New
Clause
31
Report
on tax relief on
pensions
‘The Secretary of
State shall, not later than 1st April 2008, prepare and publish a
report on tax relief on pension contributions,
namely—
(a) the annual
cost to the Treasury of those reliefs, including projections for the
following five tax years,
and
(b) the extent to which the
existing tax relief on pensions is, in his
opinion—
(i)
economic,
(ii) properly
focussed, and
(iii)
comprehensible.’.—[Mr.
Laws.]
Brought
up, and read the First
time.
Mr.
Laws:
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second
time.
I said this
morning that a couple of dogs had not yet barked in the Committee. This
is one of the two dogs—the other was the issue of public sector
pensions. I was tempted not to raise this particular issue because it
has not been fundamental to the debate on the Bill and was a relatively
modest part of the Pensions Commission proposals. Yet when we consider
how much money is at stake in pension tax relief and how devastating
the Pensions Commission’s second report was in its criticism of
the Government on this matter, it would seem a little odd to complete
our debate without at least touching upon this issue. In that report,
the Pensions Commission concluded that pension tax relief is costly,
poorly focused and not well understood. It is also true—and I
anticipate that we will hear this from the Minister in a few
moments—that the Pensions Commission said that it would be quite
complex to change pension tax relief and did not make recommendations
for immediate changes.
James
Purnell:
Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that the report
actually said, on page 319, that it was “very
complex”?
Mr.
Laws:
Yes, it said it was very complex but also that it
would not recommend changing it in the short term—in other
words, in the next few years. It did not say that it was so complex
that people of the Minister’s brilliance and all those in the
civil service, the Treasury and the Department for Work and Pensions
could not start doing some work on this in order to produce a better
system.
Therefore, I
hope that the Minister will not use that as an excuse not to take this
issue full-on, although I fear that he might. I anticipate a speech in
which he will say that this is a matter for Treasury Ministers, not for
his Department. He will say that this is extremely complex and
difficult to deal with, that other changes to the regime of pension tax
relief are taking place and that it would be imprudent to introduce
other measures at the same time, as it might destabilise them. I have
seen this speech outside; I have read it.
Despite all that, I will not be
knocked off course. Not only did the Pensions Commission come up with
this devastating criticism, but the right hon. Member for Birkenhead
(Mr. Field), in his evidence to the Work and Pensions
Committee, said he very much hoped that this issue would be pursued.
The Select Committee itself asked the Government to look into
that.
What I want to
find out from the Government today is not the bit about the
complexity—because I know that bit, have already read it and am
probably going to hear it again—but whether the Minister agrees
with the conclusion of the Pensions Commission report that this tax
relief is costly, poorly focused and not well understood. The main
issue will not be whether it is costly or well understood, because we
already have information on that, but how focused, fair or unfair it
is. We have Government figures on the cost of pension tax relief and
they are pretty significant, which is another reason why we could not
leave this whole debate without airing the issue.
In 2005-06, the net cost of
pension tax relief, after clawing back the money on tax from pensions
in payment, will be approximately £14.3 billion. That must be
something north of 1 per cent. of GDP, which is quite a lot of money.
That figure has increased by almost £2 billion since 2004-05. It
is up by something like £5 billion from 2001-02, which is a
pretty significant increase.
If some of this week’s
newspaper reports are correct that the demand for pension products is
increasing as a consequence of the recent simplification of pension tax
relief, we may find that the net cost of pension tax relief continues
to rise quite rapidly in the future. Therefore, it is quite a large
element of total tax relief and very large in relation to this whole
debate.
