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Finance Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord should not presume that these are straightforward and easy issues. The issue with regard to non-domiciles is obvious: we have to balance the tax loss of not taxing them as fully domestic residents against the obvious mobility of that community and the possibility that their investments might be taken elsewhere. That is a proper equation for the Government to worry about. I know that it is a long time since the noble Lord was in government, but he will remember that his colleagues struggled with these kinds of issues when preparing Budgets. The noble Lord shakes his head, which may suggest that the Conservative Government never had the slightest problem with rates of taxation in terms of both their effectiveness and fairness. All I can say to that is that they made a sorry mess of 18 years in power given that they found managing the economy so extraordinarily facile and straightforward. I think that the noble Lord will have to give credit to the Chancellor for having to wrestle with some fairly complex issues in areas where changes to rates of taxation have to be measured against what the yield might be. In another context, the noble Lord would be the first to acknowledge the fact that, if you increase the taxation for a particular group, the yield may not necessarily be greater. I hope that he will recognise the importance of my point.