It is a great privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Gale. I should also like to welcome all membersof the Committee and say how much I am looking forward to debating with them in the coming weeks. Like the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet, I am sure that we are all disappointed—not least the Paymaster General herself—that the Paymaster General is not serving on an 11th and perhaps record-breaking Finance Bill. I am sure that she can look forward to coming back next year.

I should also like to put on record my thanks to other organisations that have provided briefings and technical advice. I should like to dwell for a few moments on the procedure that we are about to go through in terms of debating the sittings. On Second Reading, I raised the issue of receiving evidence at the Committee sittings, as other Public Bill Committees have done since 1 January this year. The Statistics and Registration Service Bill, which I sat on earlier this year, was the first to undergo such a process. The hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West pointed out that no organisations had come forward to give evidence to that Bill and that made me wonder whether any outside organisations would be interested in participating in such a process here.

The new Public Bill Committee process was recommended by the Select Committee on Modernisation of the House of Commons in its first report sitting of 2005-06 entitled “The Legislative Process”. In a summary, it concluded:

“As a matter of routine, Government bills should be referred to committees which have the power to take evidence as well as to debate and amend a bill, and these committees should be named public bill committees.”

Unfortunately, we are still operating under the old system and we do not have that opportunity.

I took the liberty of contacting some organisations to see whether they would be willing to participate. Many of those organisations contributed to the evidence sessions of the Select Committee on Modernisation of the House of Commons. I want to quote a few of the comments. Given the short time scale, a not insignificant number of organisations were keen to support the suggestion: the Low Incomes Tax Reform Group; the Institute of Directors, the British Chambers of Commerce; the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners; the Association of Taxation Technicians and the Chartered Institute of Taxation.