§ Let me turn to some other proposals that I do not intend to make. I have no plans and I never did have any plans to change the rules that allow the first £30,000 of redundancy payments to be received free of tax. I also never contemplated any increase in insurance premium tax, nor air passenger duty. Those ideas were inventions of the newspapers that wrote about them.
§ Tax law has become too long and complicated. That campaign is certainly well founded. Some experts have described tax law as incomprehensible. The Inland Revenue will shortly be publishing a report on tax simplification. We shall propose that the Revenue tax code is rewritten in plain English—a major task. The House has a duty to set out clear legislation, which in that area we have not done. We in the House will need to look at our procedures, to see how that tax rewrite can be sensibly handled.