Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede & Weybridge, Conservative)

I start with a confession: I had not focused in any great detail on schedule 5. However, as I listened to the Minister I became increasingly alarmed. Any ministerial speech that seeks to authorise disclosure by the Inland Revenue of hitherto confidential information on a disaggregated, individual basis and includes the words, ''necessary for the economic well-being of the country'', makes me suspicious. The provision has been slipped into the Bill in a couple of lines because the Department will find it useful, but it gives rise to some of the concerns that the Minister mentioned.

I understand that he needs the information to pay his contractors by results. However, although he says that the information will not be shared or disseminated beyond what is required for the purposes of his Department, it will presumably have to be shared with the private sector contractors who are doing the work, because otherwise they will have no way of validating the Department's assessment of how much money is owed to them. Are we to assume that anyone who has contact with the Department will have to accept that

their earning patterns thereafter become an open book to the Department and its private sector contractors?

I am sympathetic to the underlying need for the provision, but it is a rather drastic step. Can the Minister reassure the Committee by telling us about any areas in which the Inland Revenue is already required to make information available on a disaggregated, individual basis to support arrangements between a Department and a private sector provider?

See this speech in context