Finance Bill

It is not up to me, as one Member of Parliament, to serve notice. I do not have the power to change this; I am simply raising issues with Treasury Ministers that I hope they will take into account. I hope they will at least address the emergency nature of the Budget and of the measures being implemented. I would also like them to address the permanency—or non-permanency—of the measures. If they are likely to be permanent, can we at least have an explanation of how that can be justified? In seeking to raise not just VAT but so many other issues in the Budget, such as the banking levy and capital gains tax, I have often been cautioned not to disaggregate one element of the Budget from the rest, on the grounds that we cannot unpick a Budget because the whole thing will implode, for some reason that I have never entirely understood—perhaps the Exchequer Secretary could explain it to me. However, given how we in this House have to scrutinise such matters, it is inevitable that we should have to pick at particular aspects of the Budget, particularly bearing in mind the fact that this Finance Bill brings forward only limited aspects of the Budget. There will be a further Finance Bill later in the year, while essential measures in the Budget will form part of the comprehensive spending review, so bits of it are all over the place. If my right hon. and hon. Friends in the Treasury and elsewhere are concerned that the impact of my probing inquiries and questions is effectively to unpick and therefore undermine the Budget, I apologise. However, I would like the Exchequer Secretary to address himself to the issue that I have raised and to the argument of those interrelationships, because at the end of the day—I have made this view clear in my contributions to this debate, and I know that many others across the House share it—of all the measures to restore the public finances, a VAT rise, it seems to me, has to be among the least welcome.