Finance Bill

The hon. Lady says that they are fairly simple matters. I shall not read out the list, but if the amendment were passed at face value and a report was produced, I suspect that she would then say that proposed new paragraph (a), (b), (c) or (d) had not been looked into properly. She would then again want to set in motion a debate about whether those issues had been looked into sufficiently, before the matters that my hon. Friend the Minister will want to talk about in due course could be dealt with. The amendment is really an exercise in kicking the process into the long grass. Why are the Opposition trying to kick the whole process into the long grass? I probably have far less experience of Finance Bills than most hon. Members here, but in my limited experience, the words that are guaranteed to set off Opposition Members are ““anti-avoidance””. That is the one matter that consistently gets them exercised. Every time we have such debates they trot out the same arguments, no matter what anti-avoidance scheme is proposed. Their argument is that they are of course in favour of anti-avoidance and protecting the Revenue; but they then disparage, blow-for-blow, the anti-avoidance schemes that my hon. Friends on the Front Bench have put forward, and this debate is no different.