I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak on this issue. It is worth remembering how we got to these provisions, because, in many ways, they seem to be an example of what Government Members often counsel against: complexity in the taxation system.

The provisions arose from the decision of the Chancellor, and the Government generally, to reduce the additional rate of tax from 50p to 45p. On Budget day, as I am sure we all remember, we were told, with lots of hand gestures, that five times the amount of money was going to come into the Treasury, compared with what the 50p tax rate would have achieved. One of the reasons for that was the change to stamp duty land tax to create a higher rate for properties valued over £2 million at the time of sale, rather than a generalised tax on properties of that value. If we do that now or in the future for transactions, what about people who have done some very clever things in the past to try to avoid stamp duty? Obviously, that was a considerable issue in the debate, hence these provisions.

One of the things that was highlighted was people saying that they were carrying out a commercial transaction, rather than purchasing a residential home, even though it was blatantly clear that they were purchasing a residential home to live in; the transaction was merely the form in which the purchase took place, hence these complex provisions. That prompts the question why we have to go through such a convoluted process. Either the Government think it is a good thing to achieve a higher tax take from higher value properties or they do not. Their justification was that such a measure would be a better form of being all in it together than the 50p tax rate, but that is not the form of the argument.

We are told that the 50p tax rate does not yield enough, but we are also told that we could achieve a similar effect—indeed, we are told that more money would come in—if we taxed higher-value properties in some way. There is a lot of merit in that debate, because the big advantage of property taxation, as we have seen over the years in local taxation—the rates had a big advantage over the poll tax, and then there is the return to council tax, which, again, is based on property—is that property tends to be there; it does not move around like people, which makes evasion harder.

One of the major criticisms of the poll tax as it unfolded, and I still think this is one of the main reasons why it was abandoned so rapidly by the then Government, was that it was a very difficult tax to collect. Anyone who was in local government at the time knows that the tax take plummeted and that the  individuals who were chased turned out to be extremely mobile. Although it sounded good to say, “If there are four adults in a household, we are getting four times the amount of money,” the trouble was chasing those four adults, especially young adults, as they moved in and out of the household.

Property taxation has certain advantages. The properties are there and they are not going to move very easily. People move houses around on wheels in some American states, but I do not think that has ever become a great practice in Britain. As the Government have decided that there is merit in some sort of property tax, and in focusing on higher-value properties through SDLT, people have asked, as my hon. Friend has said, whether we should look more widely at taxing high-value properties. If the Government had introduced a straightforward tax on high-value properties, through stamp duty or some other mechanism, an awful lot of the complexity would have been removed, because it would be straightforwardly about the existence of the property. The problem with stamp duty was that people were able to avoid even the lower level of stamp duty—the avoidance tactics were not about the enhanced level but about the previous level—by saying they were engaged in a commercial transaction.