Corporation Tax Bill

The hon. Gentleman makes a perfectly good point; the losers tend to make more noise than the winners—that is inevitable. I was coming to the issue of simplification, which relates to the argument that John Whiting has been making. Two elements are worth exploring, the first of which is the possibility of a greater degree of scrutiny. The tax law rewrite project has involved scrutiny, but the project has had a very limited remit: to focus on rewriting the language. We will discuss the conclusions that have resulted from that. The second element is the push towards simplification, and I take on board fully the remarks of the hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh) about that. None the less, the view of my party is that simplification is worth pursuing. All this, whether we are discussing the clarity of language, which is what this Bill is about, or simplification, fits into the issue of the competitiveness of the tax system. I will not digress at any length into corporation tax rates, for example, but this is obviously a Bill on corporation tax and it would be remiss of me not to mention the fact that we used to have a corporation tax rate that was lower than the OECD average in 1997, whereas it is now higher. In 1997, the UK had the 11th lowest corporation tax rate in the world, and now has the 23rd lowest—