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Finance Bill

It would be churlish not to recognise that. The Financial Secretary recognised the difficulties faced by the Road Haulage Association, and I welcome that. The hon. Member for Rayleigh (Mr. Francois) said, rightly, that the UK had the second highest pump price for petrol, the highest price for diesel and the highest level of combined tax. On the questions that he asked—yes, it would be a rolling six-month average before the trigger kicked in. The discount would take effect until the average petrol price again reduced to within the trigger level, which is 3p above—I will explain this in more detail later. Trust me. The discount stays in place until the petrol price falls below the trigger level again. The duty trigger—the world oil price—was mentioned by a number of hon. Members. We had left that at the discretion of the Chancellor. Brent Light sounds like a rather good oil type on which to base the trigger, but that would be at the Chancellor’s discretion, as would the forecast range. There was a suggestion that the forecast range might be quite conservative. I would have thought it might be quite liberal, to avoid the trigger and the discount kicking in. That brings me to the Liberals. They were sympathetic to the proposal and the objective. It was marvellous. The hand-wringing and inaction were utterly predictable. I can hardly wait to see the local newsletters in Argyll and Bute when they explain this one away in the Oban Times. My hon. Friend the Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond) outlined the working of the proposal and explained how the windfall gains would be used to smooth out, as I said a number of times in my speech, the spikes and the prolonged spikes that occur in the fuel price. I want to make it clear that this is a one-way smoothing out to mitigate against the worst circumstances that result from prolonged spiking. It is not to penalise people at the bottom end when prices go down. It is to smooth out at the top end and to allow businesses, in particular, proper financial planning. It is intended to take away at least some of the pain produced by prolonged rises in oil prices and pump prices. A number of serious points were made in the debate. I considered for a moment the Financial Secretary’s invitation to me not to press the motion further. We consider the matter to be serious. The new clause had the support of five parties in the House, covering if not large numbers of the electorate, then large geographical parts of the UK. It is a serious matter in Northern Ireland, in Wales, in Scotland and in large parts of England, so I decline the Financial Secretary’s invitation not to press the motion to a vote.