Corporate Tax Base

Debate between Chris Philp and Jane Ellison

Tuesday 20th December 2016 General Committees

[Jane Ellison]

I thank the hon. Lady for her questions; they were good, as I would expect. As I said, the UK will not give up member state sovereignty over our tax base without very good reason, and we are not convinced that there are such reasons in the directive. On some measures, such as the ATAD measure to which I referred, we have come together and been able to agree something.

Having direct control over our tax base enables us to respond to events in our own jurisdiction. We have debated tax a lot over recent years, and it has become apparent to all of us in this House that the challenges we face are global. Leaving aside the timeline issue, it is quite hard to envisage a situation in which there would be a sufficiently compelling reason—the hon. Lady set out a hypothetical situation—to give up direct control over our tax base, given the global challenge we face with some of these tax issues.

We are working very well domestically, with almost 30 measures passed since 2015—some of them are yet to come into effect, and others are already working—and have co-operated through the OECD. For those reasons, we do not see this proposal as compelling enough to cause us to give up something as important as direct control over our tax base.

[Chris Philp (Croydon South) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the second time, Mr Hanson. I sympathise with the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole and the Minister, but I have two questions.

On the question of sovereignty over taxation, does the Minister agree that the UK being a signatory to the OECD BEPS arrangements she referred to entails an implicit loss of sovereignty, because we are making an international agreement? Does the sovereignty argument not apply equally there?

My second question is on European taxation. The Minister made some powerful points about the global nature of taxation and said that acting at a European level alone may not be fully effective. Does she think that European Union member states adopting these proposals would prevent some multinationals—I am thinking particularly of companies such as Amazon and Google—from effectively running their European sales via Dublin and Luxembourg in order to benefit from very low rates of taxation and avoid paying tax in member states where sales and staff are located? I fully accept the reasons the Minister gave, but what assurance can she give the Committee that we will successfully clamp down on those tax-planning—I will not say evasion—measures if we cannot do so via this instrument? What other channels could we use to avoid that happening?