Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Nick Gibb and Nigel Evans(9 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley) (Con)
10. What steps she is taking to encourage pupils to study modern languages.
The Minister of State, Department for Education (Mr Nick Gibb)
The new curriculum requires all maintained primary schools to teach a foreign language to pupils from the age of seven. The number of entries for a modern language GCSE has increased by 20% since 2010 due to the introduction of the English baccalaureate performance measure, a major step towards remedying the enormous damage to foreign language teaching in schools caused by the previous Labour Government’s 2004 decision about the curriculum.
Mr Evans
“Ya khochu govorit’ svobodno po-russki”, possibly means “I want to speak Russian fluently.” For somebody of my age, it is an ambition I might hope to reach before I die, but youngsters tend to be more adept at learning foreign languages. Could we do more to encourage even more youngsters to learn Russian, Arabic and Mandarin not only to open doors in their minds, but to make their worth even more attractive in the employment market?
Mr Gibb
Spasibo, Mr Speaker. The number taking Russian GCSE has increased from 1,500 in 2010-11 to about 2,000 in 2013-14. I agree with my hon. Friend about the importance of languages for the economy, and for learning about other cultures. According to a report by the CBI published in 2014, 65% of businesses say they value foreign language skills, most importantly for building relations with overseas customers.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Nick Gibb and Nigel Evans(9 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Gibb
The hon. Lady raised her opposition to the establishment of the Chapeltown academy in an Adjournment debate in April, when she said that
“there is no evidence whatsoever that there is demand for these additional sixth-form places.”—[Official Report, 30 April 2014; Vol. 579, c. 964.]
In fact, 58 places have been taken up. Free schools often have smaller numbers in the first year than their maximum, but numbers tend to increase in the years ahead. To quote its website, the school wants to
“Increase aspirations to attend the world’s best universities, and boost attainment at A-Level”.
Why can the hon. Lady not support such a school, with such great ambitions for young people?
Mr Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley) (Con)
18. What steps she is taking to ensure that parents wishing to send their children to faith schools can do so.
Corporate Tax Avoidance
Debate between Nick Gibb and Nigel Evans(11 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Gibb
That is why this issue is so important. It is not just about the corporate tax base, which is hugely important, but about the competitiveness of British-based businesses.
Another thing that I found odd about the Amazon structure was that the accounts filed at Companies House report that the company has 2,265 employees, which is vastly different from the 15,000 employees that Andrew Cecil told the Public Accounts Committee Amazon employs in the UK. The other strange thing about Amazon’s group structure is that even the Luxembourg operation, with its €9 billion turnover, appears to have made a post-tax profit of just €20 million.
As we have seen with Starbucks and Google, profits can be siphoned off from individual jurisdictions by payments for intellectual property rights through royalties or technical fees. Starbucks pays a royalty of 6% of its turnover to its company in the Netherlands. Google also pays for the use of its technology. Although that technology was developed in California, the rights to use it outside the USA are held in Bermuda.
Much of this area of law is governed by a network of double tax treaties, of which the UK has signed more than 100. They are based on a model double tax convention that was agreed at the OECD and have been highly effective in boosting worldwide trade and overseas investment over the decades. Britain benefits hugely from that network of treaties. We have £10.9 trillion of investments abroad, which generated £188 billion of income in 2011. The Government are therefore right to want to tackle the problem of corporate tax avoidance through international negotiation. As the Prime Minister wrote in his letter to G8 leaders on 2 January:
“in a globalised world, no one country can, on its own, effectively tackle tax evasion and aggressive avoidance. But as a group of eight major economies together we have an opportunity to galvanise collective international action.”
One such action is the OECD’s study into the transfer pricing aspects of intangibles. In its discussion draft, snappily entitled “Revision of the Special Considerations for Intangibles in Chapter VI of the OECD Transfer Pricing Guidelines and Related Provisions”, published in June last year, the OECD concluded:
“It should be emphasized that not all intangibles deserve separate compensation in all circumstances, and not all intangibles give rise to premium returns in all circumstances.”
In other words, the OECD is coming to the view that the huge royalty payments that some international groups make their overseas subsidiaries pay to their home country or to tax havens may no longer be allowable against tax in the overseas jurisdictions. However, the OECD, by necessity, moves slowly. Speedier action could be taken by the UK tax authorities by speeding up transfer pricing inquiries. It is therefore welcome that the Chancellor has allocated additional funding to HMRC to do that. HMRC could also take powers to require companies to disclose in advance all international connected party payments and to supply the associated documentation. There could be tougher penalties when a company’s tax return is wrong because of over-aggressive transfer pricing.
I conclude by touching on a wider issue relating to corporate tax avoidance: the ethics of companies and their boardrooms. In our everyday lives, we are all governed by a sense of morality, not just by law and regulation. Corporations are artificially created legal personalities. The morality of a corporation is determined by its board—by both executive and non-executive directors. It is no good for individual companies or for free market capitalism, which I support passionately, if directors interpret their role too narrowly. Too often, people who sit on company boards fail to ask the simple and straightforward question that governs moral behaviour: is this the right thing for us to do? Too often, directors seem to take the view that their fiduciary duty as directors stops at the maximisation of shareholder value, but section 172 of the Companies Act 2006 makes it clear that the duty of a director to promote the success of the company must be subject to a number of wider considerations including
“the desirability of the company maintaining a reputation for high standards of business conduct”.
I question whether the directors, including the non-executive directors, of the three companies so ably questioned by the PAC were fulfilling that duty.
Action needs to be taken to ensure that the corporate tax contribution of a multinational to a nation’s Exchequer is broadly consistent with the level of economic activity in that jurisdiction. We need to ensure that that action does not hamper world trade: it must be multilateral, but it needs to be swift. There are measures that HMRC can take in the meantime to ensure that it has the intellectual resources to match those of the international accounting firms. There are also questions that the boards of corporations need to take seriously as business leaders and members of society.
Academies Bill [Lords]
Debate between Nick Gibb and Nigel Evans(13 years, 11 months ago)
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Dr Pugh
I want to test my understanding of what the Minister is saying. In response to the hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound), he said that he would be perfectly happy for a governing body to spend a fair amount of money on behalf of local children, even though there might not be anyone on that governing body who had any connection to local children. Surely there is an issue of accountability there—
The First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Mr Nigel Evans)
Order. This is not a wide-ranging debate on academies in general. We are debating the amendment, so perhaps the Minister could now direct his comments to that.
Mr Gibb
Thank you very much, Mr Evans. I will seek to do so.
There will be parent governors on the governing bodies of the schools, so they will not be divorced from them. We are trying to be permissive and to allow academies to draw up their own arrangements, and to select their own directors for the academy trusts and governors for the school. That is the approach that we want to take; we do not want to take a top-down approach to the governance of schools.
The hon. Member for Gedling mentioned the figure of 200 in the impact assessment. That is an illustrative figure to show the costs and the benefits that would arise if that number of schools were to convert annually. Given that this is permissive legislation, we cannot say that we will require x number of schools to convert annually and that the cost will therefore be y. He also asked for the number of primary schools that had expressed an interest. I can give him a figure, but with all the caveats that my fellow Minister of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather) expressed earlier. Of the 1,900 expressions of interest, 862 have been from primary schools, and 529 of the 862 have been judged by Ofsted to be outstanding.