The only answer that I can give the hon. Gentleman is this. I will not pretend to give a sort of court judgment, because it would be foolish of me to try to do so, but I believe that, so far, it has been treated as a form of rent. I stand to be corrected on this, but I do not think that it has been successfully challenged in the courts. I do not say that no case could ever successfully be brought to prove that it should not have been so treated, but I think that this is the way that it has been treated so far, and so far this treatment has not been challenged successfully.

This being the case, the Inland Revenue has no option but to consider feu duty in the same way as it considers ground rents in England and Wales, and although I accept straight away that there are technical differences, I do not think the Inland Revenue, seeking to play fairly between England and Scotland, has any option, as the matter now stands, but to treat it as a form of rent. Therefore, the Inland Revenue must not seek to make rent allowable as a charge against general income in Scotland when it is not allowed to be a charge against general income in England. The hon. Member for Edinburgh, East may not agree with my argument, but I think that he is following me and I am not trying to be unfair.

The hon. Gentleman was right to read out the correspondence that I wrote to him, and I should like to pay him a tribute for being good enough to read sufficient of that correspondence and not to read selected parts of it. I agree with him that in practice the law was not really applied in Scotland. Neither he nor I were responsible for the law or the practice of the law. The law itself was not changed, and it did not really matter very much. It was not a matter that caused any anxiety either to the Revenue or to the payers of the feu duties.

The real difficulty arose after the war when, for reasons which I can well understand, the decision was taken not to proceed with the normal quinquennial revaluation for Schedule A purposes. The hon. Gentleman was quite right in saying that coterminous with that decision went the rise in repair costs, so that the gap between reality and the Schedule A valuation, and what could be set off against it legitimately for the maintenance and repair of an owner-occupied dwelling, widened at both ends.

The fact that that revaluation did not take place was one of the reasons why the application of the law affecting Schedule A had fallen way behind the times and it had become a tax which was costly to collect. If one knew the law one could always make a maintenance claim. One could get away with no Schedule A tax on the majority of dwellings.

Simply because one could not do it on a new house, but could on an old one, the anomaly was thereby made the greater. The anomalies were growing within Schedule A. The alternative solutions were as follows. One could have a complete revaluation of Schedule A to show that as a notional tax it was a proper one to retain. If one is going to retain a tax on notional income, one must revalue everything right up to the proper current valuation, and that will take a good deal of time and create a difficulty because people will not understand it. The other alternative is to abolish Schedule A and bring in a new code for taxing rents. Both these things were done in my right hon. Friend's Finance Act.

The consequence is that certain owner-occupiers who used to get the benefit of being able, because of an out-of-date valuation, to set off either the ground rent or the feu duty against the tax on their general income, which would not have been possible if a Schedule A revaluation had been properly carried out, no longer got that benefit. That is really the situation. But because that anomaly existed under which they were getting a totally uncovenanted benefit for a number of years, it followed, as it always must follow when that kind of anomaly exists, that because they were escaping—good luck to them!—for a number of years their share of the tax burden—not a great one in each case, but still a share—that burden was falling on other people. This was not an anomaly which could be kept if one was going to abolish Schedule A, which was the decision taken by my right hon. Friend's predecessor. It was hardly right to perpetuate the anomaly by some Clause in a Finance Bill.

I accept that the removal of a benefit, which is what we are really talking about, is resented by those who no longer have it. I entirely accept this, and I have to stand the racket in political terms for the removal of the benefit. But it would have been desperately anomalous to have perpetuated it, which is, I think, the only way in which I can meet the complaints of those who now find themselves paying a little more tax than they were before.

The generality of people has, I believe, benefited—there is no doubt about that—but a number of people have now found themselves paying more tax in this way. I have to accept that that is the case. But to try to perpetuate what I can only describe as a privilege—[Interruption.] Not only the present Government but our predecessors, the Labour Government, perfectly understandably, did not proceed with the process of revaluation on which alone this tax on notional income, which was the Schedule A tax, could be fairly assessed across all owner-occupiers.

I assure the hon. Member for Cardiff, South-East (Mr. Callaghan) that if he will think this through he will find that this is true. As his hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison) pointed out, this benefit did not apply to a new house. It required revaluation—