---

National Insurance Contributions Bill

My Lords, I am sure that it will be the product of very able minds in the Treasury and the Civil Service. It will in part be a recognition of what has been stopped, which will clearly be auditable, but it will also reflect a view of what has been deterred, on which it is less easy to be certain. Some of that might relate to disclosures that have been made under the disclosure rules and reflect the extent to which the schemes are not taken forward. I am not sure how easy it will be to audit all that, but perhaps we can revert to the issue at later stages of the Bill. I believe that the figure will be a combination of not just what has been caught and assessed in back taxes and extra taxes, but tax and national insurance contributions that have been protected. There is a good deal of evidence about the matter. The disclosure rules threw up in excess of 100 schemes relating to tax and national insurance that were being promoted and were around in the system. On the basis of some of those disclosures, the belief is that a lot of those schemes had not been taken forward.