Finance Bill

No, I do not think that it could be done in this Bill because the homework on whether it would be wise and how much it would cost has not been done. The Government may need to organise a competition to find out what the effective subsidy is going to be. I am not persuaded that nuclear power can be done on an unsubsidised basis. The industry may tell me that it can be, but then state that the price of carbon needs to be reflected. I tend to look on that as a way of developing a so-called market-oriented subsidy. We need to tease out from the industry very quickly exactly how much it is talking about to establish whether it would be a good thing to spend that amount of money on this particular means of carbon saving or whether it is too expensive, so that the money could be better spent in other ways. For the purposes of this debate, I am still an agnostic because I do not have all the information that I need. The Government have much better access to that kind of information, and they could trigger that information quickly if they were to license certain technologies as being acceptable from a safety and technical point of view, and if they would say that, in principle, they were prepared to give planning permission for the nuclear power stations. They could then ask the industry what it would need, and we could find out whether this was a wonderful deal that we should all accept or a lousy deal for the taxpayer that we would not want to accept. We could also tease out more information about the other risks that some of our constituents are worried about, such as how safe the technology is and how good the waste treatment systems now are. One cost that has to be wrapped up in the whole envelope is the long-term cost of closure and of handling the necessary waste. That could best be teased out by market competition, and I recommend that course of action to the Government to provide a basis of fact for determining these issues. The Finance Bill invites us to legislate for three different years. This is a strange novelty. I presume that it is being done because this is the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s testimonial Finance Bill, and because he wishes to tie the hands of his successor in a number of ways and not expose himself to flak in others. For example, we are invited to settle income tax rates only for 2007-08. We know that the Chancellor is a very fair-minded man who likes to work closely with his colleagues, and we have been told what he would like the rates to be in 2008-09. Should the new Chancellor decide that he did not like the rates recommended by the outgoing Chancellor, he would presumably be free to change them. I would be happy to give way to the Economic Secretary to the Treasury if he knows something different, but I assume that that is why we are not legislating for those further rates. There is a degree of doubt; the new Chancellor might take a different view and decide that such rates were inappropriate. We are being invited to legislate on corporation tax for the financial year 2008. We may legislate on small companies’ rates and fractions for 2007, but when it comes to inheritance tax, we can apparently legislate for the new Conservative Government, because we are invited to legislate for rates and rate bands for 2010-11. I do not know whether Ministers negotiated these proposals with my hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor, but perhaps they should have done so as a matter of courtesy, as it is quite a novelty to legislate so far ahead, long beyond the time when this Government could avoid a general election. While I am happy that we are being asked to legislate with a view to raising the threshold for inheritance tax, it would be more sensible to leave open until 2009-10 how high we should go. Perhaps £350,000 will not be enough by then. Perhaps we shall be able to afford a little more. That amount would not buy a one-bedroom flat in the centre of London today.