National Insurance Contributions Bill

moved Amendment No. 32:"Page 13, line 1, leave out ““including”” and insert ““but not””" The noble Baroness said: With Amendments Nos. 32 and 33 we return to retrospection, but this time from the perspective of agreements between employer and employee rather than the retrospective effects of national insurance charges. Amendment No. 32 amends Clause 5, the main thrust of which is to prevent employers recouping from employees secondary contributions payable as a result of regulations made under the Bill. The prohibition applies not only to agreements made after the magic date of 2 December 2004, but to those made before it. Amendment No. 32 makes it clear that the clause is to apply only to agreements made after the date, and Amendment No. 33 does the same thing for Northern Ireland in Clause 6. Through the amendments, I seek to probe what public policy considerations led the Government to believe that it is right to nullify agreements freely entered into between employers and employees as to the incidence of national insurance. There are perfectly valid reasons why the incidence of secondary contributions should be shifted, and I struggle to see why that should be overturned because the Treasury decides that there should be regulations that have retrospective effect back to December 2004. I referred earlier to the fact that there continue to be legitimate ways of avoiding or minimising national insurance charges through share schemes. We know that there is no guarantee that the Treasury will not seek to detect some evil in them in future, declare them to be abuse, and therefore seek to levy further secondary and primary contributions. If the employees have already made agreements or elections concerning future liabilities, what is the rationale for shifting that back to the employer? The only conclusion that one can come to is that this is, in effect, a disguised penalty on employers. I hope that the Minister can explain the public policy background to this form of retrospection being required in the Bill. I beg to move.