Labour accused of hiding truth on tax rises

A TREASURY analysis of the family tax burden, so effectively used by Labour against the Tories for the last 17 years, has been ditched by the Government.

The decision, which has not been announced, was discovered by Malcolm Bruce, the Liberal Democrat spokesman, who last night condemned the action as a disgraceful cover-up.

"For years, Labour has been using these figures on the tax burden to expose the truth about tax rises.

"Now, with Labour in power, Gordon Brown has decided that he doesn't want to be judged by the yardsticks which he applied to the Tories, so instead of tackling the underlying issues, he has just abolished the statistics themselves."

The historical analysis of family tax burdens was so useful for MPs and academics that the House of Commons library even based one of its regular research papers on the Treasury replies.

Ironically, the first time the question was put in its most information- grabbing form was in 1981 when Jack Straw, now Home Secretary, asked for a breakdown of income tax, national insurance contributions, value added tax, other indirect taxes, and local council taxes as applied to average family samples, with and without children, on various fractions and multiples of average earnings.

Because the Tories were cutting direct taxes and switching the burden on to indirect taxes, Mr Straw's questions - and subsequent update requests down the years from Labour frontbenchers like Michael Meacher, Harriet Harman and Alistair Darling - allowed Labour to puncture Tory claims that they were cutting the tax burden on families, when it was clearly going up.

Mr Bruce said: "This is an abuse of power from a government which talks a good deal about openness and transparency, but practises an awful lot of evasion when it come to publishing information which it would rather just brush under the carpet."