Finance (No. 3) Bill

Debate between Chris Stephens and Anneliese Dodds

Committee: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 20th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Anneliese Dodds]

The hon. Lady can shake her head at me, but she should shake her head at the Women’s Budget Group, which has shown this very clearly.

[Chris Stephens]

On seriously tackling the tax gap and the lack of analysis that the hon. Lady is identifying, could one of the reasons possibly be the meat cleaver that was taken to the HMRC office network, meaning that there is now a lack of local knowledge? Also, should not the Government employ as many people to tackle tax avoidance as they do for Department for Work and Pensions social security fraud?

[Anneliese Dodds]

I know that the hon. Gentleman has worked on the issue of cuts to HMRC’s capacity, as have many Members across the House. I will return to that important issue soon, because sadly the reality does not reflect the rather rosy picture that we were provided with by the Minister on that subject.

I return to the distributional impact of this Government’s tax measures. We had an interesting discussion about fairness following some comments by the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart), who is no longer in his place. The Minister intimated that he was in favour of a fair tax system and said that the wealthiest people pay a large proportion of all tax. He is absolutely right: the wealthiest people do pay a large proportion of income tax. That is because of how wealthy they are. However, if we look at the impact of the tax system on different income groups, we find—I should not say “we” because it is the Office for National Statistics that has discovered this—that the best-off 10% of people pay less of their income in tax than the worst-off 10%. I note that the Conservatives did not contest this statistic when it was mentioned in the House yesterday. Surely that is a ringing indictment of their approach to taxation.