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Finance (No. 2) Bill

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that reminder. I declared my interest at almost every sitting of the Committee, and I am happy to do so again today. I am a settlor of an accumulation and maintenance trust for the benefit of my children, which gives me a certain amount of authority on this subject, unlike the Government, who appear to have entered into these arrangements without any understanding of their implications—as we have heard, they are now into the third set of major revisions—and without any consultation with the industry on the extent of the supposed mischief or abuse that the measures were designed to prevent. The Paymaster General was challenged repeatedly in Committee to provide evidence of the abuse, but was able to come up with only one or two astonishingly tortuous examples. When challenged by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham, she could provide no information on the scale of the abuse, but I hope that she will now have been briefed on how widespread it is.