---

Finance (No. 4) Bill

My point was along the lines of that one. One difficulty occurs if all our trading nations are going through austerity; austerity can be done only by one country in such a group. We need to focus attention on growth. Indeed, the last words of a speech I made in the House almost two years ago, after the June 2010 Budget, were that we have talked about and made the right case for austerity, but we needed attention on growth—I fear that there has been too little. I agree with the hon. Member for Leeds West in her analysis and on trying to assist small and medium-sized enterprises by allowing them to take on extra employees over the next two tax years without paying further national insurance. Better still, we could extend a national insurance holiday to all employees under the age of 25. That opportunity was missed both in the Budget and in the Bill. I wish to touch on three specific concerns that I strongly hope will be dealt with in Committee in the weeks ahead. I confess that I am a little uneasy at the prospect of the general anti-avoidance provisions and powers that are heralded in the Bill and to which the Chief Secretary referred. Senior coalition Ministers interchange the terms ““avoidance”” and ““evasion”” in a rather casual way, which should be of concern to more than merely the tax advisory community. Individuals and businesses in a free society are, and should be, entitled to organise their affairs in such a way as to minimise their tax liability. I have no problem with that. Although I sympathise with the Treasury, which is forced virtually continuously to update its rules and regulations, any general powers on avoidance should keep retrospection to an absolute minimum, and should be used only in extreme cases of what is regarded as so-called aggressive anti-avoidance. Moreover, it is surely incumbent on the Treasury, if it moves in that direction, to ensure a comprehensive pre-clearance regime to allow companies and their advisers to road-test their proposed taxation schemes with senior HMRC officials. I appreciate that banks have few friends—I represent the City of London and am perhaps one of the few left—but the treatment meted out by the Treasury to Barclays bank in February set a very unfortunate precedent, not least because in recent weeks the Treasury has sought to lecture the Indian Government on the undesirability of retrospective tax. Barclays bank had sought and obtained clearance for its £500 million tax minimisation scheme. It was overturned in a blaze of publicity. If we are to raise the substantial levels of taxation that UK Governments of all stripes need, given the electorate's addiction to public spending, we should be wary of anti-business rhetoric, which will give further encouragement to globally mobile institutions wishing to leave these shores. Being open for business depends on certainty in commercial practice, not simply verbal assurances.