I thank Peter Fox for those questions. I am really pleased that the briefing that officials provided has been useful. I'm very much looking forward to the detailed scrutiny process, which will commence on 22 December, as an early Christmas present for us all, in committee. And I know that we'll be looking at many of these aspects in more detail, but I'm very, very pleased to at least set out my initial response to some of those questions this afternoon.

One of the substantive issues that you raised was, essentially, why not use a finance Bill, and I know that this has been an issue of interest to finance committees in the previous Senedd. My position does remain that I don't consider the timing right to introduce an annual budget or a finance Bill through which changes to Welsh tax Acts can be made. A key consideration for the Welsh tax Acts specifically is that the volume of secondary legislation that these Acts have so far generated is not significant at all, and as we develop more devolved taxes then I think that, potentially, there could be a strengthened argument for an annual finance Bill, but I would even contend that if we did have an annual finance Bill, we'd still need the powers that are provided for within this Bill, because they enable Welsh Ministers to respond to external events that might not necessarily coincide with the Welsh Government finance Bill cycle. For example, the UK budget at which changes may occur isn't on a fixed cycle, and it often occurs more than once a year, and there are also other fiscal events at which changes can be announced, for example, the July 2020 stamp duty land tax rates provide, I think, an example of that. And furthermore, the Bill will enable Welsh Government to be far more responsive to wider changes, such as court decisions and avoidance activity, than is the case with either the UK Government's finance Bill approach or the Scottish Government's approach, where changes are often made through a finance Bill only.

In terms of why we are not using existing powers—so, thinking about primary legislation, for example—the Bill aims to provide an additional flexible tool to allow Ministers to respond at pace to external circumstances that impact on our devolved taxes. Primary legislation generally takes around 12 to 18 months to develop and complete that cycle of Senedd scrutiny, so it wouldn't enable us to respond in an agile way if we needed to do so at short notice, for example, to close down tax avoidance activity.

And there was also a question in terms of why, despite consulting in the documentation on the Senedd lock, we subsequently removed that from our proposals. The lock was originally proposed to enable the Senedd to signify its approval of the use of the made affirmative procedure, and the original policy proposed the use of a power that could be used whenever Welsh Ministers considered it expedient in the public interest to do so. The lock was intended to respond to concerns that the power would be unusually broad, but the Bill now, as currently drafted, has much reduced the scope of the power to those four purpose tests, which can only be used when considered necessary or appropriate. And so that does, I think, sufficiently constrain the power so that a Senedd lock, which itself would have been unconventional and may set an unhelpful precedent for future made affirmative powers, wouldn't be appropriate, because we've narrowed things down with this Bill so much.

And then just to complete that, really, just to highlight that the scope of the power is limited to the four specific purposes: firstly, ensuring that landfill disposal tax and land transaction tax are not imposed where to do so would result in non-compliance with any international obligations; to protect against tax avoidance in relation to landfill disposal tax and land transaction tax; to respond to changes to predecessor UK taxes that impact, or could impact, the amount paid into the Welsh consolidated fund; and then to respond to the decisions of courts and tribunals that affect, or may affect, Welsh tax Acts or regulations made under them. So, we've very much, following the consultation, narrowed the scope of the Bill, which I think removes that need now for the Senedd lock, which was in our original consultation. But I very much look forward to exploring these issues in more depth in the weeks ahead.