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Finance (No. 2) Bill

Those who know the Paymaster General well can judge for themselves. On the options to save the scheme, the Treasury has sought to justify the scrapping of the home computer initiative by citing abuse. On Second Reading the Paymaster General appeared to have no other defence of the Chancellor’s ill thought-out decision than to make noises about iPods from a sedentary position. It is true that a loophole existed. A number of products that are entertainment rather than educational, and so are not exactly in the spirit of the scheme, such as MP3 players, game consoles and digital cameras, were ordered in some cases and qualified for the tax exemption because the HCI guidelines from 2004 gave only broad definitions. So there was a loophole which some people attempted to exploit. However, the Treasury has produced little clear evidence, even tonight, of the extent of the abuse that it claims was occurring, which we believe was only at the margins. As I pointed out in an intervention, there was little hard evidence of the abuse in the Government’s own regulatory impact assessment, which they produced last week in a desperate attempt to justify the abolition of the scheme.