Oral Answers to Questions

Baroness Clark of Kilwinning Excerpts

Wednesday 12th June 2013 Commons Chamber

The Secretary of State was asked—

[Katy Clark (North Ayrshire and Arran) (Lab)]

1. What proposals her Department has to tackle tax avoidance by multinational companies operating in developing countries.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

2. What steps she is taking to help developing countries improve their tax systems.

[The Secretary of State for International Development (Justine Greening)]

The UK Government are committed to ensuring that developing countries have the ability to collect the tax that they are owed. The UK is using our G8 presidency to promote tax transparency, tackle tax avoidance and ensure tax compliance.

[Katy Clark]

The Secretary of State will be aware that developing countries lose more than £160 billion each year through tax avoidance, more than one and a half times what they receive in aid. What is she doing to ensure that we get country-by-country reporting so that we see how much those multinationals are taking from developing countries?

[Justine Greening]

Addressing tax avoidance and encouraging tax compliance will be one of the key elements of the G8 agenda, and transparency sits alongside that. We will look at how we can obtain more transparency, including sectoral transparency through measures such as the extractive industries transparency initiative. All those measures together have the potential to ensure that we can help developing countries to collect the tax they are owed.