Taxation (International and Other Provisions) Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords for their support, expressed in very differential ways. I perceived the sword of Damocles which the noble Baroness suggested should hang over my head with regard to future action when this Bill goes into Committee. Of course, we have one other piece of legislation to deal with in these terms. Let me reassure the noble Baroness, who raised some quite fundamental points, that we are already committed to simplifying the tax system. We are engaging with a wide range of stakeholders in the tax simplification reviews and we have made progress over the past two and a half years with more than 50 changes to the tax system to simplify it. The noble Baroness labours the same point on almost every occasion when we have a substantial finance debate—even when we have a debate like this evening’s, which may not be quite so substantial. She has access to World Bank figures so she knows it to be the case, as well as I do, that it takes businessmen 110 hours to comply with the tax system in the United Kingdom, which makes us very well placed. It is longer than that by nine hours in Canada. It is 132 hours in France, 187 hours in the United States, 196 hours in Germany, 334 hours in Italy and 355 hours in Japan. If I were a businessman—I know that the noble Baroness has business at heart—I would rather think that the British tax system compares well with others and should not be berated in quite the way she suggests.