Finance Bill

Indeed. We should not get ahead of ourselves by moving on to the treats that we will be discussing tomorrow. Let me return to the matter at hand, which is an important one. A number of national newspapers—from memory, The Daily Telegraph has been particularly prominent—have campaigned strongly on the issue, so people will want to understand the positions that the different parties have taken, and in particular the Conservative party's reservations. I should be interested to hear the Economic Secretary's intellectual justification for saying that there is a significant material difference between, to take a hypothetical example, two women—let us say two 90-year-old women—who choose to enter a civil partnership, and therefore immediately become eligible for those benefits, and two 90-year-old women who have not met in the past few months, but who have lived together in the same house as sisters for the past 70 years. Indeed, as I said in an intervention, such a civil partnership could have been motivated by tax reasons. That would be a shame—although it would not be beyond our comprehension—whereas it could not possibly be the case for the two sisters who had lived together for many decades. The Economic Secretary said that the situation would apply to very few people. Of course that is the case, but that only strengthens the argument; given that the costs are so minute, the Treasury need not worry unduly. In fact, the Treasury could be quite charitable and expand the scope of the scheme. The costs are so small that the Treasury could win a lot of good will from people who feel that they are unfairly penalised, at a small burden to taxpayers as a whole. There are a few points in new clause 2 on which it is worth reflecting. One of them concerns the 10-year living together period. I assume that 10 years is an arbitrary figure, although any figure will inevitably be arbitrary, because it is quite hard to come up with a figure that is based on anything other than an arbitrary assessment. Some people might think that 10 years is quite a short period of time, because we are typically talking about two sisters or two brothers who have lived together for their whole lives. With higher house prices, brothers and sisters are increasingly buying flats together, in London or other parts of the country, because they cannot afford a mortgage on their own, they do not have a relationship with a partner and they regard buying a property with their brother or sister as the most safe and stable basis on which to proceed. In some cases, therefore, 10 years may be quite a short period of time. The Government may be more accommodating if that period were longer, and we could rightly consider that.