Finance Bill

I think that I took part in the scrutiny of the Finance Act 2002, and I heard the Financial Secretary’s colleague, the Paymaster General, make the assertions that he has just made. The error that the Government made then was to assume that companies were the only engines of enterprise. They focused on a narrow set of business organisations, forgetting that sole traders and partnerships were contributors to enterprise, too. The changes that they introduced in 2002 were focused on encouraging companies to be entrepreneurial, but they forgot that a large amount of entrepreneurial activity comes from outside the company sector, as the Financial Secretary said himself on Second Reading last week—I will come back to those comments later. Only a quarter of small businesses are incorporated; in a way, that underlines the weakness of the Government’s arguments in favour of making the change back in 2002.