Value Added Tax Bill

Anne-Marie Trevelyan Excerpts

Friday 8th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)]

I want to highlight the point my hon. Friend is making. When the income tax rate went up to 50%, I had small businessmen come to me saying, “I’m not going to work any harder if I have to hand over 50%. I’ll work four days a week and play golf on Fridays. I’m not going to invest my capital in a business if the Treasury doesn’t understand the pressures of running a small business,” and they stepped away from increasing their productivity—indeed, went backwards—until we started to reduce the rate. Too often, we fail to understand the consequences of tax policy on behavioural patterns.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

My hon. Friend makes a brilliant point. This used to be at the heart of Conservative thinking and policy making on the Treasury Bench. It was that dynamic thinking that was behind past decisions to significantly reduce the top rates of tax. I hope we can rediscover that much more dynamic approach to the behavioural consequences of high taxes and artificial thresholds.

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[Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope), although I would highlight that I am a chartered account—and proud to be so. My training perhaps gives me a different perspective on politics, and I often from myself thinking in a different way from Members who are lawyers—not in a good or a bad way, but simply in a different way. Such training offers a breadth of policy, planning and thinking that we need to bring together. I am thrilled to speak on my hon. Friend’s important Value Added Tax Bill, and about how we might start to make significant improvements to this regressive and most punitive of taxes on the poorest, and on small businesses’ growth and productivity, after we leave the EU—very shortly, I hope—and are free to make such improvements once again.

I will address three areas of policy change proposed by the Bill, although there is much more I could discuss: VAT thresholds for small businesses; the flexibility of VAT rates on energy; and the big, thorny question of the sanitary products challenge that we have to solve. The first area on which this Bill offers an excellent improvement to our present VAT rules is the threshold for paying VAT. A small business whose main activity is one of human endeavour—the “services” part of goods and services—must monitor its monthly sales on a rolling 12-month basis these days, and must register to pay VAT as soon as the cumulative total reaches £85,000. Most small businesses that have many VAT-charged goods, such as plumbing businesses, are more likely to be VAT registered from the beginning, so such monitoring does not have to happen—those businesses are already in the VAT system because they want to reclaim the VAT on goods they have to use.

The threshold means that, overnight, a business suddenly goes from not being VAT registered to being VAT registered and having to charge an extra 20% on its bills. Imagine going in for a monthly haircut that used to cost £20 and suddenly finding that it costs £24. That business will then find that a smaller, non-VAT registered business down the road is more competitive, and it will immediately risk losing customers, so what does it do? Does it hold down prices by employing another staff member, at great speed, to increase business and grow the volume of sales, or does it stop accepting custom in order not to hit the threshold in the first place? My hon. Friend gave the example of cafés, but in Northumberland, there are tourism businesses that see the threshold coming and therefore slow down or close their doors early not to make further sales. This arrangement is simply anti-competitive and surely it is not the sort of business driver that any Conservative Government would mean to be encouraging.

A real-life example that highlights the problem is that of a young businesswoman with exactly this dilemma in my constituency. This young woman owns a small hairdressing business in a small town, and employs two stylists full time and one part time. Her turnover is about £100,000—above the £85,000 threshold—and she is therefore VAT registered. Her VAT payments to the Treasury are in the region of £16,000, leaving her with net sales of £84,000. A number of competitors have set up business in the area and purposely kept their audited income below the £85,000 threshold to avoid paying VAT, while still charging prices comparable to VAT-registered retailers. Of course, the clients do not know whether a business is VAT-registered in that small business environment, but there is a 20% advantage in favour of that non-VAT-registered business—20% more for doing less work. This young woman does not make any profit worth mentioning, but she pays herself a wage and keeps three trainees employed, and she enjoys her work. Her father, who is also a constituent, has advised her to close the business and save all the hassle that goes along with self-employment and running a business. Is it not a tragedy that a father feels he has to say that to his energetic and business-focused daughter?

Let us look at this woman’s options and the consequences. She could follow her father’s advice and close her business, putting four people out of work. That would involve vacating the premises and creating an empty shop on one of the small high streets in my constituency. She could lay off a member of staff to reduce the income to below the threshold and de-register for VAT, although perhaps still charge the VAT-hiked prices and see whether clients will pay. This is a simple but brutal example of the anti-business growth of our present VAT rules. I have been frustrated by this for a long time—as an accountant and in politics—because we have been trapped in this position. We have no control over it because we are operating under the EU VAT directive.

