Baroness Burt of Solihull
Main Page: Baroness Burt of Solihull (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Baroness Burt of Solihull's debates with the HM Treasury
(14 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberI agree wholeheartedly. I shall say more about that shortly, because it is one of the issues that we raised—I think—four years ago at the time of the merger of the departments. We hoped at that stage for a more detailed report on personnel management and the number of staff who would be employed to deal with tax evasion in particular.
The fact that Her Majesty’s Treasury does not distinguish between evasion and avoidance in its global figures suggests that the Treasury itself finds the distinction difficult to define. I tried to find a clear Treasury quantification of what is generally described as the tax gap in order to draft an amendment that would have some purchase in the real world, especially the world of Treasury practice.
I am interested in the discussion of avoidance and evasion, but does the hon. Gentleman not agree that neither problem has been improved by his own party’s complication of the tax rules, to the extent that ordinary people require a professional to help them to interpret those rules?
Complication is certainly an issue. That is partly why I want the Chancellor to report to the House on the measures that will be used to tackle tax evasion and avoidance. We need a simplification of the process, but we also need to know how many staff the Government will employ for collection purposes.