We also know
from the Pensions Commission’s excellent second report that
pension tax relief is not well understood. Page 317 of the report
provides two very useful charts, which show basic rate and higher rate
taxpayers’ understanding of how pension tax relief works. Almost
half of basic-rate taxpayers had no idea about their entitlement to tax
relief on their pension contributions, 26 per cent. thought it would be
better
than the basic rate and only 17 per cent. got it right at the basic
rate. Higher rate taxpayers, as one might expect, were a little better
informed about the enormous benefits of tax relief to them, but even
there only 28 per cent. got it right that they would get a 40
per cent. rate of relief. Almost the same figure as for basic rate
taxpayers, 27 per cent., could come up with no idea at all about what
the tax relief was
worth. I hope that we
can establish that tax relief is costly and that it is not very well
understood. The issue is whether it is well focused and fair. Before I
get an intervention, I should point out that it is a reasonable
presumption within our tax system and, as I understand it, most other
tax systems of developed economies that there should not be a double
taxation of pensions. One should not be taxed on the income used to put
into a pension and again on money as it is drawn out. That principle,
in one way or another, is embedded in our whole savings regime.
However, the Pensions Commission’s point was that we do not seem
to have that kind of tax neutrality in relation to our existing system
in the UK but, rather, an unbalanced system that seems to give greater
relief to one proportion of the population. In crude terms, something
like 50 per cent. of the tax relief goes to the top 10 per cent. of
income earners and 25 per cent. to 2.5 per cent. of the income earners.
That would not necessarily matter, if that simply reflected the amount
of participation in pension savings by those two groups and the need
therefore to neutralise the effects on taxation. However, it seems to
be not simply neutralising, but actually skewing the tax system in a
way that benefits people on very high
incomes.
We already
know that in this country we have an extraordinarily unequal
distribution of income, wealth and opportunity. There are question
marks about whether social mobility has been declining over recent
years. So, it is very striking and also bizarre and extraordinary that
we should have a tax system that the Pensions Commission considers to
be skewed in favour of those people with the higher incomes. The second
report of the Pensions Commission points out this extraordinary
situation, which we have been discussing throughout the Bill, where
those people on very low incomes potentially suffer enormous withdrawal
of benefits in retirement and therefore may have their incentives to
save cut away from them. In the earlier debate the hon. Member for
Eastbourne talked about the effect of means-testing essentially
operating as a tax on
saving.
At
the same time, to those people who already have a lot of money, more is
given. There is an extraordinary graph on page 313 of the Pensions
Commission’s second report, which shows the impact of the tax
advantages on returns from savings. Looking at it, one will see an
extraordinary rise in the tax advantage of saving for those people as
they go over the threshold for upper-rate tax. The Pensions Commission
made the issue very clear on page 312 of the
report:
“The
benefits of this significant cost to the Exchequer are...extremely
unequally
distributed”.
It
continued:
“But
the overall message is clear: the beneficial impact of tax relief on
the rates of return of savings is much higher for higher-rate taxpayers
than for basic rate or lower-rate taxpayers. And this is not simply
because tax relief undoes the higher
detrimental effect on rates of return which higher tax rates would
impose on non-tax privileged saving: higher tax rate payers can achieve
through pension savings higher post-tax rates of return than those
enjoyed by basic-rate
taxpayers”— which
includes those at the bottom end of the income distribution.
We have a bizarre, eccentric
system. It not only uses tax relief on pensions to give a special bonus
to those who already have a lot, rather than just neutralising the tax
consequences, but it disincentivises saving among people with very
little money, because there is so much means-testing. Enormous
incentives to save are being given to people at the upper end of the
income distribution. It seems bizarre that we should be giving
massively generous incentives to affluent people while creating
disincentives for people at the bottom end of the income
distribution
James
Purnell: I am following the hon. Gentleman’s speech with
interest. I should be even more interested if he were to tell us what
his policy was.
Mr. Laws: I
shall move on to that. I am encouraged to go further. We published a
policy last year—I am sorry that the Minister missed
it—to reorganise tax relief on pensions so that tax relief is
paid at the basic rate and the savings are recycled as a cut in the
basic rate of tax. If the Minister has an alternative we will listen to
it, because there are other ways of better using the money.
