Finance Bill

Debate between Andrew Jones and Stephen Flynn

Report stage & Report stage: House of Commons & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 1st July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Jones (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (Con)]

One of the features of the lockdown economy has been the march of online retail, as evidenced by the prominence of delivery vehicles on all our streets, but the growth of the digital economy is actually deeper.

The Federation of Small Businesses in North Yorkshire tells me that one of the major concerns among its members is the extent of the digital skills that they have in their businesses. I have spent a significant amount of time listening to business—I know that is something we all do as Members of Parliament, but I have also done so as a Minister and as someone with specific responsibility for this for my party—and one of the messages from that engagement was to focus on digital. That means different things for different companies. It could be the new channels to market and the need to ensure that they are able to reach their customers in the most appropriate way. It could simply be the opportunities to enhance productivity by digitising processes. My point, really, is that the digital economy is the future.

From a Treasury perspective, that is quite difficult. It presents it with hard challenges. The international nature of this economy makes it hard to collect tax—a point already made by colleagues in the debate.

[Stephen Flynn (Aberdeen South) (SNP)]

I note that the hon. Member said that digital was the future. Would it not be fair to suggest that digital is not only the future but the present—the here and now—and that that is why the Government’s proposals should go further?

[Andrew Jones]

It has been the past, the present and the future. My point is about scale. I am not suggesting that the economy will be all digital in the future and that it has been all analogue in the past. That is perhaps a misunderstanding of what I have been saying.

Returning to the point that the digital economy presents challenges for the Treasury in raising taxation, I know that the Treasury is making good progress in working with other countries on developing a multinational response, but that could take a significant amount of time. It is therefore right to take appropriate action now. The direction of travel is a positive one, particularly building on the points made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) earlier in the debate. The evolving nature of the economy—how we work and how we consume—means that tax has to evolve too. Traditional routes for collection are becoming more difficult, and the Bill is a response to that.

I am not normally keen on finding new ways to tax people. We are already quite a highly taxed country, but we need to raise revenue to fund our vital public services. In Committee, we discussed the fact that this tax could raise up to £2 billion, but there is also something unusual about it, in that it is a tax on revenues. In this case, I think that that is a positive thing, because we are talking about very large companies. The thresholds mean that we are dealing with the largest players in the online marketplace, such as social media platforms and search engines. Basically, I am pleased to see efforts to make tax fairer between offline and online—or bricks and clicks, as it is sometimes referred to.