The disposal of material as waste and the intention to discard has been a technical and complex area of the Bill, as well as being a litigious area outside this Assembly, and I’m very grateful to the committee and to its Members for giving this important issue such detailed consideration. I responded to the committee’s recommendation 5 that the Government considers the definition of a disposal of material as waste with a detailed technical note setting out the rationale underlying each component of section 6 of the Bill, which deals with this matter, and the process that went into arriving at that draft, and I also provided the committee with a summary of the relevant UK landfill litigation.

The provisions relating to the definition of a taxable disposal, and in particular the circumstances in which the condition that a disposal of material as waste has been met, have been carefully crafted so as to minimise the risk to the revenue. I was grateful to the Finance Committee and its Members for their recognition of this approach when we were voting on amendments in this area at Stage 2.

I recognise that Nick Ramsay’s amendment 50 is a development of the amendment that he laid at Stage 2. It now, I think, accepts that making changes to the substance of the Bill could pose a risk to the revenue in that it does not now seek to amend any of the provisions setting out what is a taxable disposal, but instead it seems to want to futureproof the Bill by adding to the regulation-making power at section 6(4) of the Bill, so as to allow the Welsh Ministers to modify the meaning of ‘the definition of intent’. The problem with the amendment is that neither section 6 nor the wider Bill introduces a definition of intent. Therefore, an amendment to modify something that is not in the Bill is neither practical nor, I think, desirable.

Members of the Finance Committee will be very well aware that the Bill’s approach to whether or not there has been a disposal of material as waste is made up of a number of components within section 6. The regulation-making power at section 6(4) as currently drafted allows the Welsh Ministers to modify the meaning of a disposal of material as waste, by amending section 6. This power would allow the intention-to-discard test that underpins the definition of a disposal of material as waste to be removed, added to, or otherwise changed, and in so doing changes can already be made to each of the components of section 6.

In other words, the Bill already provides Ministers with a power to achieve what lies behind Nick Ramsay’s amendment, but, I believe, in a more practical and workable way. For those reasons, I hope that Members will accept that the Bill as drafted is already sufficiently futureproofed to allow for changes in this area and agree that amendment 50 is not workable. On that basis, I ask Members not to support this amendment.