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Mr. Prisk rose—

Mr. Redwood: I see my hon. Friend has a thirst for knowledge.

Mr. Prisk: My thirst for knowledge is unquenchable, so I have been interested to hear the range and scope that my right hon. Friend is highlighting and which I have had to deal with directly. Is he aware that the most sinister aspect of all this, which is in another large tome, the Red Book, may be that the Government expect a 25 per cent. increase in the yield of the tax—£1.9 billion in one year? Does he share my concern that tucked away behind this panoply of nonsense is a much more worrying issue?

Mr. Redwood: My hon. Friend is ahead of me in my argument. I had done the Minister the justice, or the injustice, of assuming that most of the schedule dealt
 
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with bungles, but my hon. Friend is right—some of it is an intentional tightening up, almost tantamount to a new tax in some cases, which the Minister should highlight if she wishes to intervene in this important debate.

We are invited to legislate anew on "Treatment of leases for indefinite term", on "First rent review in final quarters of fifth year", on "Adjustment where rent ceases to be uncertain", on "Rent for overlap period in case of grant of further lease", and on "Cases where assignment of lease treated as grant of lease". Then there is more on agreement of leases under the amending amendments; more on assignment of agreement of leases; and more on increases in rentals and the abnormal rent business that we were discussing just before the stand part debate. That, as we saw in that moderate debate of some one hour's duration, posed a great many problems in its own right, most of which the Minister did not care to answer when she replied to the points that my hon. Friend and I had made.

The schedule needs rather more time and attention. It would be a courtesy to the Committee if the Minister, when replying to the debate, could make an honest declaration of which paragraphs of the schedule are being amended because there were errors, problems and drafting difficulties, and which are being amended because those who have to pay the tax have succeeded in making representations to the effect that it is was unworkable or unfair and one or two aspects are moving in the direction of the users, as with unit trusts in some cases. Most important, I hope the Minister will highlight to the Committee where the definitions and the text are being deliberately strengthened in order to increase the amount of revenue that the Government are raising, in the light of experience in the first year of the introduction of the tax.

That is what most matters to the Committee and the House. It is wrong that all these changes are being slipped through in the schedule in the hope that there will not be much debate. It amounts to revisiting a new tax in a pretty fundamental way, and I hope the Minister will illuminate our debate by confessing to the errors, highlighting any good news that may be hidden in the schedule for people who currently have to pay the tax, and above all highlighting in an open way to the Committee where the burden will increase. It is not clear to the lay reader where that £1.5 billion or more will come from. Some of it will clearly come from changes to drafting, rather than from the expansion of the economy.

3.30 pm

Mr. John Gummer (Suffolk, Coastal) (Con): The complexity of the changes, and the extensive nature of the amendments and the amendments to amendments may be construed as a fundamental criticism of a taxation system that is supposed to be understood by pretty ordinary people. We are discussing leases, which are often an important subject for businesses that are not huge and do not have vast arrays of advisers, helpers and people with detailed knowledge.

I much honour the Minister who is to reply. I sit on a committee with her and I hear her express ideas simply, coherently and cogently. Indeed, I often agree with her,
 
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and I do not think I have ever disagreed with her, on that committee. [Interruption.] This may be very dangerous for her career, but I have certainly understood what she has had to say. It must be extremely embarrassing for her to appear before this Committee faced with a series of amendments on which she must have spent a great deal of time with her civil servants, going through each of the details to ensure that she could explain not only to our satisfaction but to her own what they really meant.

That is an unacceptable position. Of course, there are complicated matters that need complex legislation, but such legislation itself demands that one gets things right in the first place. I think that the tax that we are considering is unacceptable. I suppose that I have a sort of interest in addition to what I have set out in my declaration of interests, to which I refer the Committee, in that I write on matters of property. I find it difficult to see that this is a very helpful tax. It affects me directly, but I do not see that it is helpful as far as the economic future of the country is concerned. Even if it were helpful in that context, the fact that it is incomprehensible to the ordinary person brings into considerable doubt the taxation system as a whole.

I plead with the Financial Secretary to recognise the seriousness of what we are discussing. Yesterday, I made a short intervention about a proposal aimed at very small companies that had only recently been incorporated. Anyone who listened to that debate would have recognised that what was happening was totally incomprehensible to anyone who was likely to be running a small company. We are now seeing a series of amendments to the system that must be utterly incapable of being understood by the very people whom we are supposed to be encouraging. It is not fair that the most difficult thing in running a business is dealing with the Government. That should not be the situation. The most difficult thing in running a business should be making a profit; that is what people should be concentrating on and concerned with. This Government are making it more difficult to run a business by insisting on a taxation system that is as opaque as they can make it.

