in place. The Paymaster General reiterated my words in using the phrase ““unintended consequences””. I have not clearly understood from her remarks that those in this group of approximately 30,000 people, for whom it is not appropriate to use the route of an election, are the products—[Interruption.] The Paymaster Generals asks why it is not appropriate. I have given the two most important reasons: first, the possible impact on beneficiaries of children’s trust if they die within seven years; and, secondly, the advancing to the time of the first death of the charge to inheritance tax when the taxpayers involved are a couple who make an election for a property that they hold jointly. That would have the disastrous consequence of causing inheritance tax to become payable by the widow or widower of the deceased at the time of the first death—a huge cash-flow problem that would almost certainly involve the forced sale of the house. That is why I am advised that the election process is simply not appropriate for certain groups of people. As the Paymaster General has spotted, I did not invent the new clause and the arguments that support it. We have been advised by the Chartered Institute of Taxation and the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners, as the Paymaster General has. The arguments that I have used have already been made in detail both to the Paymaster General—