Clause 83 - Deduction of tax: payments between companies etc
Finance Bill
11:15 am
Miss Melanie Johnson (Economic Secretary, HM Treasury; Welwyn Hatfield, Labour)
I can confirm that the Government amendment is intended to achieve the same objective as amendment No. 44. Were things different, we might have introduced this amendment on Report, but as there are drafting problems in the Opposition amendment, it seemed sensible to do so now.
Amendment No. 44 was intended to spell out that the Board should give directions only where it reasonably believed that the conditions for making the payment gross were not satisfied. We agree that the Board's power should be limited in that way. We believe that it was implicit in the wording, but we accepted that it was desirable to make it explicit. Some aspects of the drafting of amendment No. 44 would have frustrated the purpose of new section 349C, so we tabled an alternative form of wording that achieves the desired result. I hope that the Committee can accept our amendment.