I would go further than my hon. Friend has proposed in his Bill so far. It is wonderful to have a Treasury Minister in the Chamber, because I have written a number of times to a number of Chancellors on this subject, and I have the opportunity to make my argument again verbally today. Where other thresholds exist, such as for income tax, national insurance and stamp duty, there is an exemption on charges for amounts up to the threshold, with payments made only against the remaining amount over the threshold limit. If, in the case of any small business, we made VAT payable only on income above the threshold, we would offer a sliding scale of price increases or sales volume that would support the business and encourage the employment of more staff, unlike with the disincentive of the dramatic cliff edge at £85,000. Whether we are talking about £100,000 or £20,000, the effect is the same: there is a cliff edge from paying no VAT to entering the VAT world, with all the commensurate costs, stress and extra time spent dealing with it. It seems odd that there is no threshold step for VAT, just a cliff edge.

In the context of small business as a whole, the threshold is very low, despite the fact that it is one of the higher ones in the EU. It is an excellent start to see the Bill’s proposal of, in the first instance, raising the threshold to £104,000. Should this excellent Bill gain Government support and make progress, however, I would propose to go further and call on the Treasury to make all income below the threshold exempt from VAT, with further turnover up to a certain point—for example, £150,000—having VAT charged only on that marginal trading activity. Businesses could then carry the sales tax burden across all sales without having to force it on the customer in the hard way that happens now. This is important for the small business cohort; we are not talking about businesses whose turnover has reached £1 million and are employing 10, 15, 20 or more people. We are talking about the small business that suddenly falls under the complex and heavy burden of VAT, which is genuinely having an anti-competitive effect on them. We are doing ourselves and our businesses no favours at all.

The approach I am setting out would give small businesses a window of growth and investment opportunity, and the chance to take on more staff, before being hit with a 20% surcharge on all sales. Such a fairer, graduated system would level the playing field between small below-the-threshold firms and those growing businesses. It would stimulate growth in the small independent retail sector and might even be a policy that could help to revitalise our empty high street shops.

The Bill offers much more besides increasing the threshold for VAT for small businesses, as it takes up the long-overdue opportunity to exempt some critical goods from VAT altogether once we have left the EU and the limitations that the EU’s VAT directive forced upon us in 2006. The directive aimed to harmonise VAT across the European Union. Although it makes cross-border sales activity easier and has some merit for the simplification of sales taxes, it has limited any individual country’s ability to determine whether or not to exempt goods from VAT. VAT on fuel has been a matter of contention for years. To his credit—everyone take note, because I am not going to say that very often—the then Chancellor, Gordon Brown, brought that tax levy down to 5%, which was a very creditable decision, but under the EU directive, he had no independent authority to scrap it completely.

Let us consider the position for my poorest constituents in rural Northumberland—“deepest, darkest rural Northumberland”, as my mother refers to some of my more wonderful and hard-to-reach communities. In these areas, the choice in heating solutions is limited to wood, coal, expensive electric heating, which often does not work when the weather is really bad, or oil tanks, assuming the snow does not prevent the tanker from getting to a farm in the first place. There is no mains gas, so people do not have the opportunity of consumers in more urban areas of choosing a supplier from a competitive range of offers. The 5% VAT levy adds to their already higher than average heating cost burden, because all those other products are just more expensive. It would be a wise Government, after Brexit, who at last agreed that rural poverty—it has been ignored for far too long by Whitehall, in my humble opinion—could be alleviated in the first instance by removing this tax. As my hon. Friend identified, there might be an initial cost to the Exchequer of up to £1.6 billion, but the policy would have a broad range of principled and practical social and health benefits. The Government’s commitment to those is clear by their words, but such a change would make that clear by their actions, too.

If my rural constituents are disadvantaged by VAT on fuel supplies to keep their families warm, how much worse is it that our own Government could not unilaterally determine—nor indeed manage to persuade the EU while we have still been within its laws—that a 5% tax on sanitary products is a direct discriminatory charge against all women of menstruating age? A friend said to me on learning that I was going to speaking in support of my hon. Friend’s Bill today that

“women really ought to have tax deductions for being female—what with tampons and tights that ladder, being expected to wear makeup and have changes of wardrobe, you all should get a discount from the Government”

I concur wholeheartedly, as I am sure you do, Madam Deputy Speaker, although that might be a step too far for the Treasury. A small and immediately helpful step in that direction would be to scrap VAT on all sanitary products, and indeed on incontinence products, which are also listed in the Bill. This outrageous tax puts these things into the “luxury items” category of products and reminds me that we have far to go to make sure that policy making has common sense at its heart.

