My Lords, incidentally, the other meeting I was due to attend did not raise a quorum.
Nobody has so far spoken in support of Amendment 8 so it is perhaps unnecessary for me to speak against it. However, it has been formally moved. I think that inserting a duty or giving a duty to the commissioner that she or he should publish information about,
“tax rates, allowances and thresholds of relevance to small business”
would introduce a major distraction into the commissioner’s role. It is the duty of Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs to publish the allowances, rates and everything else, and it does so with considerable vigour on its websites. There are large numbers of people, including people in the profession in which I qualified, although I have not practised for many years—namely, chartered accountancy—who do this kind of thing. If the commissioner finds himself or herself with a legal duty written into the Bill to publish this kind of information, I fear that it will be a major distraction from what we all want to see as the commissioner’s initial role, at any rate; that is, to deal with the late payment issues.