I welcome the statement, and I'm in the paradoxical position of very much being in favour of the devolution of the power to tax, but not actually very keen upon exercising it. It's a point I've made before that I'm in favour of tax competition because I think that it, in general, tends to go against increases in taxes around the United Kingdom. But I wonder whether this vacant land tax has been chosen because it's probably the least likely of all the possible taxes to affect more than a very small number of people. I think it's quite a good tax in that respect to choose in order to test the system, which I'm very much in favour of.

I have actually read the Welsh Government's 'Stalled Sites and S106 Agreements' document. It's not exactly a page turner, and it was not designed to be so, but what did strike me from that is how small is the number of instances that might be affected by this tax, if it's designed to pinpoint cases of land-banking where developers are deliberately sitting upon land that ought otherwise to be developed and which they could develop but they have decided not to do so. Of course, there are times when there is an incentive to do this. I well remember, as I'm sure the Cabinet Secretary himself does, in the early 1970s that there was a controversy about the Centre Point building in London owned by Harry Hyams, which was totally unoccupied for many, many years because the notional value of the building was greater as an unoccupied building with the potentiality of sale as such than if it had been full of offices paying rent. That was regarded as a scandal at that time, 40-odd years ago.

But the point I want to make in this respect is that, if we are to have a vacant land tax, it has to be sensitive to economic circumstances. The early 1970s was a period of rapidly rising, indeed unsustainable, property price rises. And immediately after that, in 1975, there was a collapse in the market and everything went into reverse. So, we have to be flexible enough to be able to cope with the circumstances because what is a scandal in one instance is just the unfortunate result of economic circumstances in another, and we don't want to, as the Cabinet Secretary has already said, find that businesses are unfairly penalised for not doing what is, at the time, impossible to do for a variety of reasons. 

He mentioned the Oliver Letwin study that is currently going on. Again, what strikes me about reading his letter is how narrowly focused that seems to be at the moment as well, because he's looking only at large sites for development at the moment, and in the course of that study he recognises that there are all sorts of economic or planning or technical reasons for those developments not being proceeded with. And in respect of the social housing aspect of this, again, because social housing under section 106 agreements is funded by successful sales of the rest of the development, if those properties can't be sold, then, of course, there is no money available to build the social housing.

So, this is a very complicated matrix that has to be understood and, therefore, I feel that if and when a tax is constructed it's going to involve a very complicated piece of legislation that actually applies in practice to only a very small number of potential instances. So, whilst I'm in favour of having a go at this—and I fully take the point that the Cabinet Secretary made that he is going to base his decisions on evidence; that's a very laudable statement to make—we will need, I think, a lot more evidence than is provided for in this stalled sites and section 106 agreements document, and we'll need to look at, I think, a large number of academic studies of what's happened in other parts of the world as well. So, I hope all that will be made available in a convenient form for Members of the Assembly to debate it, but I wish him well with his enterprise even though I will suspend judgment on what ultimately emerges. So, I can't promise him I'm going to support what he comes up with at the end of the day, but I'll certainly support the process.