Clause 9
Finance Bill
6:15 pm
Stewart Hosie (Spokesperson (Economy; Home Affairs; Treasury; Women); Dundee East, Scottish National Party)
The specifics of where we are today are that Japan referred to the UK system in the recent World Trade Organisation hearings and observers in India have also pointed to UK budgets as letting India off the hook in maintaining local duty regimes to discriminate against Scotch in those emerging markets. We cannot be complacent. Yes, the industry has done well; yes, it has tapped into a rising, middle-class and additional disposable income in China and India, but the growing pressure on income in China and India is such that there are food price rises. I suspect that even someone who had been doing relatively well would probably choose to put food on the family table before buying another bottle of whisky, premium or otherwise. That is important.
My amendment does not seek to delay the rise, although that would be welcome, but to have the Government publish a detailed breakdown of the yield from all forms of alcoholic liquor, and to publish indicative rates for all types of drinks to show what the duty levels would be if alcohol was taxed fairly and equitably by alcohol content only. Let me explain why that is important and show the discriminatory nature of the current regime. Take three drinks with precisely the same alcohol content: a half pint of beer with 4.93 per cent. volume has 20.9p of duty; a 125 ml glass of wine at 11.2 per cent. volume has 24.3p of duty; and a 35 ml glass of whisky at 40 per cent. volume has 29.9p of duty. So for exactly the same alcohol content, there is a 30 per cent. uplift on the duty between beer and whisky and a 20 per cent. uplift on the duty between wine and whisky. That is fundamentally unfair.
I am not seeking to delay this, although that would be good. I am not seeking to say anything at this point about the escalator, although that will have to be addressed because it could be very damaging in the medium term. This is something that could be accepted. Certainly the soundings from other bits of Government and agencies concerned with things like health and crime suggest that they would be not too unhappy if we found a duty regime that taxed fairly on the basis of alcohol and recognised that cheap cider, which is massively undertaxed, would have to go up and that very strong beer and lager—the super lagers that are cheaper than bottled water—would go up.
I am not sure about wines. Perhaps they would stay much the same. We will have to see what the analysis said. But the type of rises we have seen with whisky and the type of rises that are forecast and the continuing discrimination against it cannot be tolerated. I hope that the Minister, while probably not wanting to accept this amendment in its present form, might give us some comfort that she will be prepared to pull together the assessment the amendment seeks so that we can see what the impact of fair and equitable duty would be.