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Kali Mountford (Colne Valley): Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: I will finish the point first.
The worst of it is that the Government have put their claim about a lower tax burden on this "typical family" in a propagandist leaflet, printed and distributed at public expense, which gives an entirely misleading and one-sided view of the Budget. I am glad to say that the Select Committee on the Treasury--whose distinguished Chairman is present--has pointed out that that is in itself a misleading way of portraying what is happening in regard to taxation. The Committee rightly suggests that if
the Government repeat that bit of propaganda at state expense, it should be independently audited by an outside body.
Mr. Jack: Will my right hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: I will give way first to the hon. Member for Colne Valley (Kali Mountford), as I promised.
Kali Mountford: I hoped that the right hon. Gentleman would further develop his theme of productivity, which I thought made an interesting beginning to his speech. I agree with him that productivity is the best way forward. Does he agree with me that the families to whom he refers benefit most when they work, and does he not welcome the injection of 800,000 new jobs into the economy on which our success should be based?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: I shall return explicitly to that point. I shall also return to the way in which the Government are eroding the competitiveness that they inherited from their predecessor.
Mr. Jack: Before my right hon. Friend leaves the subject of disclosure, may I ask whether he has ever got to the bottom of the facts that lie behind the unwillingness of the present Treasury team to answer a question first tabled in 1981 by the now right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw)? Each year, the right hon. Gentleman sought to put on record the full effect of the Government's tax proposals, both indirect and direct. Has my right hon. Friend ever been given a reason for the fact that that information is not now made available to us?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: It would be highly embarrassing. That is not a very good reason, but it is the real reason. As my right hon. Friend may know, the Treasury Committee drew attention to the deficiency and called for the Government to make the calculation again, as we always did--my right hon. Friend was part of our Treasury team--so that the public could know exactly what was happening to the tax burden on families of all sorts.
Mr. Bercow: Is it not significant that the Bill will do nothing to change the fact that taxes are rising but, at one and the same time, class sizes are bigger, waiting lists are longer, police numbers are smaller, the plight of agriculture is more and not less severe, and the transport system is more and not less congested? Is that not proof positive that under the present Government we get rotten services at rip-off prices?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: My hon. Friend is absolutely right: we pay more taxes, and services are getting worse. What is happening to all the money is a complete mystery. It must be going into some black hole in the Treasury.
Mr. Christopher Leslie (Shipley): Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: I will give way once more, but then I must move on.
Mr. Leslie: Why did the right hon. Gentleman say on Sky News on 22 March that the increases in health spending were "unwise and irresponsible"?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: The hon. Gentleman is entirely wrong. I did not say that the increases were unwise in any way; I said that the mechanism for taking the increase in public expenditure outside the comprehensive spending review mechanism was unwise.
It was the Chancellor himself who said, in last year's Budget statement, that in no circumstances would he unravel a three-year expenditure commitment until the end of that three year period. So why--I think I know the answer to this question; I think the reasons are entirely political--have the Government, in the middle of that period, lurched into an uncomprehensive spending review, doling out a bit of money here and a bit of money there before the spending review period ends in July this year? That is the question that I asked on the television programme, and I was right to ask it.
What we already see in the Bill is a picture of not just higher taxes but more taxes, and more complicated taxes. The best illustration is the new energy tax--the so-called climate change levy to which the Chief Secretary referred. As the more alert Government Back Benchers will know by now, the tax does a great deal of damage to manufacturing industries, especially those that are exposed to international competition. It is also completely unnecessary. The reductions in carbon dioxide emissions could be achieved at a fraction of the cost by many other means. Earlier this afternoon, we heard that the moratorium on gas-fired generation is to be removed. If that is the case, that will be a better, more efficient and cheaper way in which to achieve the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
It is an unnecessary tax in another sense. Only certain industries will be able to negotiate rebates; that privilege will be given only to certain sectors of British industry. What should concern the House is that the rebates will be agreed not by the House, or even by Ministers, but by civil servants, so we are, in effect, asked to delegate to civil servants the right to tax.
Dr. Nick Palmer (Broxtowe): Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: Will the hon. Gentleman forgive me? I shall make a little more progress.
The main point about the energy tax is its sheer complexity. I declare an interest. I am a company director and will be affected by that part of the Bill, but I am in good company. Every other business in the country, of whatever size, will have to pay the tax.
Schedule 6, which brings in the energy tax, runs to 83 pages, so every business in the country, from ICI to the corner shop, must somehow make sense of a schedule running to that length. It is not just the length of it, but the language. Almost at random, I picked out the following provision. I have mentioned electricity rebates. They are to be calculated by treatment of supply
- as a reduced-rate supply to the extent (if any) that the exempt renewable supplies made by the supplier in the averaging period would have been reduced-rate supplies if they had not been made on the basis that they were exempt.
-
I defy anyone to make sense of such a provision. It is pure gobbledegook, but everyone will have to understand it. Everyone will have to calculate that ludicrous and unnecessary levy, and that example was pulled out at random.
Mr. Andrew Smith: Is the Conservative party prepared to repeal it, then?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: We are absolutely committed to meeting the Kyoto target for carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions. We will not support a tax that does it in an entirely unnecessary and damaging way. We will fight the tax to the Report stage, when it comes back to the House and beyond that. We are adamantly and completely against unnecessary and complex taxation on that scale.
Mr. Geraint Davies: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: No. I will not give way again.
What we get from the Government is all the waffle about working with business--all the talk of partnership. Partnership is the word of the moment, but their idea of partnership is similar to that of the black widow spider. Zoologists in the House will know that it gets what it wants and then the partner is dead--like the British motor industry, as it is discovering to its cost. I shall not discuss the goings-on at the Department of Trade and Industry--they are almost beyond parody--the farcical attempts at a competition policy, the substantial withdrawal of the Utilities Bill, or the goings-on over Rover, but the point is that the Treasury has adopted the same attitude towards business.
As the House will remember, last year, the Treasury smuggled out a proposed change to the self-employed status of those working in so-called service companies: IR35. Instead of announcing it on Budget day, or in the Budget speech, the change appeared in the 35th press release: that is why it is called IR35. It is highly and hugely damaging to the British high-tech labour market.
It is therefore not surprising that the British Chambers of Commerce has added the cost of IR35 to its burden barometer. It calculates--it gets its figures from the Government's regulatory impact assessments--that the cumulative regulatory burden on British industry over this Parliament totals just over £10 billion. That is a terrifying indictment of the Government's attitude towards industry.
Dr. Palmer: In view of the right hon. Gentleman's strictures on IR35, will he explain why the Conservative party did not divide the House when the matter came up at the end of the Budget debate? Will he give a commitment that a Conservative Government would repeal it?
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