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Finance (No. 2) Bill

My hon. Friend is never lost for an apt quotation, and I cannot think of a more apt one myself, although he may well be on his feet in a moment to suggest another. I turn to the tests of simplicity and of fraud. Registering vehicles that belong to households with a postcode in a remote rural area for lower rates of VED is scarcely likely to be simple in practice. As the Financial Secretary pointed out on 3 May, motorists could easily register vehicles in designated remote rural areas and then use them predominantly or exclusively in urban areas, since, as I hope the Liberal Democrats will concede, a car registered in a more rural area can in fact be driven to an urban area. Then there is the question of cost. Amendment No. 125 invites the Treasury to define ““remote rural area”” in regulations. New clause 4, which was also tabled by the Liberal Democrats and to which the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey has just spoken, refers to remote areas and, as he made clear, proposes lower rates of duty. As the hon. Member for Dundee, East (Stewart Hosie) pointed out in a telling speech on 3 May, there is no agreement on the definition of a remote area. The description offered by the Scottish Executive covers 98 per cent. of Scotland’s landmass, and 18.7 per cent. of the population. The hon. Gentleman cited the Randall definition, which is based on sparsity of population and covers 89 per cent. of Scotland’s landmass and takes in 29 per cent. of the population. If the Liberal Democrats could offer a definition that commanded consensus they would surely have included it in new clause 4, rather than pass the parcel to the Treasury.