New Clause 31
Pensions Bill
3:00 pm
David Laws (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising that issue. There are a myriad different ways in which tax relief could be redesigned. It could simply be redesigned so that it was given to every member of the community at the same rate, rather like the proposal for personal accounts where everybody gets the same rates of pension tax relief. It could be that the money saved in that way is used to incentivise saving in some other way. Our proposal is to restrict relief to the basic rate and then to funnel that money back into reducing the basic rate of tax. But it could be used for many other things.