Clause 102 - Landfill tax: rate
Finance Bill
4:45 pm
Mr Oliver Letwin (West Dorset, Conservative)
I have no intention of being dragged into making policy announcements by the Financial Secretary. The Conservative party does not believe that raising the landfill tax by £1 is a fiscally neutral measure. I repeat my challenge to the Financial Secretary to abandon the amusements of pre-election party games and tell us whether the assertions that we have repeatedly made over the past two years are true. The Government see such measures, as taxes and intend to raise the charges bit by bit, thereby giving rise to exactly the problems that I have always imagined might reside in such a form of tax.
Incidentally, that is precisely the reasoning that led Liberal Democrat Members and myself to believe that the suggestion put forward by the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton had real merit. What is needed is some hypothecation, a Rooker-Wise amendment, some transformation into charges, or something that makes such crypto-environmental measures have a genuinely fiscally neutral effect. We would then know that the Government were not just playing party games, but intended fiscal neutrality. As things stand, we have no such assurance. We have the revelation in clause 102 that the Government now intend to show that they are willing to raise one of the three taxes without an offset.