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Finance Bill

This is a debate about what is happening in the aftermath of that debate. It is rather rich of the Government to come back five years later, and almost airbrush out the history of those measures, ignoring the fact that they started that process by altering the balance between incorporation and being unincorporated. The problem is that the Government are using a crude sledgehammer to crack a nut, and they are causing a problem for many small businesses. Let us consider for a moment the issue of incorporation, because it is an argument that has been prayed in aid by the Economic Secretary and the Financial Secretary. If we look at the way in which the number of companies that have incorporated has changed in recent years, we can see that in the year that the zero rate was introduced there was an increase in the number of companies that incorporated. That trend and step change in incorporation has continued, and the year after the zero rate was scrapped the number of companies registered was 372,000, compared with 325,900 in 2002-03. It appears that there has been a general increase in the number of companies that have incorporated, and it is hard to deduce a causal link between the two, given the fact that the large number of incorporations has continued for some time afterwards.