Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill
Debate between Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Lord Watson of Invergowrie
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
Indeed, but my noble friend must not tempt me to get away from the amendment and from this Bill. When it comes to compliance costs, the Government are going to have to find £109,000 just for,
“the IT development of the registry and communication to industry”.
My experience of government IT programmes is that they usually cost considerably more than estimated. Then we have £220,000 for ongoing maintenance. In addition, it is stated:
“Costs to businesses are estimated to be £417.4m set up cost, and £77.7m pa”.
This is a country that is not able to meet its expenses and these are businesses which, certainly outside London, are under severe stress.
My noble friend and the noble Lord argue that we need to add further to the burden put on these businesses to deal with the problem of international tax evasion by large companies around the world. I intervened to ask him how—even assuming that everything that he claims for his system works once it is up and running in Britain and we have spent the £1 billion—it would help prevent the crooks and people who wish to behave in this way operating out of a different jurisdiction. Surely, the only way this Utopian view of how to tackle the issue will be achieved is if every country does this, but I do not see any evidence of other countries rushing to implement this legislation. As far as I am aware, there is no great programme to do this among the other countries that were at the G8, so all we would be doing is hobbling honest, hard-working small businesses in this country to deal with a problem that needs—
Lord Watson of Invergowrie
I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. I always listen to the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, carefully. He always makes very considered contributions to the House, although I may not agree with him very often. This is one of those occasions. I regret that he seems to be making a speech that should have been made three months or so ago at Second Reading, because he is not arguing specifically against the amendments that I have put down; he is arguing against this section of the Bill in its entirety. I accept that he is perfectly entitled to do that, but these arguments have already been given a considerable airing.
I just would draw his attention to the amendments, which say, “where the control”—that is, the control of a company—
“is exercised through a chain of legal entities”.
That will not impact on many small and medium-sized enterprises. This is for large, complex organisations, which is why I mentioned the figure of some 2% that it has been estimated would be affected. The other companies will have to say who their person of significant control is anyway, whatever the size of the company. In most cases, it will be the chief executive. This part of the Bill will not be a burden to any significant extent on smaller companies. The bigger companies, which have an international dimension and therefore will have a complex structure, are those that we are trying to catch with these amendments. It is not in any sense about companies based in the UK that have no ownership outside the UK.