Finance Bill

Debate between Angela Eagle and Jon Trickett

Thursday 15th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Ms Eagle]

I certainly appreciate the information that the Minister has put before us, and it helps us to get on with the debate. I suppose it means that she and her officials will have time for at least a little bit of a holiday this August. Under our plans, the yield begins to come in during the next financial year. I was under the impression that she would have had to ensure that she legislated for an entirely new system in the September 2010 Finance Bill. She now tells us that potential measures for an alternative system will be forced into next year’s Finance Bill, which means that an extra £0.2 billion of revenue that was scored for the next financial year will have to be raised. I assume that she will take account of that.

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

The new regime comes in in April 2011. If, as the Minister said, the Government will not bring legislation forward until April 2011, does it mean that we will use the system that we introduced? That will be a second system. There is the current system; the one that we introduced, which will apply from April 2011; and a third one, which will be introduced subsequent to the Government’s Bill. Or will the Government abandon our system, and will there be a period of time in which we get less revenue as a result of the complex process that has just been announced?

[Ms Eagle]

There are issues of process on which I would appreciate the hon. Lady’s enlightenment in her response to the debate.

There is also an issue about the backstop position. The hon. Lady says that draft clauses might be brought forward, and, although I am sorry to go on about process, it is important when it comes to tax changes. We gave ourselves close to two years to do all the work to introduce the higher rate relief charge, because it was such a difficult and complex area. We wanted to ensure that those who were liable to pay had plenty of time to plan, understand their liabilities—even if they did not like them, which they rarely do in my experience—and get to know the system, so that there was certainty about it. It now seems clear that there is a degree of uncertainty, which those who would have been particularly badly hit by the high charges, the very richest in our society, might welcome. However, we felt that they should shoulder a fairer burden of the necessary fiscal consolidation, because they had done so well during the good times.

If the Government are serious about protecting the yield, there has to be a trade-off with fairness. The Government have hinted at using the annual allowances as a way of raising that money, rather than our way, and if they introduce that change those on incomes of less than £130,000 will be dragged into the tax net. We wished to avoid that with our solution, so, if the reduction in annual allowances that the Government are considering turns out to be their final decision, in response to the debate will the hon. Lady tell us how many people it will affect? The Government have hinted that that is their preferred way, but our amendment would ensure a distributional analysis of the measure’s effect. Given that we legislated for a particular approach to raising that yield, and given that the Treasury did a great deal of work on developing that system, it would be entirely appropriate for the Treasury to produce some comparisons between that and the preferred approach at which the hon. Lady and, certainly, the Red Book have hinted. How great will the sudden tax liability be of people who earned less than £130,000 a year and would not have been affected had our approach to raising the yield gone ahead? How low down the income scale will the restrictions on tax relief go?