Finance Bill

I do acknowledge that there is an issue, and extending the treatment to EEA properties clearly makes the concession—the favourable tax treatment—more expensive. I absolutely acknowledge that point. The point that I was seeking to draw out is that the Government's usual approach is not to be so proactive in identifying areas of the UK tax system that appear to be in breach of EU law. There is a long list of cases on which the Government have fought long and hard before making the changes, yet on the issue before us they seem to have rushed rather quickly from identifying it to conceding the point that it is in breach of European law. The Government's wording is that it may be in breach of European law, and I do not know whether that prevents them from running into retrospective difficulties, but I do not want to press the Minister on that. There seems to be some enthusiasm for creating the problem as a consequence of European law, and that is not always the case. If the Minister will respond to those points in his remarks, I shall be grateful. In conclusion, and returning to the other new clauses in the group, we think that it is vital that everything be done to ensure that the UK has a competitive tax system. In the current fiscal climate, the priority has to be a predictable and workable tax system, and our proposals for an office of tax simplification go some way towards addressing that.