Our policy would avoid the
current situation, from which most Members of this House will probably
benefit. We can take the enormous benefit of 40 per cent. tax relief as
we save, in the knowledge that many of us will be paying only the basic
rate of 22 per cent. when we retire. A large proportion of the people
who receive tax relief at 40 per cent. will pay only the basic rate of
tax in retirement.
Figure 7.8 on
page 313 of the Pensions Commission’s second report is an
interesting graph that shows the average tax rate for people in
different income bands in retirement. The average rate of about 20 per
cent. applies to people on incomes of up to about £55,000 a
year. Someone who has been a higher rate taxpayer during their working
life has to earn an awful lot of money in retirement to miss out on
that enormous freebie from saving in pension accounts. Notwithstanding
all the criticisms that have been made of the Chancellor of the
Exchequer for tinkering with tax relief on pensions, I should have
thought that removing that anomaly, which enormously advantages the
advantaged, would be extremely sensible for a Labour Government who
are, on the face of it, passionate about social justice.
I know that the Minister will
say that such changes are far too complicated, but in its contribution
to the Select Committee inquiry, the Pensions Policy Institute
said:
“Discussions
between the PPI and practitioners suggest that
reform”
of the type that
we suggest
“would be
possible. A review of value for money to the taxpayer of current and
alternative systems of tax incentives for pensions and other forms of
savings would help address a remaining significant policy
issue.”
Elsewhere, the
PPI has
said:
“Discussions
between the PPI and practitioners have indicated that it would be
possible to resolve the problems identified in Lord Turner’s
report.”
I think Lord Turner would acknowledge that
he was hardly encouraged by the Treasury or other parts of Government
to look in great detail at tax relief on pensions. One suspects that
the Chancellor would have gone potty if Lord Turner had gone that far
into the Treasury’s area.
We should not regard the
Pensions Commission as having drawn a line under the issue with its
conclusion that resolving it will be complex. We should note instead
its criticism of the unfocused nature of the existing relief. In the
Minister’s reply, I hope to hear an acknowledgment that tax
relief is badly focused and that the door should not be closed to
consideration of that
issue.
3
pm
Ms
Keeble:
I should be very interested if the hon. Gentleman
would again go through the proposals. I am unsure about the detail. I
understand that pension relief on the contributions would be capped at
the basic rate. Then would the money saved be provided to broaden the
band that is only taxed at 10 per cent., or would thresholds be
increased? Or would it go into other forms of support for
pensioners’
income?
Mr.
Laws:
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising that
issue. There are a myriad different ways in which tax relief could be
redesigned. It could simply be redesigned so that it was given to every
member of the community at the same rate, rather like the proposal for
personal accounts where everybody gets the same rates of pension tax
relief. It could be that the money saved in that way is used to
incentivise saving in some other way. Our proposal is to restrict
relief to the basic rate and then to funnel that money back into
reducing the basic rate of tax. But it could be used for many other
things.
Ms
Keeble:
For
everybody?
Mr.
Laws:
Into the basic rate of tax for everybody. But it
would be open to the hon. Lady and others to bring forward their own
proposals. There are plenty of other ways of doing
this.
I hope that the
Minister will not only give us the guarantee that he regards pension
tax relief as badly focused, but clarify the purpose of pensions tax
relief and whether it is to give incentives to save or whether it
simply seeks to deliver neutrality in the tax
system.
Mr.
Waterson:
I do not wish to detain the Committee long,
particularly at this late stage in our deliberations, but I could not
not intervene in this debate.
I apologise—although I
would not wish to lull him into a false sense of security—to the
hon. Member for Yeovil that I missed the policy announcement he
mentioned. As with buses, however, if you miss one Lib Dem policy
announcement there will be another one along at any time, probably
saying exactly the opposite. I am grateful for his confirmation that
indeed his party’s policy is the same as it was before the last
election, which is to remove the tax relief available to higher earners
for making pensions contributions. He has twitched so I will give way.
[Laughter.]
Mr.
