Schedule 14 - Vans
Finance Bill
9:45 am
Mr Quentin Davies (Grantham and Stamford, Conservative)
This is a good example of the Government at their worst in tax matters. It is a small example, but it is quite interesting. It is a small vignette of the major problem that we face. We know that the Government have lost control of fiscal policy, as I argued in detail on Second Reading. That was never refuted. They desperately need money. They are borrowing £37 billion or £38 billion and they are thrashing around in desperation looking to get money back from any taxpayer they can find who may be vulnerable to a new provision of this kind. Their eyes have alighted on van drivers, and I am afraid that van drivers are therefore being targeted and that as much money will screwed out of them as possible. That is basically the purpose of the measure.
Another aspect of the schedule, which is a microcosm of the Bill, in that it is extraordinarily heavy-handed. The Government are using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, or, perhaps I should say, a van driver. The schedule is six and a half pages long, and, as if that was not enough, there are another six pages of explanatory notes. When there are as many pages of explanatory notes as there are pages in the Bill, something is clearly wrong. There are endless laborious definitions of new bureaucratic concepts such as business travel requirements, commuter use requirements and restricted private use provisions.
There are even two equations. They are mercifully relatively simple linear equations, but I do not doubt that one day the Government will come up with provisions that require us all to solve differential
equations in order to work out our tax liability, and that we will go to jail if we do not succeed. I am afraid I shall be joining the group going to jail—I better not say that because it might be a rather seductive prospect for the Government; I do not want to give them ideas.
I do not know whether it is true that most van drivers naturally think algebraically and will think it helpful to have their tax liability expressed in terms of equations. However, it is possible that not all van drivers think algebraically. The Government must think about the complexity that they are introducing into the Taxes Acts with measures of this kind. They are not defining a liability to a purely corporate tax, such as petroleum revenue tax, which no individual ever pays.
It is certainly not good enough to say that the employer will have the task of assessing employees under the provision, because—I hope that the Government will not disagree with me—it is important that employees understand the basis of the tax code that the employer gives them. Any kind of mystification that makes it more difficult for employees to understand their position under PAYE is inherently undesirable. It is not an excuse for this kind of complexity to say that under PAYE the employer will have the burden of doing most of the calculation.
Nor is it an excuse—I say this having worked with the Charted Institute of Taxation for many years —that people who do not understand such things can always go to professional advisers. That is not an acceptable answer from the Government. I do not believe that that is right, and nor do members of the Chartered Institute of Taxation, which is high-minded about such matters and not cynical. It believes that we should not generate additional, gratuitous complexity simply to provide an earning stream for advisers. Undue complexity is an important issue and anyone who cares to waste quarter of an hour of their lives by reading the schedule in detail will recognise that it is extremely heavy-handed and convoluted.