Clause 8
Finance (No. 2) Bill
6:45 pm
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland, Labour)
As the Financial Secretary has just intimated, this is an important clause because it introduces a new power for the Treasury to amend the list of vehicles permitted to use red diesel. Those are clearly considerable powers so this debate is rather like the one we had on the provisions in clause 2 that gave the Treasury similarly considerable powers.
At that time, I asked the Minister about consultation because I wanted to be sure that it had occurred. He has just said that a consultation document has already been published and that groups with which the Treasury has held consultations are satisfied. That is important because it is quite a wide-ranging power and we shall not have the opportunity to add to or subtract from the list in primary legislation. None the less, we shall not oppose the clause, but I have a question for the Financial Secretary.
This morning, he sent round a draft of the statutory instrument in question, which is quite detailed, and it defines agricultural tractors, agricultural machine handlers, mobile cranes and road resurfacing vehicles. It will clearly be an important statutory instrument. In the letter to my hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers) that accompanied it, the Financial Secretary said that he enclosed a partial regulatory impact assessment for the Committee. We would like to know when the regulatory impact assessment will be complete and when others will be able to see it.