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Wales Bill

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Deputy Speaker, and to do battle once more with the Exchequer Secretary, who seems to have been permanently seconded to the Wales Office—he is like a ringer, to use football parlance. We welcome him and the opportunity he now has to clarify some of the things that he was unable to clarify when we last debated the Bill.

On income tax, the Opposition’s priority is very clear: we believe that we ought to have a fair and progressive tax system across the whole UK. For us that means reinstating the 50p rate and having a starting rate of 10p. That will be far fairer for the people of Wales, and indeed the people of every other part of the UK, than the tax cuts for millionaires that the Exchequer Secretary has overseen at the Treasury.

In the context of the Bill, we have three further priorities. Our first priority—this is why we will support the Bill this evening—is to ensure that Wales has access to borrowing powers in order to offset the £1.6 billion that the Conservatives have cut from the budget for Wales. That is linked to the taxation powers set out in the Bill.

Our second priority is to ensure that Wales is not further disadvantaged by potential additional cuts to the block grant that might be associated with the transfer of tax powers, as we heard a moment ago from the Exchequer Secretary, and as I will test in a moment.

Our third priority is to test properly the costs and benefits to Wales of the transfer of additional powers, particularly in respect of tax, because one of the truths about the Bill thus far is that the Government cannot really be taking this seriously. If they took it seriously and thought that it would really benefit Wales, they would have done a bit of the work to determine what the net costs and benefits would be for Wales. They have undertaken no such analysis, which I think calls into question the seriousness with which they address it.