It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Riordan.
I thank the Minister for his introduction to clause 1 and schedule 1. Let me confirm from the outset that we support these measures, as we did in the previous two debates on the Bill. We will do so again today. As I say, we have already had a couple of debates and it is a small Bill, so many of the issues have been debated thoroughly before. I am grateful to the Minister for dealing with some of the questions that arose on Second Reading. I have just a couple of points on which I would like to press him, and I will be grateful to hear his response in his summing up.
First, can the Minister provide us with an update on HMRC’s handling of the queries that arose when these measures were announced? Can he confirm the number of queries that HMRC had to deal with, clarify the nature of the queries that the public or their advisers raised and confirm whether all outstanding queries have been dealt with?
Secondly, let me press the Minister a little further on the revenue. I put some points to him on Second Reading about the expectations of revenue, but that matter has not been fully covered by the responses we have received. The Minister knows that these measures are expected to cost £395 million in 2014-15, rising to £760 million in 2015-16. Research by Lonres and Dataloft has found that more homes changed hands on the day of the autumn statement than on any other day in the past decade, so one in six of all homes sold in London’s most expensive areas in the last three months of the year changed hands on 3 December. The research by Lonres and Dataloft estimates that, as a result, buyers saved £9.4 million in taxes. Is that in the order of the behavioural change that was expected, as modelled by the Treasury in its costings? I am sure the Minister will repeat that they have been independently certified by the Office for Budget Responsibility.
I should like to know whether the number of transactions and the cost in Exchequer revenue after the announcement of the measures in the autumn statement are along the lines that the Government were expecting. As the Minister knows, the Office for Budget Responsibility, which applies a rating system to the “certainty” of costings, has said that it considers the costings to be medium to high risk. How confident is he about the numbers, and about the extent of the behavioural change that is expected?
4.30 pm