National Insurance Contributions Bill

I thank the Minister, and I would be grateful if he would send me further information. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Newby, for taking part in the debate. The amendment was not intended to tie the Government’s hands prospectively, but was merely designed to give certainty up to the point when the law was actually changed. I hoped that the amendment would be read in that spirit. I completely accept the Minister’s words about how difficult it is to draft for a clearance procedure. I also accept that it is costly, which is why HMRC and the Government have gone down the route of disclosure rather than general anti-avoidance. You must have a clearance procedure if you are going to have general anti-avoidance. I keep returning to the issue of how to get certainty for taxpayers, given that there is a spectrum. Where there are clear, fancy schemes designed solely to avoid tax and national insurance it is fairly clear, and there is no particular need to give certainty for those. My concern has always been throughout the Committee to ensure that we have arrangements that create some degree of certainty for those people who might unwittingly be caught up in a retrospective change because the powers in the Bill are unrestricted. The Minister has made something of saying that the Statement on 2 December 2004 provides the context in which regulations will be made. Of course, those words and that context do not appear in this Bill: this is an unrestricted power. That is why the noble Lord will find these Benches expressing concerns about the impact of that on those who need to arrange their affairs. I will consider carefully what the Minister said, and I hope that he will write to me. Does he want to add something before I sit down?