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(Clauses 1, 4, 8, 189 and 209, Schedules 1, 23 and 33, and certain new Clauses and new Schedules relating to value added tax)

At the danger of being ruled out of order for repeating today's earlier debates—[Interruption.] The Financial Secretary says from a sedentary position that I am on the back foot, but I am absolutely not. I have been pointing out to his colleagues for the past couple of hours that the volume of behavioural change anticipated in the Exchequer analysis is fundamentally flawed. The taxable income elasticity point chosen by the Exchequer to derive that volume of behavioural change is completely outwith the normal delta used by economists to assess the elasticity of top incomes. [Interruption.] No, we are talking about the future. We are talking about what behavioural change there will be and what the yield will therefore be in future. That takes us to the central question of the Government's competence. There are questions to be asked about the competence of the way in which they set up the bank levy. Why on earth did the Government choose in the first instance a rate of 0.045%, only to have to increase it five times in the past 18 months to hit their annual yield target of £2.5 billion? I would be delighted to hear the Financial Secretary explain that to us. Why did the Government do it that way around? It does not make any sense to me. It would have been more sensible either to have stuck with the payroll tax, as we suggested, or to have arrived at a hard figure and allowed the yield to set the rate, not the rate to set the yield. Thus we come to the question of how the Government can keeping saying that they are certain that the bank levy will yield £2.5 billion each year. It did not in its first year, when it hit £1.8 billion. The reason the Treasury team is continually having to tweak the rate is that it is not certain how much money it is going to yield.