Clause 3 - Duty on beverages made with spirits
Finance Bill
12:45 pm
Mr Michael Jack (Fylde, Conservative)
The amendment is a not-unreasonable request for the Treasury to lay before Parliament information to justify a tax change. I was struck by an interesting sentence in paragraph 5 of the explanatory notes on clause 3:
''Tax as a proportion of the retail price is now lower for spirit-based designer drinks than for any other type of alcoholic drink, in both the on and off-trades.''
That caught my eye because it seems to move us to a basis for determining tax on alcoholic beverages that is equivalent to the deemed taxable potential of a particular product. I am intrigued by that because it opens up—I will not trespass into this too much, Mr. Gale—a very interesting new philosophy for taxation.