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AMENDMENT OF THE LAW

In fairness, India is the only country with a more complicated tax code than ours. My point was that, in a global world, we need to have an eye to simplicity. In many ways, our tax system has become overly complex, so I am happy to take this opportunity to welcome the Chancellor’s move today to simplify income tax. It also makes absolute sense to align the higher rate of tax with the national insurance level, as that will remove all the little overlaps with which I am sure that the Financial Secretary is familiar. One legacy of 10 years of this Chancellor is the level of public debt. The golden fiscal rule, insofar as it still exists, has been breached on a number of occasions. The date of the economic cycle has been changed three times to force the facts to fit the theory. Spending is at almost £600 billion a year, and is reliably forecast to rise to about £670 billion by 2010. Too much has been—and will continue to be—funded by debt. The public finance initiative is another problem. Much of the building of schools and hospitals to which the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris) referred earlier has been funded by the PFI, and there is a sense that we are relying on future generations to pay for what we are consuming today. Much of that off-balance sheet financing is delaying the tough decisions that need to be made about the future of public expenditure. I fear that this era will come to be regarded as the best of times, because we are consuming now without paying proper regard to future generations.