Finance Bill

Debate between Anneliese Dodds and Mark Harper

Committee: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 11th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

There are a couple of things in what the hon. Lady says. She is absolutely right that we need to do more to ensure that multinational companies pay tax in the appropriate jurisdiction, but we cannot do that unilaterally. We have to work with other countries, because we need international agreement on where a company’s profits are earned. The media sometimes does not understand this, but companies pay tax on profits, not revenues, so the whole argument is about where the profits land and that has to be addressed internationally. This Government are leading that international work, not following it—[Interruption.] It is no good the hon. Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds) shaking her head. UK tax professionals have been leading this work and continue to drive it forward. We have a proud record.

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

I have seen some of this from the inside, within the European Union. For example, I have seen measures against trusts and measures to introduce country-by-country reporting blocked by Conservative MEPs, and I frequently saw measures to attempt to introduce international co-ordination blocked by Conservative-related politicians.

[Mr Harper]

No. First, it cannot just be done at European Union level—[Interruption.] No, we have to do it globally, because many of the companies involved are US companies. The base erosion—[Interruption.] I do not know why the Opposition Front-Bench team are laughing. The base erosion and profit sharing programme comes from the OECD.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Harper]

The hon. Lady made a relevant point in the previous debate that I did not mention at the time. Some of the things that we had to deal with early in the last but one Parliament involved multinational tax arrangements that were put in place under the previous Labour Government. We did our best to get at least some money from those multinationals. It was not enough, but we did at least move things in the right direction. Profit shifting can only be dealt with internationally by agreement. If we do not do that, we will not make any progress. As I said in the previous debate, we are leading that international effort, which did not happen under the Labour Government.

[Anneliese Dodds]

I am sorry, but it is not the case that Governments are completely unable to do anything unilaterally to prevent profit shifting. They can, for example, decide whether to execute secret sweetheart deals with large multinationals through their tax authorities, or they can decide to be transparent.

Finance Bill

Debate between Anneliese Dodds and Mark Harper

Tuesday 12th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point, and he is exactly right. This was one area in which the debate about corporation tax rates during the general election campaign became rather confused. The Opposition kept saying that we were cutting corporation tax, and making it sound as though we were therefore going to collect less revenue. What we were doing, of course, was to reduce corporation tax rates. The purpose of doing so was to collect more corporation tax revenue, both to attract more businesses to locate in the United Kingdom and to enable the businesses that are already here to be more successful. That is an admirable aspiration but it is, as my hon. Friend said, what has happened in practice.

One of my concerns about the Labour party’s plans is that an increase in corporation tax rates would lead to the collection of less corporation tax revenue; and we would have less money, rather than more, to spend on our public services and our hard-working public sector workers. [Interruption.] I see Opposition Members, including those on the Front Bench, shaking their heads, but since we cut corporation tax rates, we have collected more corporation tax—

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

indicated dissent.

[Mr Harper]

It is no good the shadow Minister shaking her head. The fact is that that is exactly what has happened. We are in the business of collecting revenue to spend, not putting up rates to punish people in order to make ourselves feel good.