I thank the hon. Member for Dewsbury (Paula Sherriff) for tabling her amendments, for speaking to this issue today and for having campaigned on it so effectively for so many months, if not years.
My amendment 140 would require the removal of VAT on women’s sanitary products to take effect by 1 January 2017. The background is that the former Prime Minister assured the House in March that he had succeeded in persuading the other 27 Heads of Government at the EU Council meeting on 17 and 18 March to allow the United Kingdom Government to respond to popular demand and extend the zero rate for VAT to women’s sanitary products. The former Prime Minister told the House:
“This is an important breakthrough. Britain will be able to have a zero rate for sanitary products”.—[Official Report, 21 March 2016; Vol. 607, c. 1246.]
On 24 March this Bill, then the Finance (No. 2) Bill, was published, and clause 125, as it now is—it was originally clause 115—was designed to implement the pledge on the abolition of VAT on women’s sanitary products and the introduction of a zero rate, but when the EU VAT action plan was published on 7 April it did not deliver on what the Prime Minister must have thought he had been promised at EU Council meeting in the previous month.
I tabled a couple of parliamentary questions on the subject. The first was:
“To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, what information his Department holds on the reasons why the EU Action Plan on VAT consultation document issued…on 7 April 2016 omits any reference to the decision of EU Heads of Government that the UK can remove VAT from women’s sanitary products”.
The answer I received was typically helpful from my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary, then the Financial Secretary, and said:
“The content of the EU VAT Action Plan is a matter for the European Commission. European Council Conclusions welcomed ‘the intention of the Commission to include proposals for increased flexibility for Member States with respect to reduced rates of VAT, which would provide the option to Member States of VAT zero rating? for sanitary products’.”
I then asked my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary on what date he expected the removal of VAT from women’s sanitary products to take effect, and he replied on 18 April:
“The zero rate of VAT for sanitary products will take effect as soon as possible after Royal Assent.”
There was no mention of any constraint in EU law that would prevent the early implementation of the pledge that the Prime Minister was able to deliver following that European Council meeting.