Scotland Bill

My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble friend for that very unsatisfactory response. He has not answered any of the points that have been made, particularly as to whether he could give an example of where taxes have been imposed by secondary legislation, subject to a vote in this House. His comparison with the Section 30 procedure in the Scotland Act to justify this is ridiculous. On that basis, Ministers could impose taxes on England using the secondary legislative procedure because there is a precedent of secondary provision in other legislation. My noble friend did not read out the bits of the Calman report to which he referred because I suspect that they are crystal clear. It talks about specified taxes, and when I have repeatedly asked the Minister to specify the taxes that could be imposed using this power, we have been told that the aggregates levy and other taxes could be written into the Bill, with a commencement provision by order. I would not have a problem with that. My noble friend says that he does not understand what the constitutional difficulty is, because the Scottish Parliament will follow its procedure in deciding on the tax. However, the ability to raise taxes on the people of this country should reside with the House of Commons. The House of Commons, having gone through the proper procedures may delegate decisions to the devolved institutions, but what my noble friend is doing is turning that principle on its head. I do not wish to embark on the debate on the next set of amendments and the sensible amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Browne, but one has only to look at the first subsection of his amendment, which states that the use of the section, "““shall be assessed against the following criteria … the potential for the new tax to create or incentivise economic distortions and arbitrage within the UK … the potential the new tax might create for tax avoidance across the UK””." These are matters of interest to people not just in Scotland but in the rest of the United Kingdom, and should be debated properly in the normal way that applies to tax policy—on the Floor of the House of Commons, not in this place by order. We have no business in relation to the imposition of tax, and have not had any since 1911. This is a constitutional outrage. The justification for it is unclear. It appears to be that the Minister is not prepared to include aggregate tax in the Bill because there is a legal dispute over entitlement to raise aggregate tax and it is therefore necessary to have this completely open-ended provision. When my noble friend relies on criteria which he says that the Treasury will apply before using the power, he should wake up and go to Scotland to see how the First Minister and the Administration there behave. The First Minister will eat the Treasury for breakfast if the Scottish Nationalists have won a landslide victory and want to impose a new tax—perhaps a local income tax, perhaps a tax on London gin, or whatever. If the Treasury says, ““This does not meet our criteria””, he will say, ““I have a mandate. It is in the Bill. It was agreed. We gave legislative consent””, and we will be faced with a stand-off with the Executive down here. That is exactly the kind of confrontation that he will provide. Why can we not have clearly defined in the Bill the tax powers that are to be devolved, rather than creating this open-ended commitment that will be used in every way possible to argue for new taxes, which will put the Treasury in the role of the unco-operative man in Whitehall who knows better than the people of Scotland?