Finance Bill
10:30 am
Philip Hammond (Shadow Chief Secretary To the Treasury, Treasury; Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
Further to that point of order, Sir Nicholas. I am grateful to the Paymaster General for her clarification. It was a very long and hot sitting on Thursday. It was with admirable foresight that you managed to arrange matters so that you would not be in the Chair, Sir Nicholas. Due mainly to the weather, it was not the most pleasant sitting. It is important that, when discussing a Finance Bill in particular, everything that is said is precise, and if it is capable of misinterpretation, that it is clarified at a later stage.
People outside the Room have suggested that two other issues referred to on Thursday afternoon require clarification. In answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree (Mr. Newmark) about Inland Revenue pre-clearance, the Paymaster General said:
“The clearance is binding. If a company has approached the Revenue and gone through the clearance procedure in place as a result of the provisions, and if the HMRC makes a decision, that decision is binding.”—[Official Report, Standing Committee B, 23 June 2005; c.104.]
Lawyers expressed surprise at the expression, “The clearance is binding.” I am told that the al-Fayed case found that an agreement between the Inland Revenue and the taxpayer did not have the force of law and was not capable of enforcement by the taxpayer. I take it that the Paymaster General’s comment was not intended to rewrite the law and imply that a pre-clearance decision was binding—