Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance – in the Senedd at 1:48 pm on 18 April 2018.
All the points the Member makes are important points and ones that we would wish to take seriously. No finance Minister, when the detailed work is done, should that work demonstrate that a potential tax would create more problems than it would solve—nobody would want to take it further forward. So, these are important points and ones we will definitely want to consider.
I recognise the point the Member makes about rural communities and the fact that development often takes longer for specific reasons. But I just repeat the point that I made to him at the very beginning: a vacant land tax is not intended to bear down on those people who are making every effort to bring land into productive use. You've got to design it in a way that makes sure that people who are doing everything they can are not captured by it, while providing an additional incentive for those people—and we do believe that this does exist in the Welsh economy, just as the Chancellor of the Exchequer was anxious that it existed in the London economy—who should be bringing land forward for productive use, but who choose not to do it, in order simply to speculate for a windfall gain.