Another fiasco

Correspondence

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Another fiasco

Many of the Finance Bill amendments published on 2 July relate to stamp taxes. The Financial Secretary to the Treasury told the House of Commons that most of these are in direct response to representations made on the original Bill. She omitted to advise the House that an awful lot of those were to put right some disappointingly sloppy drafting by replacing the unintentionally wide term 'interest in land' with the narrower and more precise expression 'chargeable interest'. Apart from these one other amendment deserves special mention because it contains significant errors. The Stamp Office has confirmed this but by the time the errors were discovered it was too late to make any changes so legislation which is already known and acknowledged to be inappropriate will be enacted.

I refer to amendment number 215 which inserts new...