Laws:
The hon. Gentleman clearly has not been following
the twists and turns of Liberal Democrat policy as well as he should
have been. This policy was passed a year ago. It was not the policy at
the last
election.
Mr.
Waterson:
I apologise again. I was only going on what his
hon. Friend the Member for Northavon said in the House. In any case, it
does not really matter, as there is no Liberal Democrat Government
following that election and we are now looking to the next
election.
So that my
constituents among others can be absolutely clear about this, the
Liberal Democrats would remove the tax relief on pension contributions
for higher earners.
Mr.
Laws:
And reduce the basic
rate.
Mr.
Waterson:
Yes, well, we await some of the detail. I am
amazed, if that is the case, that the hon. Gentleman has not had the
courage of his convictions because, if he does not mind my saying so,
his rather mealy-mouthed new clause only talks about having a report
whereas it seems to me he claims to have a thoroughly worked out,
hard-edged policy, which I think he might just have managed to form
into a new clause, but there we are. There is always Report stage to
consider.
Speaking for
my party, at this crucial stage where the last thing we want to do is
remove incentives to people to save into pensions for their retirement,
to start fiddling with and reducing the tax relief available is exactly
the wrong way to go. The hon. Gentleman is wrong when he says it is not
understood. It may be true, as he indicated, that a lot of people do
not understand all the complexities and the detail but they do
understand the central point that if they pay into a pension fund they
get tax relief.
Mr.
Laws:
That is not the point I made; it was Lord
Turner’s point. Does the hon. Gentleman disagree with Lord
Turner’s suggestion that tax relief is poorly
focused?
Mr.
Waterson:
Well, I agree with Lord Turner’s point
that it would be, I think the phrase was, “very complex to do
anything about it” but it is a luxury available to the hon.
Gentleman’s party to have very complex policies because they are
never going to be called upon to put them into effect in the real
world.
We on the
Conservative side of the Committee would have great reluctance in
supporting any such proposal, even if it were actually contained in the
new clause. We think it will not be well received at all among the many
higher earners out there who are aware that there is tax relief and may
well for that reason be saving in their pension. This is at a time when
we are really worried as a party that, if anything, people need more
encouragement to save into pensions, particularly with the coming of
personal accounts and the whole issue of levelling down, which I will
not go into again.
James
Purnell:
I am tempted to say that the hon. Gentleman has
given my speech, so there is no need for me to do so, but I shall gild
the lily slightly by saying that I look forward to the
“Focus” leaflets in Twickenham, Richmond and Guildford
highlighting the importance of higher-rate tax relief, explaining to
people how it works and how the Liberal Democrats are going to take it
away.
James
Purnell:
And indeed in Yeovil. I also look forward to
seeing the detailed calculations that the hon. Gentleman will provide
at his seminar. He rather gave the impression that he was going to be
able to pocket £14 billion from this. As he well knows, the
higher rate element of it accounts for only about a quarter, and there
is no guarantee that the savings will materialise because, people being
what they are, having lost one form of tax-advantaged saving, they
might well find another to allow themselves to make provision for the
future. Perhaps, therefore, all he will achieve is to shift money from
pension saving into another form of tax-advantaged saving, perhaps
housing. Given that the thrust of our debates has been to encourage
pension saving, I am not sure that that would necessarily be a
brilliant policy.
I
am also tempted to read out to the Committeepage 319 of the
commission report. I can see that you would be delighted for me to do
so, Mr. Gale, but I shall just send it to the hon. Gentleman
again so that he can read the bits that do not suit his argument quite
so well, especially the bits that say that it would be very complex to
make the changes.
Mr.
Laws:
Will the Minister give
way?
James
Purnell:
Absolutely; it will give me time to find the
place.
Mr.
Laws:
If it could be demonstrated that it was not very
complex, would the Minister then be in favour of the
change?
