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Finance (No. 2) Bill

I welcome the fact that the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers) regards these amendments as useful. The provisions on leasing are narrow, and I do not propose to re-run the wider arguments that we went into in some detail in Committee. However, we will keep the new regime for leasing under close review. We will also consult the interests in the industry when monitoring the impact and operation of the new regime, just as we did during its design. Amendments Nos. 21 to 23 in particular reflect the points made by the hon. Lady in Committee, as well as the representations of the Law Society. We have had a chance to look at all those points more closely, and we have now tabled those amendments. I pay tribute to her work and to the representations of the Law Society on this matter. On amendment No. 98, the hon. Lady is right to say that there is a degree of consensus in the House on the need to support our film industry. It is an important, innovative, creative and economically successful industry. There is also consensus, however, that we need to safeguard against the practice of artificially inflating claims for relief or abusing the reliefs that we put in place. We believe that the Bill gets the balance right and that the new regime will work, but we will keep it under close scrutiny. Perhaps the House will be interested in a letter that Mr. Dan Glickman, the chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, sent to the Chancellor last month, in which he said of the American industry:"““Our industry…finds the UK an enormously attractive location to produce our films for a variety of reasons. We are optimistic that the revised tax program will continue to make the UK an economically attractive location as well””." Amendment agreed to.