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Finance Bill

If the Minister really believed that the current Mayor would stay in post for many years, she would not have any problem accepting the amendment. She said that she wanted to depersonalise the discussion; the point of the amendment, which delays implementation until 2009, is to depersonalise it. It would mean that that discussion was not about Ken Livingstone, but about the principle of the tax treatment of severance payments for Mayors of London. The central point that has come out of the discussion—from the Minister's remarks about the parliamentary scheme, I think that it is a point in which she is interested—is that we have a curious arrangement whereby there are payments that, in the hands of any person other than a Member of Parliament, a Member of the devolved Assemblies, or a member of the GLA, would have to be defended against the Revenue. The tax treatment on the first £30,000 would have to be earned by demonstrating to the Revenue that the money was not an entitlement, but an ex gratia payment. What we have done in the case of Members of Parliament, and what we are about to do in the case of members of the Greater London authority and London Mayors, is define such a payment, in statute, as non-contractual, even though it is made under statute, and so will certainly be received by the holder of the office in question. Any payment that someone in the private sector was certain to get when they relinquished office would certainly be taxable in full, and the Revenue would rightly argue that case, so we are creating an anomaly for a very small class of people, all of whom happen to be politicians.