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Finance (No. 2) Bill

I am grateful for that intervention, which allows me to deal with the broader comments made by the hon. Gentleman, the hon. Member for Rayleigh and, in particular, the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young). I apologise to the right hon. Gentleman if I took him literally when he started talking about cuckoos. A few weeks ago, we discussed the proliferation of Jaguars. As I said then, I know that the right hon. Gentleman has a great deal of experience and understanding of these matters. I am very pleased that as a result of contacts since the Committee stage, we will meet on 18 July so that I can hear from him directly about his concerns and also his ambitions for residential property investment in our country. I was also encouraged to receive a letter from him a few weeks ago, after the Committee stage, in which he told me that he had engaged in a dialogue with a housing association that is thinking of establishing a REIT. I commend him for the work he is doing to ensure that the take-up of REITs is as successful as we all want it to be. We are not attempting to establish a regime that will try to bias investment in one direction or another. We want a regime that is not particular, distorting or potentially inflexible in the way in which it encourages in the property sector. The right hon. Gentleman asked why the 1996 regime had been too restrictive, which is how I described it in Committee. The main problem was the fixed upper limit on the cost of each unit that could be part of the regime, which was lower than the cost of most houses. It was not successful, because most houses could not be invested in. There are no such restrictions or upper limits in our UK regime.