Tax Avoidance and Evasion

Debate between Catherine West and Nigel Mills

Tuesday 14th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier), and I join in the congratulations to the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) on her securing this important debate. I absolutely agree with the conclusions she came to, but I probably took a slightly different route to get to them.

I should start, though, by saying that I do not think it is fair to say that over the past 15 years or so, HMRC, the previous Labour Government and the current Conservative Government have not tried to tackle aggressive avoidance. Look at the number of measures that have been introduced, ranging from disclosure rules for artificial schemes through to more recent measures. Look at a Finance Bill and count up how many targeted anti-avoidance rules have now been added. We have been trying everything we possibly can to tackle the most outrageous behaviour. Many of the schemes that 15 years ago used to be possible or, indeed, quite widespread just cannot be done in the UK at all now.

[Catherine West]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there is a cultural issue and a whole machinery that enables and facilitates these sorts of arrangements, which the 99% of us have nothing to do with, and that we have to be very aggressive in tackling that 1%?

[Nigel Mills]

I agree with the hon. Lady exactly, but the point I was trying to make was that I do not think that the size of the tax gap is down to a lack of effort or attempts to introduce new rules or measures. The problem is that the avoiders and evaders are perhaps one step ahead and move on to different things. That is why the Panama papers and the Paradise papers show that people are now just going offshore, or finding artificial ways to go offshore, rather than trying to do artificial domestic planning to get around the rules.