Schedule 25
Finance Bill
10:00 am
Stephen Timms (Financial Secretary, HM Treasury; East Ham, Labour)
No, I do not think it is necessarily a problem. It is perfectly possible, with the new approach, to set out clearly things that are excluded, and that is what we are doing. The hon. Gentleman’s description highlights the difficulty with the old approach. If one sets out in legislation things that people are not allowed to do, it is not difficult for them to come up with a slight variation that they will do instead. The disguised interest rules that we were talking about a moment ago were introduced in 2005, but it has been necessary every year to amend them to capture the new things that people have come up with. I hope that annual amendments will not be required under the new approach.