§ At a time when taxes are having to go up, it is particularly important to collect all the tax which is properly due. So let me begin with my proposals to counter tax avoidance.
§ Suggesting that Budgets should close tax loopholes is stating the obvious. Every Budget over the last 14 years, and indeed every Budget that I have listened to before that, has closed some tax loopholes. It is not a big new idea. The tax avoidance industry is always ingenious, but it is one industry which this Government has certainly never helped. [Interruption.] The right hon. and learned Member for Monklands, East (Mr Smith) would not know what a loophole was if he were looking one in the face.
§ My Budget today contains a particularly good crop of new proposals to combat tax avoidance, starting with an end to the ploy which is apparently growing under which 934 salaries are paid in gold bars, coffee beans, cowrie shells, or other exotic payments in kind, simply to avoid national insurance contributions and delay paying tax.
§ I also intend to counter the abuse of the tax relief for profit-related pay; tackle the avoidance of stamp duty on property transactions; halt the use of shell companies to avoid payment of tax; and end the use of indexation to create or increase capital gains tax losses. These measures will yield about £2 billion in the next three years. Claims that more might be found in this way are, I regret to say, much exaggerated.