James
Purnell:
I did not have time to find the quote. However,
the hon. Gentleman has again demonstrated that he is cleverer than the
Pensions Commission and, indeed, John Hills, who looked into the matter
in some detail. John Hills gave a lecture on this, which was posted on
the PPI website—that is not the right quote. Here we are: the
Pensions Commission said that it would be extremely complex to make the
changes so long as there is a significant element of
DB—defined-benefit—provision in the
system.
The point is
that, as is explained on page 319, which all hon. Members will read
before the hon. Gentleman’s seminar, making the changes would
deal a potentially fatal blow to defined-benefit schemes because of the
extreme complexity that would be involved, the fact that individual tax
obligations would have to be calculated—for every member, we
think—and the fact that members who had significant increases in
their salaries might be required to pay significant in-year tax
bills.
Mr.
Laws:
Does the Minister agree with Lord Turner that
pensions tax relief is poorly focused?
James
Purnell:
We are implementing the Pensions
Commission’s recommendations pretty much in full, and they did
not include making that change. If the hon. Gentleman wants to make
policy suggestions that are potentially very damaging to final salary
schemes, that is very much at odds with his previous concerns during
our proceedings about levelling down. We do not think that that would
be the right approach, and in that we follow the Pensions Commission. I
suspect that he is trying to find a sum of money that he can recycle
into something that enables him to make a simple claim about basic rate
tax. I am sure that the money will be spent in a number of other areas
as well, such as on increasing the basic state pension, and it might
fund some other policy suggestions that the hon. Gentleman has made. I
do not think that that is a practical solution, and neither did the
Pensions Commission, and I urge him to withdraw the
motion.
Mr.
Laws:
It has been an interesting debate, and this is the
last new clause. I was not going to propose it until I got stuck at
Basingstoke station on the way home one day, and had nothing better to
do than read the Pensions Commission report. I then decided that it
would be negligent to end this Committee without airing serious
criticisms of the pension tax system. I anticipated, and wanted to
flush out, just how conservative both sides were going to be. I wanted
to test out whether all this new model Conservatism and Toynbeeism
really added up to much. We found out from the hon. Member for
Eastbourne that it does not. It comes down to a defence of traditional
privilege: the traditional privilege of those highest earners in
society who are tax-privileged and are getting an enormous subsidy to
save in pensions. The Conservative party is still determined to defend
that.
Andrew
Selous:
Is the hon. Gentleman aware that moderately senior
nurses in the NHS and other people of that ilk are higher rate tax
payers? Does he think they are hugely privileged
people?
Mr.
Laws:
The hon. Gentleman should know that the people who
are upper rate taxpayers are among the 10 per cent. richest and the
most affluent people in the country. The idea that we should have a
pension system that gives powerful disincentives to the poorest people
in Britain not to save, and gives enormous subsidies and incentives to
the richest to save is crackpot. Eventually, whether or not the other
parties agree, we will end up with a grand consensus based on this
little phrase from Lord Turner that we have got to change the
system.
The briefing
will change and the Chancellor of the Exchequer will become Prime
Minister and decide that this is a good idea. The leader of the
Conservative party in a cuddly moment will decide that it is something
that he must support too. I look forward to hearing the hon. Member for
Eastbourne and the Minister eating their words and commending me for my
proposal to end the immoral and wasteful system of tax relief. I detect
that I may not at the moment
command a majority on the Committee. With those deeply consensual words,
I beg to ask leave to withdraw the
motion.
Motion and
clause, by leave,
withdrawn.
Ordered,
That
certain written evidence already reported to the House be appended to
the proceedings of the Committee.—[James
Purnell.]
Mr.
Waterson:
On a point of order, Mr. Gale. I do
not want to detain the Committee long, but it would be wrong not to say
a few thanks at the end of this constructive and good-natured
Committee. The golden rivet has proved elusive, except for the
concession made following the intervention of my hon. Friend the Member
for South-West Bedfordshire on new clause 28. We can take that away and
claim a success, although the hon. Member for Yeovil will even now be
drafting a press release claiming that it was all his
idea.
