Schedule 15

Part of Finance Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 5:45 pm on 9 June 2009.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Stephen Timms Stephen Timms Financial Secretary (HM Treasury) (also in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) 5:45, 9 June 2009

I think that some of the amendments that we have been debating will address some of the hon. Gentleman’s concerns. Amendment 137, which ensures that a UK company must be a member of the group for accounting purposes, would deal with the problem of deadlocked joint ventures. On his concern about available versus total calculations, several potential mismatches created by the different treatment of more complex financial arrangements have been raised with us. The draft clauses published in December included a wider definition of finance expenses and finance income which would have prevented some of those mismatches, but there was a strong view from businesses that we should remove the impact of foreign currency adjustments and payments and receipts from derivative contracts from the debt rules.

I accept that narrowing the definitions might raise some problems, but I am cautious about introducing a quick solution to reintroduce other complexities that we wanted to eliminate. We will continue to look at these, consulting with interested parties. If we can find suitable solutions, we can announce additional rules at the time of the PBR which could take effect from 1 January 2010, although the legislation would follow shortly afterwards.