It is wonderful that, as in the battles for women’s voting rights 100 years ago, there are men like my hon. Friend leading the charge to change the law in support of women’s rights and fairness. There have been excellent campaigns from across this House in recent years to push the Government to effect change, and the Bill is the next step to get this VAT discrimination sorted out. By scrapping VAT on sanitary products and making them exempt, as is the case for food and children’s clothes, this Government would be sending a clear message that they understand that the tax system can be an incentiviser or a punisher. For too long, I have been shocked that the EU has chosen to continue to ignore this call for fairness, allowing—no, forcing—women to have to pay more for sanitary products, which are an indispensable part of our daily lives, to boost Treasury coffers across Europe. I look forward to hearing from the Treasury in the Budget that follows our departure from the EU that it has understood and will immediately remedy this discriminatory tax.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern that if we do not leave on 29 March without a deal, people will have had their expectations raised that we will have left the EU, but will be frustrated by knowing that such issues cannot be resolved by this Parliament?

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Personally, I would rather leave with a deal that ensures that the bucket of issues that have to be sorted out are dealt with as we move forward from our legacy relationship into a new relationship, because that would make things easier for everybody, but the approach has to be right. The reality is that until we have left the EU, we have to follow the VAT directive, which means that we are not able to control that part of our tax law. I am grateful that we are leaving and that we will not move into the whole area of tax that the EU is looking to take control of across the board, which is a terrifying issue of taxation without representation. I am very glad that the British people have decided to step off the EU train before we move into that part of its policy making.

It would be a shocking failure not to remedy the discriminatory tax on sanitary products, so I hope that, in the most visible and practical of senses, the Government appreciate that constituents feel we have lost the ability to make good choices. We must take the opportunity, as soon as possible, to set the train in the right direction on this issue.

The VAT directive may not sound sexy or dramatic, but it has long been one of my most hated of all the directives under which we have had to work as members of the EU, as it emasculates Chancellors of whatever political colour in critical policy areas and disenfranchises us from being able to support small business, our poorest and, indeed, the female 52% of our population. It has meant that in a major area of tax policy, we have had to suffer taxation without representation for far too long. We will be able to send the clear message to the senior people in the EU Commission who determine, without oversight, what EU laws should be, that as in so many policy areas, the UK will lead the way in improving our citizens’ lives. I commend the Bill to the House and wish it every success in reaching deep into the Treasury’s conscience, which I know is there, so that we can make these proposals a reality after 29 March.

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[James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash (Maggie Throup). She has highlighted how the VAT rules do somewhat take the biscuit when it comes to gingerbread men. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope) has shown that, on Europe, we really cannot have our cake and tax it.

I wanted to clarify one point that my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch made earlier in reference to me. He very kindly referred to me as a former senior Treasury adviser. In fact, I did serve a brief apprenticeship after leaving university at the Policy Research Unit when it was founded, but I then started my own business. I was never at the Treasury—although it can feel like that when running a business.

Interestingly, when I was a mortgage broker, I found that mortgages were exempt—mortgage commissions are exempt from VAT. We were very much of the belief that mortgages would one day be done online—this was back in 2004—and, of course, many of them now are. When we invested for the first time in a new souped-up piece of IT kit, we received a very expensive bill with VAT on it, which we could not offset, and that created many problems for us. Since then, we have diversified. Most of our income is VATable: we run a big home show at the QE2 and a property portal for shared ownership properties. It is a good business. The great frustration that I have with VAT is that it is very unpredictable in those quarterly comings and goings, particularly as we have a home show every six months. As my hon. Friend said, we should run our businesses as if we are reviewing them quarterly to make sure that we can fund them.