Mr.
Laws:
I have done it
already.
Mr.
Waterson:
I should like to thank you, Mr. Gale,
and Mr. Taylor, for your excellent chairmanship. I should
like to thank our Clerk, who has striven manfully to keep our
amendments in order, the Hansard writers, the police and the
security officers and all the officials who have kindly supplied the
Minister sometimes with the right quotations and sometimes not. They
have supplied us all with loads of information and with loads of
letters, but not all at the same time. I should like to pay an especial
tribute to the Committee Office scrutiny unit who have laboured long
and hard to deliver two, two-page submissions. I do not regard this
Committee as having been a wonderful example of the new rules of
written evidence, let alone oral evidence. But do not get me started on
that.
3.15
pm
I should like
to thank all my hon. Friends and all members of the Committee. I should
particularly like to thank my hon. Friend the Member for South-West
Bedfordshire for his all hard work on the Committee and my own Whip
who, sadly, is not here. I should like to thank my hon. Friend the
Member for The Wrekin, who is not here either. I see from his biography
that he is a member of the Miniature Schnauzer Club of Great Britain. I
assume that he is out walking his dog today. In addition to his
activities as a Whip, my hon. Friend is a bomb disposal
expert—he has recently returned from Iraq—as well as
working in the family firework manufacturing firm. Let us hope that he
does not light the wrong blue touch
paper.
We have been
very honoured to have two very good Ministers. I looked on his website
and saw that when asked what motivates him, the Under-Secretary of
State for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington
said:
“You need
to keep the belief that there is far more good in the world than
evil.”
Let us hope that
this Committee confirms that view of life. The hon. Member for Solihull
has experience as a prison governor and I hope that this experience has
not
been too different. We established in a previous debate that the
earnings link was broken when the Minister for Pensions Reform was
still in primary school. There has been a great historical sweep in our
debates. I thank the
Government Whip for whipping the Committee with an admirably light
touch. The visits to the Liberal Democrat Santa’s grotto have
been interesting; I hope that the Minister has kept a running tally of
the spending commitments, the prize for which must go to the hon.
Member for Northampton, North who came up with a modest, probing
amendment that would have cost £14 billion. I wonder whether she
has considered joining the Liberal Democrats.
The hon. Member for Yeovil
seemed determined to upset every aspect of the electorate, particularly
higher earners, except, of course, for the Christian Brethren who, as
he conceded, cannot vote for him or, indeed, for anybody
else.
Finally, I had
a letter from the Minister this morning that contained a sentence that
should send us on our way cheerful and happy. It
said:
“Cross-party
scrutiny of the Bill’s proposals is an important part of
deepening the existing consensus around the future of the UK pension
system.”
That is a
wonderful sentiment. In our case, the deepening consensus has become
rather more shallow and we shall return to some of the issues on
Report. I take my share of the credit for delivering this Bill entirely
according to its agreed timetable. Everyone has had their say; we have
considered all the important parts of the Bill with full
justice.
Mr.
Laws:
Further to that point of order, Mr. Gale.
I thank you and Mr. Taylor for chairing our proceedings in
such an excellent way and for your tolerance and patience throughout
the last three weeks. I thank the Clerk, the officials who supported
the Ministers and the Committee, the Hansard reporters, the
police and others. I also thank the hon. Member for Northampton, North
for her expensive probing amendments which, as I said earlier, allowed
me to triangulate between those and the Gladstonian candle-end pinching
of the hon. Member for Eastbourne and to find myself firmly on the
rational centre ground of British politics.
We enjoyed the contributions
made by the hon. Member for Eastbourne and his dry and frequent wit,
and those made by the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire, who was
always rational and constructive in managing the debate. We also
enjoyed the Ministers’ contributions; they did not concede very
much, but it was done in a gracious way, and he gave way frequently and
with great tolerance. We look forward to Report and to Third
Reading.
