Wales Bill

Part of Bill Presented – in the House of Commons at 6:23 pm on 31 March 2014.

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Photo of Mark Harper Mark Harper Conservative, Forest of Dean 6:23, 31 March 2014

Madam Deputy Speaker, I shall not draw you into the debate. I am sure that, for the sake of your reputation at the Treasury, you would, if allowed, cast off that foul calumny. If the right hon. Gentleman thought that highly of you when he was a spending Minister, you could not have been doing your job as a Treasury Minister properly. We all know that you absolutely were; otherwise you would not have found your way into that Chair. I will close this aspect of the debate just there, before I find myself cut off against my will.

I have some questions for my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, although I do not necessarily want him or the Minister to respond today; perhaps we can touch on the issues when the Bill returns to the Floor of the House in Committee. If the income tax provisions were devolved, how would they work? I looked carefully in the Bill at the definition of an individual Welsh taxpayer; it is to do with their usual place of residence. How complex will operating the system be for businesses, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises? In a constituency such as mine, businesses will have staff resident in both England and Wales. If income tax varying powers were to be used by the Welsh Government, I would want to make sure that the burden placed on employers of English and Welsh residents was not significant and that the system was as easy as possible to operate—preferably with as little burdensome administration as possible. I will return to that issue in Committee, to make sure that it has been properly thought through.

I also want to check on the issue of stamp duty land tax. The shadow Secretary of State touched on it in a slightly facetious way when he discussed properties that straddled the England-Wales border. I want to make a serious point about the quality of the mapping involved. May I make a plea for us not to use postcodes in determining which nation the land is in? It is not the Post Office’s fault, but a lot of organisations are sloppy and do not use postcodes properly. They assume that everybody with an NP postcode lives in Wales, including my constituents in the southern part of my constituency. A lot of my constituents, who live in England, get bilingual letters from all sorts of organisations that assume they live in Wales. I hope that my hon. Friend can assure me that we will use a proper mapping system when looking at stamp duty land tax so that we make the right decisions about whether property is in England or in Wales and do not have the sorts of cross-border issues that I have seen as a result of devolution so far.

I support the proposal to move to fixed-year terms offset against the terms for this place. On balance, it is better to have elections in Wales that focus on the issues important to the people of Wales—and ensure that those running the Welsh Assembly and those wanting to be elected to it are properly held accountable—than elections that take place on the same day as a UK general election, because then the arguments would blur. One can argue it both ways—the hon. Member for Rhondda, who is no longer in his place, did so, as did several others when we were passing the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011—but I am pleased with the measure.

I have already said that I am happy with the proposal to reverse the change made by the right hon. Member for Neath, and I will say no more about that. We have had a lot of debate about it already, and I do not want to provoke any more.

I notice that the borrowing powers are already available to be used for the M4 development. That is a helpful proposal. I have been having an ongoing debate with some Labour Members about the Severn bridge tolls that is driven by the desire for improvements on the M4 to improve the economic benefits from that corridor. I have proposed a third Severn crossing, although that is not welcomed by all Labour Members if it means an extension of toll revenues. Some of the borrowing powers could enable improvements to the important M4 link, which is very important for the economies not only of south Wales but of constituencies such as mine. The proposal is very welcome.

Overall, I welcome the Bill. I am glad that it has been well thought through as a result of the proposals from the Silk commission and that it had pre-legislative scrutiny in this House. I will certainly support it, and I look forward to debating it further on the Floor of the House.