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Finance Bill

I do not have the budget in front of me, but given our debate, I think that the House will welcome the fact that a piece of independent research will be published. The hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. Browne) will accept that definitive answers to the questions raised in the amendment will be elusive, because nobody can absolutely prove what would have happened otherwise. However, the report will certainly provide some useful data to help to draw some conclusions. The assessment that he seeks will be doable when the necessary economic data become available. To assess the impact of the VAT cut, we will need data from the consumer trends survey, breaking down consumption between zero-rated and VAT-able goods. Data for the first quarter of 2010 will be available in July 2010, so the timing will be a little later than his amendment proposes. In the meantime, of course, ahead of the completion of that research, others have already drawn conclusions about the impact of the VAT cut and will continue to do so, not least in the light of the striking figures on retail sales from the British Retail Consortium to which the hon. Member for Ludlow (Mr. Dunne) referred. Until that point, I was surprised—or perhaps I was not—that nobody had mentioned them. Today, Stephen Robertson, director general of the BRC, described them as the""best sales growth for three years"." Helen Dickinson, head of retail at KPMG, said:""consumers are remaining resilient to the prospects presented by a gloomy economic outlook"."