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Income Tax Bill

My Lords, I certainly do not want to take any great amount of your Lordships’ time, but I felt that I had to say something. As the Minister acknowledged twice, or perhaps three times, I am currently the chair of the Steering Committee for the project. If anyone is mystified and wants to say, ““Why you?””, or ““Why me?””, whichever is appropriate, they had better turn to others for an explanation. My noble and learned friend Lord Howe of Aberavon appeared to have decided that I was a good person to take it on from him. I understand that he managed to persuade the project and the Minister of that view; they ganged up on me, and I allowed my sense of inadequacy to be overwhelmed by these blandishments. I therefore agreed to take over as chairman of the Steering Committee—with some diffidence, given that this project had been born in the mind of my right honourable friend Kenneth Clarke, as a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, and carried forward by my noble and learned friend Lord Howe of Aberavon, who had been looking after it for the whole of its 10 previous years of life. At any rate, here I am, and pleased to be associated with—to endorse the Minister’s words—a very worthwhile venture. I want to do little more, except to join in his tributes to various people. I have mentioned some of them, particularly my noble and learned friend Lord Howe of Aberavon, whose project this became over those 10 years. Alongside them, I want to express my thanks to the project team, some of whom might just be in earshot at the moment, and to my colleagues on the Steering Committee; not least, the noble Baroness, Lady Cohen of Pimlico, and a number of others who devote great diligence to studying complex and lengthy papers. They make an extremely important contribution to the project. My main purpose apart from that was simply to be here to support the Minister and to urge the House to let him have his Bill. It looks as if the House is in a fairly docile frame of mind, so I am optimistic that my plea will not fall on deaf ears. However, I would like to make two related points, which I hope are not out of order. First, this project, as the Minister indicated, has been going on a long time. It was not originally envisaged to last as long as it already has, and it has still not by any means completed its work. I say to some who have assisted with the project through consultation that I am conscious that, with the acceleration of the project, there have been mutterings about consultation overload. I want to assure them that all of us connected with the project are very aware of that, and will do everything possible to try to ensure that consultation takes place in a way that minimises rather than maximises the burdens and pressures on those whose co-operation we require. Secondly, because of some of the pressures on the Steering Committee and therefore the whole project, there is a tendency—not among the professional bodies, but in one or two quarters—to confuse simplifying the writing of complicated legislation with simplifying the legislation. One grumble that we pick up is, ““You may have made the thing clearer, but it is still extremely complicated. Why doesn’t somebody simplify it?””. The Minister will understand if we say that this remark is directed at the Government and not the project, because our specific terms of reference are to simplify the writing of the legislation, however complicated, but not to simplify the legislation. The Minister and his colleagues ought to be aware that considerable anxiety remains outside that, despite the relative applause for the simplified drafting, somebody ought to be doing more about simplifying the legislation itself. Now, while I expect no great declaration from the Minister tonight, I hope that he might carry that little message from those of us who are at the coal-face in this matter to his colleagues in the Treasury. Meanwhile, apart from thanking everyone, exuding good will and urging the House to accept the Bill, I have nothing else to say.