Finance (No. 3) Bill

Obviously I am not as accomplished as my hon. Friend at making contact with the criminal elements in London. However, he has raised a serious matter: there are criminal elements who exploit differentials in duty. We have seen that in Northern Ireland, when terrorist organisations financed their activities by smuggling fuel across the border from the south to the north and vice versa, and we have seen it in other contexts. If we are to have a policy on fuel taxation, we need to ensure that if we introduce measures that discriminate in favour of certain people in remote rural communities, we do not also create loopholes that will be used in a discriminatory way to undermine the sense of justice and fairness that our people want us to exercise. If we have high levels of fuel taxation in this country, which we do, and if that causes problems for our road haulage industry and discrimination between rural and urban areas, when the review is conducted—I hope that the Government will support the amendment, because it is vital that we look at these issues in—