Finance (No. 2) Bill

I want to help the hon. Gentleman on this point. There is flexibility when it comes to reducing the rate, but the difficulty is that if one plucks a particular item, such as petrol, and reduces VAT on that alone, as his party advocated, it would need to be consistent with the VAT directives and that would require a derogation, which would take some years. The concerns we raised related to the ill-thought-out specific proposal that those on his party’s Front Bench put forward a year or so ago.