Dr. Miche?l Collins:

First, I echo all the previous comments and I will not restate them.

This is very much a political economy issue. The first recommendation of the commission's report is significant. It is that there is an inevitability that we will have to collect more tax in the future, and so the question is: how? I suppose we need to think about that in the context of CAT or inheritance taxes. If we make a decision, as we kind of have been as a society for quite some time that we will not really collect much there, we have to understand that means we are collecting more from income, consumption and other taxes.

Perhaps we should begin to think more about that trade-off. Arguments in favour of reducing certain income taxes and so on are heard fairly frequently in these Houses. However, if you put that into the context of an overall need to generate more revenue, we must ask where taxes are to be raised if we are to follow that path. It is inevitable that this forms a part of it.

My second point comes back, to some degree, to the limited data available to the Houses as to who receives inheritances and how often. If I am right, the ESRI contributions point towards it being challenging to find enough usable data to analyse that. We do not know enough about that but we do know that, given the sums involved, we are talking about a small cohort of the population receiving these inheritances. I do not believe anyone is of the view that they should be eliminated. It is a question of reducing them and benchmarking against multiples of earnings in some way, as has been mentioned before. There is an obvious path to take there. It is an area of discussion society has avoided for quite some time.