Since being elected in 2011, most of the discussions I’ve heard in the Senedd regarding taxation have been about reducing it—although not quite as extreme as Neil Hamilton this afternoon—rather than the need for taxation to pay for public services. When you look at the cost of private education and private healthcare, it puts into perspective the value for money we all get from our taxation system.

Taxation is raised to pay for public services. Too many people believe we can have the same quality of public services as Scandinavia but have a taxation system that is more akin to that of the United States of America. It is not by random chance or serendipity that those countries with higher tax levels have the best public services and those with lower tax levels the poorest. It’s because taxation is necessary to raise the money to pay for the public services that we all need—services such as the roads I travelled on into the Assembly today, the safety of people in work, the safety of food, education, the health service, which I and my constituents depend upon, and the policing of our streets. Quality public services, be they health, education, or infrastructure, come at a substantial cost to the public purse, and the only way of paying for them is via taxation. Taxation can be on income, profit, consumption, expenditure, or value of land and property, or a combination of all of them. But, if people want quality public services, these are the taxes needed to pay for them.

Whilst nobody likes to pay taxes and some rich individuals and multinational companies are experts at reducing their tax payments, for multinational companies, corporation tax is an optional payment whose value can be reduced by such things as intracompany payments for intellectual property rights, or transfer charges for goods and services, or ensuring that the point of sale for goods for people in Britain occurs outside Britain and profit occurs offshore. All of these have been used by some of the largest companies in order to reduce the amount of corporation tax they pay in Britain.

On devolving corporation tax, while I suspect that Plaid Cymru want to do it so they can reduce it, unless reduced to almost zero, it will not be competitive with the offshore British protectorates, such as the British Virgin Islands, for multinational companies. I don't think corporation tax has got much of a life left in it. It is going to, at some stage, have to be replaced, because it is only paid by smaller companies who only deal in the country they're in.

Providing quality public services means that if some people do not pay then either public services suffer or others have to make up the shortfall. Every time tax cuts are made, they are shown as beneficial and they appear to be for those who are paying less tax and have more money in their pocket. The effect that these reductions in Government income have on public expenditure on services such as health, local government and education are completely ignored until the cuts start affecting people. Some of those in favour of reducing public expenditure are amongst the first to oppose any cuts in services. 

The more difficult a tax is to avoid, the more unpopular it is with the rich and powerful. By far the most difficult taxes to avoid are the property taxes—non-domestic rates, council tax. There are no tricks, such as using internal company transactions or having non-domiciled status, to avoid paying the tax. The buildings, whether they are residential, manufacturing, commercial or retail, are not movable and the tax becomes liable on the property and has to be paid.

I also welcome the Welsh Government’s consultation on the possibility of introducing innovative taxes and the list of a levy to fund social care, a disposable plastic tax, a tax—[Interruption.] Certainly.