Tax Avoidance and Evasion

Debate between Anas Sarwar and Michael Meacher

Thursday 13th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Meacher]

We have our representative on the Front Bench who will speak about that, but I will come to what I think should be done.

The Government have said that they will accept the Aaronson proposals in full—what a surprise! So the Prime Minister’s boast that he was cracking down on aggressive tax avoidance turns out to be nothing more than a paper aeroplane job devised in the certain knowledge that it will never fly.

After this tragic-comic charade, what will Government’s Bill, scheduled for next year, achieve? If it is used at all, other than as a fig leaf to cover the Chancellor’s nakedness on this issue, I think that it will be drawn extremely narrowly to include only the most egregious and extreme cases of tax abuse. It will exclude national insurance and VAT, which are a pretty large part of the tax system, and will not even regard the shifting of income, profit or gain from one tax category to another in order to gain a tax advantage as being within the definition of tax avoidance. I ask you, Mr Deputy Speaker! Indeed, the fact that the Government’s own economic impact assessment for the proposed general anti-abuse rule states that it will have little or no measurable impact makes it absolutely clear that the anti-abuse rule is just a massive white elephant.

[Anas Sarwar (Glasgow Central) (Lab)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on securing this important debate. He is rightly making a powerful case about tax avoidance in the UK, but does he recognise that it is also a global problem? Recent OECD statistics show that the amount of tax avoidance that takes place in developing countries is three times as much as the global aid budget, and the Government’s recent legislation on controlled foreign companies makes it easier for companies to avoid paying tax in developing countries.

[Mr Meacher]

I agree. That is a question to which the Minister should reply. What concerns me is that this Government, out of those in all the western countries, particularly those in the EU and the OECD, have been dragging their feet the most on this issue.

Why are the Government introducing this measure? That can only be a matter of conjecture, but I suspect, as does the Association of Revenue and Customs, which represents senior officials at HMRC, that its real purpose is to stop almost nothing while allowing the vast amount of tax avoidance that it will never address to be deemed ethically and technically acceptable when of course it is nothing of the kind—in other words, to move the goalposts even further towards expanding the boundaries of so-called legitimate tax avoidance. I hope that the Minister will convince me and the House that that is not so, but that is certainly how many people read it.

Turning to the point raised by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), what should be done in place of this mealy-mouthed Government measure? First and foremost, we need a general anti-tax avoidance principle—GANTIP—enshrined in statute. That would allow HMRC to declare null and void any scheme whose primary purpose was an artificial contrivance to avoid tax rather than to act as a genuine economic transaction. I think that most people in this country would agree that that is an extremely fair and reasonable proposition.

That is exactly what my private Member’s Bill, the General Anti Tax-Avoidance Principle Bill, would do. It is due to receive its Second Reading tomorrow and I expect the Government Whips to give it a fair run. It was prepared and drafted by Richard Murphy, one of the founding members of the Tax Justice Network and, I can say without any exaggeration, one of the country’s leading tax accountants. It would overturn the rule in the so-called Duke of Westminster case in 1936, which has underpinned the tax avoidance activities of the accounting, legal and banking professions ever since for three quarters of a century. In effect, there is an economic test at the core of my Bill that can be applied if, having taken into account all the relevant circumstances relating to the economic substance of a transaction, it appears that tax is not being paid by the right person, in the right amount, in the right place, at the right time, or at all

GANTIP is crucial, but other measures are also needed and I will address them briefly. The Government should seek an international financial standard that requires country-by-country reporting by transnational corporations in order to block the immense loophole of transfer pricing. The European Union savings tax directive, which the UK Government have repeatedly tried to water down, should be strengthened to include offshore trusts, which are a favourite tool of the tax-cheating industry. The non-dom rule was introduced in 1799—it is somewhat anachronistic—and the UK is now the only country in the world, apart from Ireland, I think, that does not tax worldwide earnings. It should be abolished.

A much tougher line should be taken on closing down UK tax havens. The UK Crown dependencies hold some $7 trillion of US bank deposits and probably dodge some £30 billion of tax. The Cayman Islands have just 30,000 inhabitants, but they are home to 457,000 shell companies. We should adopt the rule that unless such territories provide full and automatic information on all such funds that can be taxed, any transactions with such tax havens should be declared illegal.

In conclusion, I do not often agree with the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, but tax avoidance is morally wrong and morally repugnant. It is high time that we had in this country a Government whose actions show that they actually believe and support that.