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Finance (No. 2) Bill

My Lords, I thought that sentiments of the kind expressed by the noble Lord had died out long ago with new Labour. It is refreshing to hear the politics of envy alive in this House of all places. I thought his attempt to link VAT fraud with tax avoidance was quite disgraceful. Company directors are under a duty to maximise revenues for their shareholders for investment in the future of the company and it is perfectly sensible for a finance director to structure his tax affairs in such a way as to pay the minimum of tax within the law. However, where I did have some sympathy with the noble Lord was in his clear frustration at the range of new schemes emerging on the back of attempts by the Chancellor to restrict tax avoidance. Surely the lesson is obvious: we do not need complexity upon complexity; we need a fairer and more broadly based tax system, a simpler one which cannot be exploited so that people pay what is clearly due within the law. I took the trouble to have a look at the Finance Bill. I am not sure whether the Minister has read all of it, but I suspect probably not. I also suspect that his officials in the Box will have read only those sections that relate to them. It is 506 pages long in two volumes. I asked him earlier how much of the Bill had been discussed and debated in the other place, and he told me that I could look at Hansard like everyone else. I hope that he might be able to answer that question when winding-up the debate because I know that his officials have been following the Bill throughout the course of its parliamentary progress and should know the answer. I have done a similar exercise for last year’s Finance Bill and I can tell him what the numbers are for that. It was much shorter—only 481 pages. That compares to Finance Bills when the Conservatives were in office which were about 157 pages. So Finance Bills are now three times as long. In the case of last year’s Finance Bill, less than 5 per cent of the clauses were debated and only 1.5 per cent of the pages were discussed in the other place. The most important measure in the Finance Bill 2005 was the Chancellor’s raid on North Sea oil taxes. That was not done through the Finance Bill at all but through a statutory instrument which was not even debated in the House of Commons. It strikes me as quite extraordinary that we have this vastly complex new legislation being brought forward and it is not even discussed. Add to that the points that have been made by noble Lords earlier in the debate about the failure to consult on measures—or even to mention some of the most important ones in the Budget speech—and we have a catastrophic failure on the part of the Executive and Parliament properly to administer tax law. The House of Commons is simply not doing its job. In the days when the noble Lord, Lord Barnett, was Treasury Secretary the Finance Bill was taken on the Floor of the House of Commons and given much greater scrutiny and consideration, but now we have a Finance Bill which is immensely complicated. Indeed, even if the House of Commons was prepared to do its job, and even if it had the expertise to do the job, the timetable imposed by the myth that income tax has got to be renewed annually and is not permanent means that there is no time for proper scrutiny.