Finance Bill

My hon. Friend is right on both counts: about the point that he has made and the fact that I would have made it. He has saved me that job. The purpose of the new clause is to find a workable scheme for reducing but not eliminating the premium, to give some relief to people in remote rural areas, where, as my hon. Friend has just said, there is no alternative. In my constituency, there is a petrol station in Durness and in Tongue, which are about 50 miles—or an hour—apart. The average price of diesel on the north and west coasts is about 145p per litre; that is the scale of the problem. In my intervention on the hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening), I alluded to the principle behind why something should be done. If one is seeking to change people's behaviour through taxation, people have to be able to make that change—in this case, people still have to be able to go places. In the remote areas that I am talking about, there is no capacity to make that change and there will not be. As my hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael) pointed out, in many such areas the car is by far the most environmentally friendly option—far better than buses carrying nothing but fresh air. The second point is that, broadly speaking, taxation should be equitable. It is clearly inequitable that in an area where there is no choice the tax should be higher, by virtue of the VAT element, than it is in other areas of the country. It is perverse that fuel costs are lower in many areas with public transport than in many areas where there is none.