Finance (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Catherine McKinnell and Lord Stunell

Wednesday 17th April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Catherine McKinnell]

I am very shocked to hear of those comments. I missed them at the time. If the Minister wants to explain her position or the Liberal Democrat Front-Bench position on these amendments, I will be glad to hear it.

[Andrew Stunell (Hazel Grove) (LD)]

rose—

[Catherine McKinnell]

Does the right hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Andrew Stunell) wish to intervene?

[Andrew Stunell]

With the permission of the Chair, in a minute or two I hope to be able to tell the Committee fully.

[Catherine McKinnell]

Excellent. I am grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s intervention. We look forward to clarification of the Liberal Democrats’ position on the issue, and we hope it does not go the same way as their mansion tax vote went earlier, when they voted against their own policy for the second time.

I call on all right hon. and hon. Members to support our amendment 8, which would monitor the impact of the GAAR and ensure that the Government take genuine action towards securing the tax transparency and fairness that the world needs in this 21st century. We also seek to test the will of the House by pressing our amendment 6 to a vote, to determine whether the House will commit to ensuring that we do all we can in our power to tackle tax avoidance that is damaging not just to the UK, but to developing countries.

I finish by reiterating briefly concerns that I have expressed on several occasions in the Chamber and elsewhere about the huge number of challenges facing HMRC, highlighted recently by yet another scathing report from the Public Accounts Committee. The very body on which the Government rely to tackle tax avoidance is being seriously undermined by devastating budget cuts of £2 billion over this Parliament and the loss of 10,000 staff. These cuts will be a false economy if they hamper HMRC’s ability to collect the billions of pounds in avoided tax, and all the tough talk, strategies and moral indignation in the world will not deal with the problem of tax avoidance if HMRC simply does not have the capacity and resources it requires to do the job.

[Andrew Stunell]

I strongly support the general anti-avoidance rule and its introduction. Some would say that it is long overdue. Bearing in mind what the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) has just said, how important and urgent it is and how long-standing the problem has been, one has to say that it was overdue in 2010, so it is good that it is in place now. I commend Ministers on the Front Bench for including it in the proposals coming to the Committee now.

I shall spend a minute or two commenting on what my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) said in his speech a little while ago, making it clear that there are some risks and some dangers, particularly of retrospection. The Minister will know that we have been in correspondence about one particular series of events which has left constituents of mine at a severe disadvantage, as they see it, because of the retrospective application of an HMRC ruling to them.

What I want to say to my hon. Friend is that one thing that the general anti-avoidance rule will do is put everybody in this country on notice about their tax affairs so that they cannot be caught by surprise, or perhaps even subterfuge or a recycling of policy, in the way that my constituents have been. I will continue to write to the Minister about the case facing my constituents, but a general anti-avoidance rule puts everybody on notice and makes any possibility of an excuse disappear. We should welcome that.