Finance Bill

The loyalty of the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris) is being stretched so far that he is having to justify his intention to vote against the new clause on the basis that we need more information and we have another nine months in which to get it, but that is a weak argument. These tax changes were the centrepiece of the Chancellor’s last Budget. Does it matter when they will be implemented? In the closing sentence of the Budget, the Chancellor said that"““to reward work, to ensure working families are better off and to make the tax system fairer, I will from next April cut the basic rate of income tax from 22p to 20p””." From the debates on Second Reading, in Committee and now on Report, it is clear that, for many people in work and families, the Budget will not make the tax system fairer. People paying a higher rate of tax will benefit, and we are not sure why that will make the tax system fairer. If the information had been made available at the point at which the Chancellor made that announcement— in the Red Book, which also gave details of how the decisions would interact with each other—everyone would have been able to make a fair assessment. The reality is that after the Chancellor sat down no one had any idea how the cut in the basic rate of taxation would be funded until, after leafing as rapidly as they could through the Red Book, they discovered that it was through the abolition of the 10p rate, a decision referred to by the Chancellor with the words:"““With the other decisions I have made today, we are able to hold to our pledge made at the election not to raise the basic rate of income tax.””—[Official Report, 21 March 2007; Vol. 458, c. 828.]" That is ludicrous that such comments can be made, but it is so difficult to find the information about how that will be funded, let alone the impact that it will have on many households. Other hon. Members have spoken about the groups of people who will be affected. In particular, they have mentioned those on very low incomes, those who work part time—perhaps many of them will be women—couples with no children and a particular group of pensioners. Another group is those aged under 25 who are on low incomes, because they do not qualify for working tax credits. For those people, the tax system will not reward their work, ensure that they are better off or become fairer for them. On the surface the changes look attractive, but there is a lot going on underneath and it is not clear how it will all interact. The hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers) made some good points about the statistics and bombarded the House with useful information. This is outrageous, and the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) is being very reasonable in his new clause. All he is saying is that we should be upfront about matters. The differential impact on different groups of taxpayers should be made clear at the point at which the announcements are made. Tribute must be paid to the right hon. Gentleman for teasing out much of the information in the Budget debate and during the progress of the Bill. If the Minister is not prepared to accept the new clause, I wonder whether he would consider an alternative way of pursuing the matter. The Statistics and Registration Service Bill will come back before us in the near future, and perhaps the national statistician might be able to call in the issue and for the information to be made available as a national statistic. We have a sense of the impact that the changes will have, and much of that is thanks to the work of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, whose response to the Budget provided a lot of information. I do not see any reason why the Treasury could not undertake that work in advance and publish at the same time as the Budget. Some very compelling arguments have been made. It is crucial that the information is made available at the time that the changes are announced, instead of when they are implemented.