James
Purnell:
Further to that point of order, Mr.
Gale. This has indeed been a very constructive and pleasant Committee
to be part of. I hope that it will be seen as having added to the
consensus. There are some issues to which the hon. Member for
Eastbourne wants to return on Report, but, particularly in respect of
the clauses on the state pension, I hope that there is broad agreement
on the direction of travel in the reform of the pension system in the
UK.
I was lucky
enough to go out with the local Pension Service recently to see their
work in action. We visited
the home of a wonderful 85-year-old lady and on the way in, the
gentleman from the local service turned to me and said, “How
shall I explain your presence here? Shall I say you are a Minister or a
trainee?” He then looked at me and said, “I think trainee
is probably more credible, don’t you?” The lady asked me to open a can
of condensed milk for her, which is not something I had done before I
must admit, certainly not with the implement that she pointed me
towards. I did not know how to use it and decided to use brute force
instead, with the result that I spilt condensed milk all over her
kitchen. On that occasion, my trainee status cover was not
blown.
That was a
long segue into an acknowledgment of the fact that both I and my hon.
Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington are both trainees
here—this is our first Committee as Front-Bench Members and we
have been delighted to have learned along with everyone else. Indeed, I
would like to start by thanking my ministerial colleague for all his
expert, overshadowingly brilliant, support during the Committee. He
dealt with a large number of important
clauses.
I would like
to thank the Conservative Front-Bench spokesmen for their constructive
and serious approach to our policies, as well as for their wit in
describing many of them. I would also like to thank the hon. Member for
Yeovil for being such a gracious butt of the jokes of the hon. Member
for Eastbourne throughout the proceedings and for ensuring that we have
been able to use all of our 12 allotted sittings. It would have been a
shame had we not been able to do so. Without his contribution, we would
definitely not have used a number of the sittings that the Conservative
Front-Bench Members asked
for.
I would also like
to thank our Whip, who, as the hon. Member for Eastbourne said, is the
crème de la crème of Committee whipping. He is a most
experienced Whip and has dealt with us with a very light touch. He only
once said to me that I had made rather heavy going of a clause, which I
took to be a nuclear warning given his normal approach to such matters.
I can only apologise for new clause 2, which I know is embedded in the
memory of your co-Chair, Mr. Gale.
In particular, I would like to
thank my officials, who have done a brilliant job. If we have appeared
like a duck across the surface of the water without too much stress, it
is only because they were furiously paddling underneath—they
stayed up till all hours of the night dealing with people’s
amendments. I hope that the Committee will join me in thanking them, as
well as the drafters of the Bill. They have given us a Bill far more
comprehensible than is normally the
case.
I would like to
thank the Clerk and all his staff as well as the members of
Hansard. Not least, I shall finish by thanking all the
organisations that provided so many of the briefings and amendments,
and the police, who have prevented great hordes of Bosnians, the
Plymouth Brethren, mothers over 60 and, in the last sitting, a whole
horde of upper-rate taxpayers from invading the Committee. Without
their protection the Room might have been stormed, although I cannot
see them—ah, there they are, fighting off hordes of higher-rate
tax-paying
nurses!
Finally, I
thank you, Mr. Gale and Mr. Taylor, for your
brisk and effective chairmanship. I wish everyone a very good weekend
and half-term
break.
The
Chairman:
It is one of the wonderful eccentricities of
Committee work that we always end with five minutes of points of order
that are totally out of order. But then, as points of order on the
Floor of the House are usually out of order, I suppose that it is a
convention that the House has established. As we have been completely
out of order, I am interested to note that the Committee feels that I
have been tolerant. Clearly, I shall have to look to my
laurels.
On a more
serious note, I add my thanks to the staff and Officers of the House
without whom we could not do our work. I also thank every member of the
Committee for making this a congenial and constructive
event.
Bill, as
amended, to be
reported.
Committee
rose at twenty-four minutes past Three
o’clock.
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