The key point that I wanted to touch on with this Bill is the issue of unfunded tax commitments—a central point on which, in effect, my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch and I debated through interventions. We were joined by my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough (Neil O'Brien) who was here earlier. That is not to say that any of the measures in this Bill would not be desirable. As I said earlier, I represent a rural constituency. Most of my constituents are on heating oil, so why would I object to cutting the VAT on heating oil? Of course I would not do so on principle. The same is true for sanitary products. My hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Anne-Marie Trevelyan) made a very good case for reducing the VAT on those to zero, which I am sure the Treasury will do once it has the power. The question is not necessarily about desirability, but, of course, about affordability.

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

My hon. Friend and I both have rural constituencies and constituents who do not keep their houses as warm as they should because the cost is too high. The question is one of breaking the silos of government to assess the differential in loss to the Treasury compared with the saving to the NHS for those health and lung issues that would not end up in the health service at all. The challenge, if we need to prove it before we make a change in policy, is how we do that across departmental boundaries.

[James Cartlidge]

Of course. Although that is a very good point, it does assume a competitive marketplace where that tax change would be passed on in full to the consumer, and it remains to be seen whether that would be the case.

The point that I was trying to make is that when the Labour party makes unfunded commitments, we talk about the magic money tree. I have to say that I was trying to keep a tally as my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch was speaking, and he seems to have opened up something that we might call a wondrous wonga arboretum of revenues. At one point, we were looking at £7.6 billion, once we added in the heating exemptions and the potential increase in the threshold to half a million pounds. These are not inconsiderable sums of money. The key thing that we have to remember is that, yes, there are those who argue about dynamic effect on behaviour, which means that these things are revenue-neutral. Perhaps I am a small c conservative, like a former great Chancellor, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), whom I admire greatly. He was talking about this very Budget. He used to take the view that we should never rely on forecasts; everything has to be paid for. If we make a commitment, we have to find a corresponding item to fund it. I take that view as well. That is how one should run a business. It is cautious—one always assumes that there is a downside and an upside. Unfortunately, we now live in an era in which we cannot talk about downsides, because there is this “Project Fear” thing, but that is the sensible way of politics and prudence.

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[James Cartlidge]

That is a good point. I was simply trying to make the point that we are talking about the impact of VAT on the consumer, yet if the no-deal scenario that some Members wish for happens, consumers will face onerous costs. By the way, even if we decided that we wanted to cut tariffs unilaterally, we could not; we are not taking back control of France, Germany and the rest. We cannot cut tariffs on our exports, and we would have far less leverage in trade deals. That is an extremely serious prospect, and we need to think about it.

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

I have a large number of lamb farmers in my constituency—the finest lamb comes from Northumberland, of course—and the challenge for them is: what are the Government preparing to do in the case of no deal? I certainly would not prefer that outcome; it would be much more constructive to have a deal. Should we leave without one, however, I hope very much that my Government will be prepared, and that there will be plans—contingency plans, if we want to call them that—in place to support the farming industry.

One of the great challenges has been the lack of communication from the Treasury and DEFRA. That is quite understandable, because we are still making our best endeavours to reach a deal, but there is a real difficulty in suggesting that it is therefore better to say we cannot have a no-deal scenario because of the risk. That leaves the business community at the greatest risk of facing challenges without knowing the answers.

[James Cartlidge]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. It will be the last intervention that I take, because I am a strong supporter of the Bill promoted by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers), and I want her to be able to speak to it shortly.

I want to finish with a point about productivity and investment, which has been made by several people. Going back to what I said earlier about IT and so on, the key to productivity is investment, and as a country we under-invest, relatively speaking. For most of the larger companies that want to invest, the ability to offset VAT is fundamental. If I had a wondrous wonga arboretum and I was told that I could cut some money for business tomorrow, I would go for business rates. I would do so because business rates are an on-cost that directly hits investment in small businesses, and I am convinced that they are what is holding back productivity in the SME sector. I will stop there, because I think the next Bill is an excellent one. I hope that if the Bill promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch makes progress, we will find a prudent and responsible way of implementing it.

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[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

I agree with the Minister that the consultation was difficult and did not seem to come up with a solution, but will the Treasury seriously consider having a sliding scale for VAT registration, as is the case for other taxation systems?

[Robert Jenrick]

That suggestion, which my hon. Friend set out so eloquently in her speech, has been discussed on many occasions. It is an interesting proposal, but it would have significant fiscal implications, and it would mean that any business would be able to take advantage of that; large multinational corporations would benefit, not just small and medium-sized businesses. However, it is something we might consider in future.