National Insurance Contributions Bill

moved Amendment No. 38:"After Clause 7, insert the following new clause—" ““REPORT TO PARLIAMENT    The Commissioners for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs shall report to Parliament, whether in their annual report or otherwise, as to the amount of additional national insurance contributions collected as a result of the powers contained in this Act.”” The noble Baroness said: Amendment No. 38 inserts another new clause after Clause 7. It requires HMRC to report to Parliament on the additional amount of national insurance contributions collected as a result of the powers contained in this Act. We discussed this briefly at Second Reading. The additional yield expected by the Government is, I understand, £95 million for 2004–05 and £240 million per year after that. That is not, of course, enough to fill the black hole in the Government’s coffers, but I am sure it is better than nothing. I asked the Minister at Second Reading how the Government would measure the success of this Bill. He replied:"““It will in part be a recognition of what has been stopped, which will clearly be auditable, but it will also reflect a view of what has been deterred, on which it is less easy to be certain. Some of that might relate to disclosures that have been made under the disclosure rules and reflect the extent to which the schemes are not taken forward. I am not sure how easy it will be to audit all that””.—[Official Report, 9/1/05; col. 28.]" I accept all that the Minister has said on that. My amendment is not intended to be prescriptive about how the figures are to be measured; I accept that it must be a mixture of actuals and estimates. My amendment does not require the disclosure of the basis of the measurement, but I am sure that HMRC, in fulfilling the Bill, would give all relevant information. My amendment is not even prescriptive about how the figures are to be reported to Parliament or when. We often table rather specific ““report to Parliament”” amendments, and Ministers nearly always get up and say, ““That will be included in the annual report”” or, ““We will report in the first X years; please do not make us report in perpetuity””. I accept all that, so my amendment leaves to the discretion of HMRC—which is an extraordinarily generous thing for an opposition amendment to do—when HMRC should report. I should just say briefly why we think it important to see the figures. It comes back to the unusual nature of the Bill, with its high degree of retrospection. The Government have claimed the figures that I quoted earlier, and they are using the scale of potential avoidance as justification for unprecedented retrospection. They even managed to convince the sub-committee of the Economic Affairs Committee of your Lordships’ House that the scale of abuse in this case justified the means. The amendment is directed at that issue. If, for example, the Government’s forecasts of national insurance gained by the Bill were met or exceeded, I am sure that Parliament would be satisfied that the powers had been justified. However, if the Bill actually yielded a lot less, not only would Parliament feel somewhat cheated that it had signed up to an unusual degree of retrospection for no real return, but it might mistrust any future proposal brought to it by the Government. I acknowledge that asking the Government to accept this degree of scrutiny would potentially expose them to criticism, but I hope that the Minister will see that the case for openness about the potential outcomes of this Bill is a strong one. I beg to move.