National Insurance Contributions Bill

moved Amendment No. 7:"Page 3, line 20, at end insert—" ““(   )   any purpose relating to the payment or recoverability of additional primary contributions which become payable;”” The noble Baroness said: In moving the amendment I shall speak also to Amendment No. 18, which is identical, except that it applies to Northern Ireland. Amendment No. 7 would amend new Section 4C of the Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992, which will be inserted by Clause 1. New Section 4C allows regulations which are consequential to new Section 4B, and new Section 4C(2) sets out the purposes for which the regulations may be made. My amendment would add another purpose: the payment or recovery of additional primary contributions that have become payable. In another place, my honourable friend Mr Mark Field raised a number of questions about how primary national insurance payments which might have been made by employers some years after remuneration had been paid might also apply in respect of employees who had left the payroll. The Paymaster General said that was not an issue because it would be dealt with in regulations, and that the regulations would restrict the right of recovery. I should stress that I am not talking about situations where there has been a joint election or agreement about how national insurance contributions are to be borne, I am talking about the simple case where some form of remuneration is paid in, say, January 2005, and two years later the Treasury makes some regulations with retrospective effect that make national insurance payable on that amount. Employee A is still in the company, but employee B has left the company and may even have left the country. I believe that the employer will have to pay the primary contributions in the first instance on both employees, but what happens then? That is the question put by this amendment. My amendment does not say what should happen, it merely says that the regulations should cover the situation, and so, for the purpose of today’s debate, it is probing in nature. At Second Reading the noble Lord, Lord Newby, raised a similar question and the Minister gave a somewhat Delphic response. However, he suggested that the Government expected that some employers would get stuck not only with their own secondary contributions but also with some primary contributions. I have tabled this amendment to give the Minister an opportunity to set out how this question will be resolved, how it is to be determined and when and how employers can recover any amounts. I invite the Minister to say how this is dealt with in the first batch of regulations, as I could not see it from my own reading of the draft regulations. In addition to that specific question I ask him to set out the principles that the Government intend to apply in any future regulations. I beg to move.