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AMENDMENT OF THE LAW

I would like to enter that on the Register of Members’ Interests. A disgraceful feature of this Budget—it has, I am afraid, been a feature of Budgets in recent years—was the lack of transparency and the tendency to exclude from the speech important measures or any details that make comprehensible the measures that appear in it. I can remember, as I am sure my right hon. Friend can—we were both Financial Secretaries to the Treasury, and I was Economic Secretary before that—that when we drew up Budgets, officials would sometimes say, ““You’ve got to include that measure. It might be boring, but it’s important. It raises revenue.”” Invariably, we would say yes. There was a presumption that anything important or significant had to be included and explained and the cost made apparent. The tendency in recent years has been to do exactly the reverse and say that anything important, anything that will be painful or anything that imposes burdens of taxation on people will be hidden in the small print of some press release and barely mentioned in the speech. We had the extraordinary experience of the Chancellor giving a Budget speech shortly after taking £100 billion of additional liabilities on to our balance sheet without mentioning that he had nationalised a dodgy back or that he had included the extra loans on the nation’s balance sheet. I find that disgraceful. It is not treating the House or the nation fairly. I understood that the Office for National Statistics had said that that would be on the balance sheet. The figures should be included in the nation’s assets. The fact that the provision does not come in until the first day of the new financial year is not an excuse for not including it in today’s Budget. Closer inspection of the book leads us to discover that the lollipop in the speech—the offer of an increase in the winter heating allowance that the Chancellor announced—will be financed for only one year. It is a one-year increase. Will it disappear next year? If it will, that is fair enough, because no money has been set aside for it. However, if the Chancellor is giving the impression that it will be extended this year, no money has been set aside and there is some dodgy financing going on there, too. We were not reminded that the most significant change that will occur in the tax system as of 6 April is the abolition of the 10 per cent. rate band: 5.3 million of the least well-paid people in this country will pay more tax. The Chancellor did not mention it, let alone point out its impact on those people’s standard of living. He also failed to remind us, of course, that it was introduced in an attempt to create the impression that he was cutting the basic rate of income tax by using the money in his last Budget to announce a 10 per cent. basic rate cut while eliminating the 10 per cent. rate so that most people actually end up paying more. The Chancellor accidentally said that he was cutting corporation tax from 38 per cent. to 28 per cent., when the actual cut is from 30 per cent. to 28 per cent. I think that that was just a slip of the tongue; I make no complaint about it, as we all make such mistakes and I am guilty of them from time to time. What the Chancellor did not mention, however, was that the corporation tax rate for small companies is going up as of the beginning of this financial year. That matters to millions of small companies, which are, above all, the job and wealth creators of the future—and hopefully the big companies of the future. They are enraged by that prospective increase and the fact that it is being made at these particularly uncertain times in the economy. The Chancellor was remarkably opaque about what he is doing with non-doms—non-domiciled residents who work here, but do not necessarily pay tax on overseas income. They pay tax on their income in this country and it would have been interesting to hear from the Chancellor exactly how much tax they pay on the incomes they generate in this country. It appeared to me that the Chancellor was backing off in his proposals and reverting more to those made by my hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne), the shadow Chancellor, to pay a flat £25,000. Of course, the Chancellor charges more—unsurprisingly, as Labour always charges more—but once the non-doms have paid, no further inquiries are made about their foreign revenues. In fact, when the Chancellor said that he was going beyond that and was not only going to charge the non-doms that sum, but start chasing their overseas income and investments as well, he produced an absolute uproar among the non-dom community resident in this country. A friend of mine, who is not a non-dom in this country and is not even resident here, has a business in central Europe. He lives in Zurich. He told me that he was delighted by what the Chancellor proposed because the outflow of non-doms from this country to Switzerland—to the fashionable suburb of Zurich where such people live—has been such as to treble the value of his house since the announcement was made. The idea that this is just a brouhaha is not the case; people are physically upping sticks and moving, and we are losing not just the £25,000 or £30,000 that they might pay, but the hundreds of thousands in tax revenues that they are paying on their incomes in this country, generated in this country, and, of course, the prospect of moneys being returned from abroad to this country—not to mention the contribution they make to arts and charities.