Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Chris Stephens and Jesse Norman(1 year, 6 months ago)
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Jesse Norman
It is worth saying that the tax system does support the take-up of electric vehicles already. As a former Financial Secretary, I can tell the hon. Lady that I would be skinned if I made Treasury policy from the Dispatch Box. I am not going to do that, but I have no doubt that my colleagues in the Treasury will have noted her concern.
Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Chris Stephens and Jesse Norman(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)
The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Jesse Norman)
The Government are committed to supporting the introduction of 4,000 zero-emission buses and a zero-emission bus fleet. As the roads Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Mr Holden), said, he has focused on sustainable public transport recently in a visit to Scotland, which included meetings with the traffic commissioner in Glasgow and Lothian Buses.
Chris Stephens
The Transport Committee’s recent report referred to earlier on the implementation of the national bus strategy confirmed that meeting this Government’s bus decarbonisation targets initially for England and Wales actually relies on the Scottish Government. That is evidenced by Scotland’s ordering of 10.11 zero-emission buses per 100,000 people, compared with just 0.94 in England outside London. Will the Minister explain the vast chasm of delivery? What is the Government’s revised target for zero-emission bus delivery in England and Wales?
Jesse Norman
The Government are on track to deliver the policy. As the hon. Gentleman will be aware, we are working with companies to build substantial supply chains that then have to scale up by several orders of magnitude in order to meet the scale of orders. If we look at the number that have been ordered alone: for zero emission bus regional areas, the ZEBRA scheme, 1,342; 275 for Coventry; 20 will be going to Cambridgeshire in the next few weeks, I am pleased to say; and 350 to other schemes in England outside London. The total so far is 3,429, which is well on track to meet our target.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Chris Stephens and Jesse Norman(1 year, 9 months ago)
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Jesse Norman
The hon. Gentleman will be aware that I will not comment on the Budget; as a former Financial Secretary, I will certainly not attempt to trespass on the Treasury’s prerogative on tax issues. What he will know, of course, is that the vast majority of that investment is coming from the private sector. Of course, that will itself be massively boosted by the zero-emission vehicle mandate. I met one of the largest charge point operators only this week, and they were perfectly clear that the one thing that will do more than anything else, not just to reduce carbon but to support the development of that industry and that transition, is the mandate, which we will publish, as I say, in the near future.
Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)
Loan Charge 2019: Sir Amyas Morse Review
Debate between Chris Stephens and Jesse Norman(4 years, 9 months ago)
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Jesse Norman
I thank my right hon. Friend for the question. All he needs to do is attend to the detail of the Morse report, in which Sir Amyas Morse goes through the efforts made at that time, before and after 2010, in some detail. That is the basis for the judgment that he reaches about the appropriate relief.
Chris Stephens
The Morse review also suggests that the main people responsible were the creators of such schemes, who do not seem to be getting chased up to the same extent as those who appear to be the victims of the schemes.
Jesse Norman
I take it that the hon Gentleman rightly refers to the enablers and promoters of such schemes. As he knows, I take that extremely seriously, and I have insisted on that point ever since I became Financial Secretary. I will say more about that shortly.
I return to the point that such schemes were contrived tax avoidance schemes that were typically run through an offshore vehicle. A person would receive a monthly amount of pay, often deliberately set at or around the level of the personal allowance to maximise the tax avoided, and above the national insurance lower earnings limit, so as to qualify the person concerned for the national insurance contributions required to receive a state pension. Of course, that did not reflect the person in question’s true earnings because, alongside that payment, they would receive a further top-up payment described as a loan. In many cases, the top-up payment far exceeded—often by a large multiple—the salary element declared for tax purposes.
Those facts are not genuinely in doubt, and all Members who have taken part in the debate have rightly condemned tax avoidance, but I put them on the record again because they highlight how contrived that form of tax avoidance typically was. They also go to the root of the problem.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden raised the issue of thesauruses and dictionary definitions. Let me remind him of the difference between a dictionary definition and a thesaurus. A thesaurus gives an alternate word of supposedly the same meaning. A dictionary definition tries to explain exactly what it is that is being talked about.
The dictionary definition of a real loan is,
“an amount of money that is borrowed…and has to be paid back”.
That accords with our natural experience, as hon. Members will discover if they try to take out a business loan from a bank and not pay it back. If they try to take out a mortgage and not pay it back, they will find the same to be true.
Those loans, however, were not designed to be paid back. They were rather different from loans that might be made to employees that then get written off, on which tax is typically chargeable. They were not designed to be paid back. They were employment income in disguise, so they were subject to tax.