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Finance (No. 4) Bill

I agree with my hon. Friend that VAT is a tax of immense complexity. However, it is an essential tax for the revenue-raising that this country needs and it has to include in it things that all of us like and would rather not be taxed. Equally, it will include things that some of us do not like, do not particularly wish to eat and do not mind how heavily taxed they are. If I am put the question, I would choose a sausage roll over a pasty, but I know that others have different views. I also want to mention briefly the freezing of the threshold about which the right hon. Member for Stirling (Mrs McGuire) spoke interestingly. Again, the Government were right. Because the big step is being taken to raise thresholds altogether, it makes absolute sense, at no cash cost to any current pensioner, to freeze this level and allow it to even out so that we have one threshold. Every time we have variance in tax levels, be they rates or thresholds, we simply employ more people at Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, we have a more expensive cost of collection and we fail to achieve the objective of simplicity across the tax system. This has been a great Budget and I wish to finish by speaking briefly about this terrible question of tax avoidance. I agreed with my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) when he cited that notable judge with his phrase about allowing the taxman to take the biggest shovel. If people avoid tax, that is legal because we, as Parliament, have allowed them to do so. The following clauses in part 1 of the Bill allow legal tax avoidance: 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 38, 39, 40 and 44. All those clauses in the first 50 allow tax avoidance of which the Government approve. We will all approve of some of them, because they allow MPs £30,000 tax free when they leave Parliament, allow cars that must be made secure because people are at risk to be tax free and allow people in particular situations and circumstances to pay less tax than they would in normal circumstances. The enterprise initiatives under clauses 38, 39 and 40 allow investment that the Government want to encourage. Those are all examples of tax avoidance that is liked by the Government. We have to be fair to taxpayers. We can only expect them to follow the law of the land as it is written—the black letter law of the land. We cannot expect taxpayers to look at their affairs and say that the Government might like them, if they are feeling kind, to pay more tax than they are being asked for. None of us has an obligation to do that and it is wrong and dangerous to elide tax avoidance and tax evasion.