Windfall Tax (Hansard, 12 June 1997)

§ 1. Mr. Prior
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he will publish the representations he has received from business leaders regarding the windfall tax. [1585]

§ The Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr. Gordon Brown)
Companies have been invited to make representations. While I intend to follow the normal procedure of treating such representations as I would others for the Budget—namely, as confidential between the parties—if companies wish to make their views public, that is a matter for them.

§ Mr. Prior
Will my right hon. Friend—[Interruption.] Will the Chancellor confirm that in principle he is not in favour of retrospective taxation and that the one-off windfall tax is, indeed, one off?

§ Mr. Brown
I am grateful for the welcome that I received from the right hon. Gentleman—[HON. MEMBERS: "Right hon.?"] The hon. Gentleman raises the issue of the windfall levy and asks whether I support retrospective action. That is a question that he should ask of his colleagues who were in the House in the 1980s. Was not the first windfall levy imposed by a Conservative Government without ever being in a Conservative manifesto and without any advance consultation with the businesses affected? That windfall tax was imposed on the banks to deal with the costs of failure. We are imposing a windfall tax so that we can tackle a problem that the hon. Gentleman and other Conservative Members should be concerned about. Indeed, they should be ashamed that the previous Government did not act to tackle youth and long-term unemployment.

§ Mr. Stevenson
Does my right hon. Friend agree that, with the notable exceptions of Sir lain Vallance from British Telecom and Conservative Members, there is tremendous public support for the windfall tax throughout the length and breadth of the country? Will my right hon. Friend therefore undertake to introduce the windfall tax at the earliest possible opportunity so that we can begin to get our young people back to work?

§ Mr. Brown
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. The greatest opponents of the windfall tax are not the utilities, 1262 but the Conservative party. When a report today states that 500,000 long-term unemployed people in our country need proper skills and training to allow them to get back to work, people will be asking why the Conservative party is defending the utilities instead of the long-term unemployed.
A chairman of one of the utilities has reported that he regards the way in which we are going about the matter as reasonable and fair. Mr. James Rogers, co-owner of Midland Electricity, said only a few weeks ago that he was confident that Labour would apply the tax in a "fair and reasonable manner". He said: a windfall tax would require us to deal with the sins of those before us. A one-off tax is not inconsistent with that.