Finance Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate, and I am particularly grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, for amplifying the message from the committee, whose work we all respect. There have been times in our debate on the general issues—it has been fairly a political debate as opposed to a Finance Bill debate—when assertions have been made by those on the other side without too much evidence to back them up. My noble friend Lord Peston, while saying that he had nought to say for my comfort about what the Government should do, asked what the Opposition think they would do. The answer came there none; nor came there much evidence. The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, said that such is the impact on international business that the flight has begun. I presume that this is the same flight that it was contended would occur when the non-domiciles left the country in droves. I anticipated, given the prescience of the Opposition—they always base their contentions on established fact—that we would have strings of indices for this. This is, after all, a financial debate in which figures might feature prominently, but not at all; there has been no supporting evidence for these contentions.