There are three points with which I would like the Financial Secretary to deal. First, is it not true that the tax is being introduced because the Chancellor did not dare introduce a sensible, direct tax that everybody knew about? Is this not one of those examples of the Chancellor trying to invent a tax that is so complex and so particular in its incidence that people will not notice it enough to say, "There you go again; taxes are going up"? We know who will pay the price; it is not the businesses who pay the tax in the first instance, but the customers of those businesses. The Financial Secretary is shaking her head, but it is true. She is paying for it, as am I. Indeed, we are all paying for it in the goods and services provided by the businesses that are now taxed by what I understand to be an additional £1.7 billion, or an amount of about that size.

Mr. Prisk: It is £1.9 billion.

Mr. Gummer: It is £1.9 billion that the Chancellor is taking out of the pockets of the people of this country. That is what this is about. It is all right for the Financial Secretary to shake her head so elegantly, but the truth is that she knows very well that there is no one else to pay
 
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the money. In the end, all taxes are paid by the consumer and the customer. If £1.9 billion is taken out of the system it is taken not from a mythical collection of rich people or a series of property speculators who can be cut off from the rest of the community, but from the pockets of the purchasers of goods and services. This tax is complicated in order to uphold the fiction, which the public increasingly recognise as a fiction, that the Government are not a tax-and-spend Government. Of course they are a tax-and-spend Government, however polite and charming their front may be. The Financial Secretary must defend this tax in terms of its being a straightforward imposition that we can all understand.

My second question, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) raised earlier, arises in the stand part debate because this is the moment at which we give credence to the amendments. Will the Financial Secretary distinguish between the amendments to obtain more money and the amendments that were made because she got the provision wrong in the first place? I do not blame her for getting the provision wrong, and, unlike certain Ministers of the Crown, I am not prepared to blame civil servants. I was brought up in an old-fashioned way, so I blame Ministers—I expected to take the blame when I was a Minister.

I shall blame the person who is really responsible, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He must explain, through his voice, the Financial Secretary, which is the mea culpa bit and which the "mea grab-a bit." Which bits is he apologising for, and which bits is he preceding with the word "sorry" before taking some more? That distinction is not included in any of the explanatory memorandums, and I am sorry that that should be so. I have read the explanatory memorandums carefully, because it is difficult to read the Bill, and one needs the explanations. None of the explanatory memorandums states, "We got these things wrong, and we are now going to get them right. We are also introducing this provision, which means that we will raise a great deal of money. We want to explain the Red Book properly."

Thirdly, will the Financial Secretary explain to whom my constituents affected by this gobbledegook should apply—at no cost, because it is not their fault—for specific advice on how the changes will affect them and their businesses? If she does not introduce free help, she will act as a recruiting sergeant for those overpaid people—I nearly called them a profession—chartered accountants. The Government have given more money to chartered accountants than any Government in the history of mankind. Ministers do not need to include that point in their declaration of interests, but they ought to—members of the chartered accountancy profession have more treasure than is imaginable, because they have earned so much, and, given recent events and examples, I doubt whether one can trust them.

The Financial Secretary must explain who will advise those who do not want to spend money, in addition to the tax that is being extorted, to make sure that they do not break the law. The problem is that one seeks professional advice not only to minimise the tax that one legally ought to pay, but to ensure that one does not get caught in a taxation system that is so complex and
 
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irrational that one would not imagine that one was doing wrong, and that proposition is central to our argument.

It is wrong to put people in the wrong by introducing legislation that is so irrational and unconnected with anybody's natural assertions and thoughts that people would not imagine that they are doing something incorrect. It is wrong to set out to have a taxation system that is designed to hide the fact that anybody is being taxed, to design the mechanism to be as complex as possible so as not to have to admit to raising taxes, and to promise the nation that taxes will not go up, then get into a mess and have to do it anyway.

3.45 pm

That has an immoral effect on the public. It puts people in the position of being lawbreakers by accident because the complications and hoops are such that no sane person can possibly imagine what questions they should ask and what issues they should consider when they enter into the perfectly reasonable activity that is the purchase, passing on or sale of a lease—a simple matter that, since before mediaeval times, people have done in a simple way. It took this Government to make it an act worthy of a senior wrangler from the University of Cambridge: only someone of that quality could read and understand the changes in the Bill and still carry on a business.

One of the sad aspects of this Government is that very few of its members, including the Treasury team, have ever run a business. Nowadays, it is increasingly difficult for those of us who run businesses to be able to say so with pride, but I do. I run a business, and I know how difficult it is to get these things right. The Government are introducing into our business life complications that make people spend more time trying to handle the problems placed upon them by the Chancellor of the Exchequer than trying to win a profit out of a marketplace on which he depends.

We should vote against the schedule and say to the Government: "For goodness' sake get real. Get yourself into the marketplace, understand what you're doing, and don't clog this House up with the unmentionable, the inconceivable, the incomprehensible and the absolutely unnecessary. If you want to tax us, do it publicly, clearly and simply; and admit that your big fault was to promise that you wouldn't increase taxation, then find that you've got to hide the taxes because you dare not face the electorate."

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