Taxation (International and Other Provisions) Bill

My Lords, I would not like the Minister to get too carried away with the World Bank study. I know his fellow Ministers in another place have recently become rather fond of quoting that particular study. I am sure the Minister has read the detail, as I have. It is based on a hypothetical construct of a hypothetical company, which is then replicated around the world by a firm of accountants known as PricewaterhouseCoopers. It does not represent any actual measurement of actual effort required by companies across a whole spectrum. It is one hypothetical company with a set of characteristics. In addition, the PricewaterhouseCoopers study asked questions about how simple the tax systems were. Unfortunately, those results are not incorporated in the World Bank’s overall indicators—so statistics are very nice, but let us not have too much of them.