Finance Bill

Lord Wakeham Excerpts

Wednesday 16th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wakeham (Con)]

My Lords, this has been an extremely wide-ranging debate. Perhaps the Minister might like to take some comfort if I tell him that I support the Finance Bill that he has brought before the House and that I would like to see it passed. That would be an encouragement to him. I add my congratulations to my noble friend who has just finished his time as chairman of the Economic Affairs Select Committee. In fact, not many of us have been chairman of that committee because when it was set up the noble Lord, Lord Peston, was chairman. He was extremely good and when his term of office came to an end we changed the rules so that he could do another session as chairman. He might even have done a third term. He certainly did it for a very long time and was extremely good, so when I followed him as chairman some years ago, it was a bit of a revelation to have someone without the deep knowledge that he has. Certainly, my noble friend Lord MacGregor has tackled a number of very important issues very well. I remember my time particularly because the committee produced, as my noble friend Lord Lawson will remember, the first serious report on the economics of climate change. It was a unanimous report. As he was a very prominent member of the committee, we had a job to educate one or two members of some of the finer points but we got it through.

The Government need credit for their improved consultation but our report indicates that it is still not good enough. They are still not as good as I would like to see them in their consultation. Certainly, when plans change, they do not consult about the new plans. We are very impressed with the people who give us evidence. But I sometimes wonder whether, in practice, some of them know what they are saying or whether they are taking from their own members what they tell them to say. The noble Lord wanted experts in tax to come and tell us how to collect more tax, but I want these advisers to be very practical about telling us the unintended consequences of what the Government are doing. That is what I think these advisers are best at, or ought to be best at.

While the Government have made progress in all sorts of areas, the truth of the matter is that virtually every one of our taxes in this country will need some very serious looking at over the next few years—not necessarily to reduce the tax rates; that is not what concerns me. Virtually every tax has anomalies and difficulties. For example, with income tax, if you earn between £100,000 and £120,000 a year, your effective rate of tax is 60%, because as the personal allowances fall and you go up to the 45% rate, you end up paying 60% on your income. That is complete nonsense and it should not be so. The Government know this perfectly well and they should change it.

I will not go far into corporation tax because my noble friend Lord Lawson made a scathing attack on its inadequacies. However, if the Government think that they will get international agreement to deal with the problems of Starbucks and other such companies by negotiating on corporation tax in a wider world, they should forget it; that is not going to be the way. Corporation tax has passed its sell-by date as far as international business is concerned. We have to find some other way.

In the past I have talked about capital gains tax. Somebody in the Labour Party made a speech the other day to say that a rate of capital gains tax for long-term holders of investments should be considered. If that is not recognition that a substantial part of the capital gains tax that people pay is a tax on inflation, I do not know what is. Capital gains tax is very substantially —not completely, of course—a tax on inflation, and sooner or later we will have to face that.

I have had a go before in the House about stamp duty. It is fundamentally a bad tax. It is a tax on change. What we need in the country and in the world is for things to change and to improve. Of course, the Inland Revenue loves stamp duty because it is an easy tax to collect, but it is fundamentally a bad tax. The economic effects are being felt now. Things that would happen are not happening because stamp duty is too high. Lastly, I turn to inheritance tax. The Prime Minister has said in a speech that he thinks it needs to be looked at. Right across the board, you can see things that need to be done to bring our tax system up to proper modern standards.

The Minister quoted from a report about the greatly improved way in which tax policy is being achieved, but the formal review that was promised has not actually happened. I hope that it will happen. I am not saying that there are not some good things in what has been done, but I am not sure that it is as good as it might be. If the Government come to do their formal review, I would invite the people to look at one particular paragraph in our report. It is a quotation from the senior tax partner in a firm that I used to work for. I suspect that I left the firm long before he was born, so I do not know him, but he is very good. He is referring to the division of expertise between the Treasury and HMRC and whether that is right—whether the Treasury has sufficient experts. He says,

“if HMRC’s role was to ‘own’ the policies, ensuring that any proposals are rigorously evaluated by both the policy lead and those with practical experience of the operation of the tax system, then a number of the concerns of detail might be identified and addressed up front. HM Treasury would then have a clearer ‘scrutiny’ role, which would provide the ‘challenge function’ to the policies being developed”.

That is the way that policy arrangements between the Treasury and HMRC should develop rather than as it is at the moment, where there seems to be a division of expertise between the two. I am not sure it is as good as it might be. But I finish by saying that I am in favour of the Bill that the Minister has brought before the House.