Finance Bill

The hon. Gentleman is right. He is making a slightly different point about a different part of the tax legislation process, which I will also address in due course. The Chancellor was eventually forced into humiliating climbdowns on both issues, as well as subsequently having to kick his ill-thought-out, unworkable and highly damaging proposals on the taxation of foreign profits and on income splitting into the long grass—and, presumably, the grass must be long enough to get him to the other side of a general election. All those issues affect businesses. The saga of the 10p tax rate does not affect businesses directly, but is yet another example of poor scrutiny and poor process. I am sure that Government Members would say amen to that. They must realise more than most how desperately important it is not to repeat the type of mistakes made with the abolition of the starting rate of tax. It was not only a bad measure in principle, as it was badly explained, poorly understood, deferred in implementation for all the wrong reasons and then reversed—or at least mitigated—in a way that has further undermined confidence in the stability and structure of our tax legislation system. Although the measure was announced in 2007 and immediately identified as a potential problem, it was the failure to grasp the scale of the problem among those who later became concerned about it that has been so highly damaging to the Government. Although it is not my job to worry about the damage that the Government seek to inflict on themselves, it is instructive to note that this not particularly complex piece of tax legislation impacted negatively on 5.3 million ordinary people—whom we often think of as voters—rather than businesses, yet it still took the best part of a year before the debate on the issues really got going. I am trying to make a serious point, as this indicates the failure of the House's mechanisms for scrutinising tax legislation. We need to ensure that such legislation is understood, if not by every hon. Member, but by a wide enough audience so that any serious political problems can be identified at the earliest possible stage. To return to the issues of non-doms and capital gains tax changes announced in the pre-Budget report, the Chancellor's U-turns, which I have already mentioned, were not very neatly executed. Immediately after the pre-Budget report, No. 10 began briefing that there might be concessions on capital gains tax. What happened is that the Prime Minister was taken aback by the scale and ferocity of the business response and saw his laboriously constructed base of business support—not to mention business donors—evaporating overnight. He responded accordingly by kicking the man next door. The concessions dribbled out over the following weeks and months, but in a way that meant businesses, and particularly those entrepreneurs considering a sale of a business in the near term, did not know where they stood until as recently as early March. I remember meeting groups of entrepreneurs and small business owners back in late October or November after the announcement had been made. There seemed to be an even split between, on the one hand, those who felt that the only safe route was to gain the benefit of the taper relief by cutting and running and trying to sell their businesses even as the economy was slowing down against the backdrop of the credit crunch, which made the financing of business acquisitions quite challenging, and, on the other, those who put their faith in the trickle of news from sources in the Treasury indicating that concessions would be made. It was a very destabilising situation.