Don't rush Finance Bill, CIOT urges Darling

The Chartered Institute of Taxation (CIOT) has written to the Chancellor to urge him not to rush through substantial tax changes introduced in next week’s Budget.

The professional body is has expressed its concern that ‘MPs’ minds will… be elsewhere’ after 24 March, as they prepare for a general election that is widely expected to announced for 6 May.

This will inevitably lead to the Finance Bill being pushed through in a single day, according to the CIOT, and proper parliamentary scrutiny will be ignored.

The institute has therefore is asked Alistair Darling to include in the Bill only those measures essential to maintaining the Government’s revenue-raising capacity, such as renewing the provision of income tax, while leaving other measures to a post-election Finance Bill, when they can be debated at greater length.

In the letter, CIOT president Andrew Hubbard writes that his organisation ‘strongly believes that good tax law requires close examination and detailed scrutiny from parliamentarians and from outside experts. In particular, this is to ensure that the legislation does not have unintended negative consequences.

‘A Finance Bill rushed through all its stages in a single day does not allow for this – especially in the final days of a Parliament, when most MPs’ minds will, understandably, be elsewhere.’

Mr Hubbard goes on to offer the Chancellor a warning by reminding him of the circumstances of the previous election year: ‘The process that was applied to the Finance Bill of 2005 [was] not a happy precedent. That resulted in 106 clauses… being rushed through… in four hours.

‘It is hardly a good example of Parliament discharging its key duty to electors to examine key tax proposals carefully.’

At a tax seminar in the House of Lords yesterday, the financial secretary to the Treasury, Stephen Timms, said the Government intends to publish a full Finance Bill over which ‘debate will have to be curtailed if the election intervenes’.

Mr Timms’s Conservative counterpart, David Gauke, expressed the belief that the Bill will be ‘very short… with only ten or so clauses’.

Categories: News , Budget 2010