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Finance (No. 2) Bill

I am grateful to the Paymaster General for her complimentary remarks. It is not the first time that she has made such remarks; it appears to be habit-forming and as I have said before, I fear that it may have consequences for my career. I acknowledge that in some cases the judgments of the ECJ relate to the single market. I do not want to argue the historical point. I am not pointing the finger at the Government for introducing legislation or signing treaties that may have caused the problem, but political society as a whole has not addressed it and given it the profile that it should have received. I am trying to highlight the concern, but as a country our options for addressing it are somewhat limited. We should consider amending treaties. We may need to consider taking a tougher line at intergovernmental meetings. We must always bear in mind the consequences to our tax system when we evaluate our relationship with the EU. My concern this evening is simply to highlight that issue, which does not receive the attention in the House or outside that it should. We are talking about very large sums of money. We are talking about a cost to the Exchequer of £7 billion. We have rightly argued about the proposals on trusts, which the Treasury estimates will cost about £15 million, and about the home computing initiative. We are talking about relatively small amounts of money in those cases, but large sums are being lost to the Exchequer and large administrative burdens are being placed on British industry and business as a consequence of such judgments. There is a need for a greater awareness of what the ECJ is doing to our corporate tax system. The effect is substantial and very concerning, and it is highly regrettable in my opinion that we are losing the ability to legislate for ourselves the corporate tax system that should apply in the United Kingdom.