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Finance (No. 2) Bill

The hon. Gentleman is trying his best to cap my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (John Bercow), but I will give him a serious answer. It is significant that the Liberal Democrats have left the definition in the hands of the Treasury. If they had a workable definition they would have included it in the new clause rather than pass the parcel to the Financial Secretary. As new clause 4 and the other Liberal Democrat amendments do not have a definition attached it follows, as night follows day, that they do not have a price attached. I do not know, but I suspect that the cost to the Treasury of a lower rate of duty and lower rates of VED in remote rural areas would be considerable. I am happy to give way to anyone who can tell me what the cost is, and how the Liberal Democrats propose to make up the lost revenue. That leads me to my main point. The transport problems faced by people in remove rural areas are, as we have heard, formidable. Large vehicles are needed for agricultural and other work—that is not usually the case in urban areas—public transport is often non-existent, and there is far greater reliance on cars than in urban and suburban areas, as the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey quite fairly pointed out. Our quality of life policy group, chaired by my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer), is therefore examining those issues as we formulate our policy programme in the run-up to the next election. That is preferable to introducing in the first year of a Parliament a series of hasty and apparently unfinanced tax cuts that show no sign of being properly thought through, and which, alas, open those who propose them to the charge of opportunism.