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Finance Bill

The whole House will be astonished at that information, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing it to our attention. I should like to make two other brief points to Ministers about the clause. The first is an issue that I raised when the VAT cut was first announced last autumn: the extraordinary impact on the sectors of our economy that have the benefit of flat-rate VAT arrangements. By introducing the measure with such haste, the Government failed to take properly into account the consequences for the many sectors that benefit from such arrangements. Like, I am sure, almost every other hon. Member, I have had constituents writing to me complaining that, far from seeing a reduction in VAT as a result of the 2.5 per cent. general cut, their customers have seen an increase because the Government have failed accurately to calculate changes to the flat-rate arrangements. Many businesses are having to impose on their customers a higher flat-rate charge during this period of the so-called VAT cut than they did previously. That is quite extraordinary, and the Government have failed to provide a proper justification for it at any point. I hope that they will revisit the subject, even at this late stage. Finally, I should like to touch on the point made forcefully by my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree (Mr. Newmark) about the date. I also mentioned it in the Second Reading debate. It is quite extraordinary to choose a Thursday to introduce a significant change that will require the re-ticketing of every item, on and off the high street, that is subject to VAT. As my hon. Friend said, the only thing that the proposal has in its favour is that it is the calendar year end. It is not a month end or a week end; in most cases, it is not a financial year end. If the Minister had any familiarity with retailing, he would recognise that most retail financial year ends vary. They will typically fall at the end of January, not the end of December, but they vary according to the calendar. If it is, say, 31 December, it will be the final Saturday of the month closest to that date, not a Thursday. I ask the Minister to consider something that might be familiar to his Parliamentary Private Secretary and to many of his other colleagues. Has he had any discussions with the retail trade in Scotland about what the impact might be of introducing a significant change requiring a large number of manual amendments to stock price items after close of business on Hogmanay evening? I suspect that that will be extremely inconvenient to retailers in Scotland, who will have to pay substantially more in overtime to their long-suffering staff for coming into work after lights out on Thursday 31 December, when they may well have other things that they would prefer to be doing. I hope that the Financial Secretary will deal with that point directly.