Saving Gateway Accounts Bill

I shall speak also to Amendments 48 and 49. These deal with the tax regulation-making powers in Clause 14, which allow regulations to give relief for income tax and capital gains tax. Would income or capital gains tax be involved in respect of the maturity payment if no regulations were passed under the clause? Would it be treated as interest, some form of income or as a capital payment? If it is a capital payment, I doubt whether there is any need for regulations, given the annual exemption from capital gains tax. It would be interesting to know what the Government’s view is of the taxable status of the maturity amount. The Government’s clearly stated intention is that saving gateway accounts will attract neither income tax nor capital gains tax. We fully support that. The Bill is permissive on that score, which is why I have tabled the customary "may/shall" amendment into Clause 14, so that the Government must create these regulations to ensure that the funds stay outside the ambit of the tax system. Can the Minister explain why there should be any optionality for the Government? Amendments 48 and 49 together ensure that if the Government make regulations under Clause 14, which deals with the relief from income and capital gains tax, the affirmative procedure must always be used. Clause 27 requires only the first regulations to be subject to the affirmative procedure. The relevant approval is only for the other place, about which we always have some regrets, but that is a debate for another time. However, it must surely be right that Parliament in one form or another has to take the positive step of approving tax-related regulations. In practice, I think that there will be no issue with the first regulations, but suppose the Government then changed their mind about total exemption and narrowed the exemption. That is exactly the kind of issue that the Government should be required to come to Parliament for to explain and to seek approval. That is what the affirmative procedure does, which is a modest requirement. If the Government wish to make the equivalent change in the Finance Bill, that would have to be processed as part of the Finance Bill itself. If we are going to allow it to be done by regulation, as a minimum we believe that it should be done using the affirmative procedure, so that the Government have to come and explain why they wish to make the change. I beg to move.