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Finance (No. 2) Bill

The hon. Gentleman’s anxiety always causes me anxiety. Indeed, I took a similar view of those on the Front Bench until I joined my own. Measures beyond number have been introduced in the House, both by the present Government and by Conservative Governments, without an exact financial quantification. We have proposed a principle to deal with a problem that causes serious economic and social hardship. As is often the case in the House, we should allow the details to follow later. Accepting the proposal commits the Government to nothing. It is an enabling measure, rather than a prescriptive one, that gives them the power to deal with the problem. I have lost count of the number of occasions in Committee and on Report when the Government have proposed such enabling measures and said, ““Trust us—we’ll deal with this later.”” We are giving a power to the Government, and we are prepared to trust them to do the work and bring the figures to the House at a later stage. The proposal introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey is necessary. As he has pointed out, people using the cheapest petrol pumps in my constituency pay about 105p per litre. In the remoter parts—the outlying parishes in Orkney and in Shetland, and the outer islands away from the mainland of Orkney and Shetland—the price is much higher than that. When I was first elected in 2001, people in Hoy in Orkney were already paying more than £1 per litre. That causes real financial difficulty. Many of the people living in those communities are on low and fixed incomes. They do not have public transport running at the bottom of their road every five or 10 minutes. They have to use a private car because they have no option. The Government take in the form of value added tax, quite apart from the fuel duty, hits those people particularly hard because they start from a lower income and pay more. In the villages and towns in my constituency, petrol is sold from small petrol pumps and shops that do not have the purchasing power of Asda, Tesco and other big suppliers in the towns and cities. That is the root of the problem. The Treasury has come up with all sorts of answers. It has told us that we cannot introduce such a measure because people will drive from areas where they already get cheap petrol to areas such as those represented by my hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey—my goodness, I wish he had a shorter constituency name—simply to get petrol that they could buy, at best at the same price, and probably cheaper, if they stayed at home. The logic of such objections does not bear rational examination.