Well, I'm sympathetic to what the Conservatives are proposing here in the first part of their motion, but I'm also sympathetic with the Government, except for the 'delete all', and we are going to support the Plaid Cymru amendments as well. I supported the devolution of tax-raising powers to Wales because I believe in tax competition between the various parts of the United Kingdom. I think this will be healthy for the whole United Kingdom economy, as Mark Reckless pointed out in his speech at the beginning of this debate.

Property taxes, as they've developed in the UK over hundreds of years, are very bad taxes indeed because the overall effect of them is to gum up the works of the economy—to make the use of capital more and more inflexible. We've seen this to a growingly dramatic extent in the domestic housing market. I reflect that when I first bought a house back in 1984, the rate of stamp duty then was 1 per cent, so it didn't matter. Nobody was deterred from buying houses at that sort of rate, even when it was doubled to 2 per cent shortly after that. But now that the rates of stamp duty are dramatically higher, this has had a most unfortunate effect, I believe, upon the whole of the property market in the United Kingdom—less so in Wales, of course, because as the poorest part of the United Kingdom, property prices here are so much lower.

I did support, and do support, the Government over the land transaction rates generally. I think that what the finance Secretary has produced is a better overall system than what we have across the border in England, which is a good thing. But I do think that if we want to grow the Welsh economy, it is absolutely essential that, if we are to fund improvements in public services, we must make Wales a magnet for business. We don't do that by having higher taxes on business in Wales than in the rest of the United Kingdom. Even though the difference may be very small—. You, know, 1 per cent is not the end of the world by any means, and certainly, if you're thinking of locating here, the effect of the tax is likely to be replicated in a reduction in the price of the land or the buildings to start with. But the problem with these land taxes is that they freeze the ownership or occupation of property because the tax is borne on those who move. Taxes on movement are very bad things for the economy generally. So, UKIP's view is that Wales should position itself within the United Kingdom as a kind of tax haven, and I hope that—. I had hoped that when these powers—and I hope new tax powers—are devolved to Wales, we would be able to use them to lower tax rates rather than to increase them, because to have a high tax rate in Wales is likely to be wholly counterproductive.

Our property taxes are a complete mess in the United Kingdom: council tax, business rates, stamp duty, the land transaction tax here in Wales, the restrictions that were introduced by George Osborne on buy to let. All these things have had dramatic impacts upon the housing system, gumming it up, at a time when we need more houses. The whole quantitative easing exercise has trickled into values of shares and real property. One of the main reasons why there's been such a boom in house and land prices in the south-east of England is the vast quantitative easing programme that the Conservative Government embarked upon. That has made the local economy in the south-east of England that much more difficult—not that we're too worried about that here, but there is a kind of trickle-down effect from there, out into the other reaches of the United Kingdom as well.

So, it's a principle upon which I want to make my speech today, rather than the arcana of the Cardiff bus station and the other elements of the Conservative motion: it is to encourage the Welsh Government to use the freedoms that it has as a result of devolution to show an example to the rest of the United Kingdom—in fact, to steal a march on the rest of the United Kingdom, to make Wales into a more attractive place for businesses to locate and to operate, and to attract also high-rate taxpayers from England into Wales to help increase our tax base, and hence the tax take, as in the 1980s the Lawson tax reforms were able both to see a reduction in tax rates but also a dramatic rise in tax revenue.