Clause 166 - First-year allowances for expenditure on environmentally beneficial plant or machinery
Finance Bill
6:15 pm
Mr Adam Price (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, Plaid Cymru)
The point about effectiveness has already been made in relation to the first-year assessment. There are two aspects to the degree of effectiveness. One is the vigour by which availability is communicated to the target business sectors, and the other is the certainty with which the businesses can be assured that the support will be available. I should like to address my brief remarks to those two aspects.
I ask the Economic Secretary how it is proposed that the availability of the provision will be made public. Is the information already on the Revenue's website? Is there an up-to-date list of the specific assets to which the provision applies on that website, and how is that being made available?
On the issue of certainty, the schedule relating to the provision allows a certificate to be revoked retrospectively, which is to my mind fairly counter-intuitive. I always thought that one of the great traditions of this place was that legislation does not apply retrospectively. Unfortunately, it seems that certificates can be revoked retrospectively, but no criteria are set out in the schedule to explain why those certificates may be revoked retrospectively. Currently, no right of appeal is available under the provisions.
It is perfectly possible that a company could agree to incur some expenditure based on a quite reasonable expectation, given that the Secretary of State or some other authority will have granted a certificate, only to find that that certificate is subsequently revoked. That seems a highly questionable practice. The onus in that case would be on the company to contact the Revenue and inform it that the certificate has been retrospectively revoked. If the company has already filed a return, it will have to inform the Revenue of that change in circumstance. Again, that seems highly questionable. In order to give companies some certainty about the provision and to encourage them to take up the first-year assessment, would not it be simpler if only future expenditure were affected by any retrospective revocation of a certificate?