Finance (No. 2) Bill

Lord Mackinlay of Richborough Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 29th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[James Murray]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comment. The geographical impact of policies should always be considered, but we should also ensure that the Government consider targeting sectors. Rather than having a scheme that applies to everyone with a large pension pot, let us have a targeted scheme for NHS doctors, which is something we can all agree on.

Alongside the changes to the taxation of individuals’ pensions, this Finance Bill includes measures that will affect the taxation of businesses. Disappointingly, but unsurprisingly, there is no sign of the fundamental reform of business rates once promised by the Conservatives. The Bill does, however, include changes to corporation tax and allowances. In fact, making changes to corporation tax and allowances is something the Government have become quite experienced in. Under the Conservatives, corporation tax has changed almost every year since 2010, and as the Resolution Foundation has pointed out, the introduction of the latest temporary regime for corporation tax represents the fifth major change in just two years. Businesses deserve better than this. When I meet businesses across the country, they are clear that they want stability, certainty and a long-term plan, yet after 13 years in office, this Government are incapable of providing those crucial foundations for success.

The truth is that Conservative MPs have become deeply inward-looking and riven by division, and their default when faced with difficult choices is to put party before country. No matter what they say, this means that Conservative Ministers are simply incapable of providing stability and certainty in government. We can see that reality in the policies they announce. As Paul Johnson of the IFS said in response to the latest temporary tweak to the tax regime for businesses:

“There’s no stability, no certainty, and no sense of a wider plan.”

Indeed, we can see that by looking at the Government’s decision to allow temporary full expensing for expenditure on plant and machinery. We know how important it is to get capital allowances right as the rate of corporation tax is being increased, yet, as the Office for Budget Responsibility reveals, the Government’s approach will make no difference whatever to medium-term levels of business investment. Rather than a long-term permanent change, this change is for only three years. As a result, it only brings forward investment rather than increasing its overall level.

[Craig Mackinlay (South Thanet) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman has talked about certainty and stability, and they are qualities that I would have some sympathy with, but can he rule out, here and now on the Floor of the House, that it is not going to be Labour’s plan under any circumstances to harmonise capital gains tax with income tax?

[James Murray]

As we have said several times, we will set out our plans in our own time. But let us be clear, if the hon. Member has concerns over capital gains tax, he might want to talk to those on his own Front Bench, because they raised it in the last Finance Bill by cutting the annual exempt amount. I suggest he talks to his colleagues before he raises questions with us.

--- Later in debate ---

[Craig Mackinlay (South Thanet) (Con)]

I will start with a depressing fact. We have talked about the Office of Tax Simplification, and I struggle because the Bill before us runs to 456 pages and the explanatory notes run to 679 pages. Perhaps we are not going in the right direction.

As I am sure Ministers are aware, I will air my views on this Finance Bill, both the bits I like and the bits I most certainly do not like. Starting with clause 2, we know that the income tax rates are 20%, 40% and the additional rate of 45%, but that does not tell the whole story, does it? We have this peculiar rate of 60%, as the annual allowance is taken away at £1 for every £2 of extra earnings over £100,000. The tax rate for those earning between £100,001 and £125,140 is, in fact, 60%.

At the autumn statement, we debated whether the 45% additional rate is the right measure at the right time, the right measure at the wrong time, or the wrong measure at any time, but I would have been more comfortable—this may surprise Ministers—if the 45% rate started at £100,000 and we got rid of the 60% band.

My entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests notes that I am a chartered accountant and a chartered tax adviser, and I recommend that the Treasury considers the number of people in that £100,001 to £125,140 band. It is all very well once people push their way through the band, but there are behaviours that can enable people to avoid the band, not least with the expansion of the annual allowance for pension contributions. I foresee that there will be very few people in that band, because they will use pension planning to make sure their income is always below £100,000 if there is any threat of being in that band.

I suppose this comes down to the whole concept of tax. I am not talking about a spreadsheet in the Treasury; I am talking about people’s behaviour. We sometimes forget that making such a change does not automatically spring a certain amount of tax out of the system, as people do other things. Additional money might be raised because people spend and pay VAT. We are all very familiar with the multiplier.

[Anthony Browne]

I thank my hon. Friend for his interesting speech.

[Craig Mackinlay]

Don’t worry; there is a lot more yet.

[Anthony Browne]

I am sure there is, and I might intervene later.

My hon. Friend makes an interesting point about moving the 45% additional rate to £100,000, which I have previously recommended. Does he agree that it would be a good guiding objective for this Government, and indeed any Government, to try to reduce all marginal tax rates below 50%? It is a good, Conservative principle, but it applies to everyone, that people who work extra should keep at least half the money. People should never have to give more than half to the Government.

[Craig Mackinlay]

My hon. Friend speaks a truism that should not need to be spoken from the Conservative Benches, as it should be patently clear.

A sole trader who is running a good little business and doing quite well might be knocking on the door of £100,000 in profits—I would have thought that is not an unusual amount for some in the south-east of England, even in the building trades. Too many of them will say, “I’m not going to pay 60%, plus 2% national insurance. I will work four days a week and spend the fifth day on the golf course.” We are losing out through the 60% rate.

Ministers will not be surprised by my objection to corporation tax being increased from 19% to 25%.

[Richard Drax]

Raising corporation tax from 19% to 25% is a 31% increase. That figure is not often used.

[Craig Mackinlay]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. This 6 percentage point increase is actually very big in percentage terms.

The corporation tax increase is in clauses 5 and 6, and corporation tax has a story in this country. I went back to April 1973, a mere 50 years ago, and it was at 42% in those days. Corporation tax has generally fallen over time, both in the Conservative years and under the Labour Administration between 1997 and 2010. Peculiarly, the Labour Administration even introduced a 0% rate on small profits up to £10,000 between 2000 and 2006. I was more vigorously in practice at the time, and the 0% rate was a bizarre move that caused a rash of incorporations, which people did not need the wisdom of Solomon to foresee. The rate was deemed to be malused, shall we say, so things changed again.

Under us, since 2010, the maximum rate of corporation tax has reduced from 28% to 19%, and what have we seen? We used to have discussions about Laffer-curve economics, to which I am an adherent. There is a sweet spot at which reducing the rate raises more tax. That was behind the thinking of George Osborne, a previous Chancellor. I would not say that I agree with everything he did—I think he meddled rather too much with the tax system; hence, we now have a tax code that runs to about 23,000 pages—but he believed that reducing corporation tax would increase returns, which is exactly what happened. The money we are looking to raise to pay for the NHS, and to do all the good things that public services provide for us, was being delivered through a lower corporation tax rate. Is it any surprise that Ireland decided to put this on steroids by taking corporation tax down to 12.5%? The rate per head of receipt in corporation tax is four times the rate in the UK. Ireland’s corporation tax returns are way in excess of what is raised from one of our primary taxes, VAT.

We lived through the 19% rate era, however, which was very welcome. It attracted international business and, on the other side of this, made domestic businesses think that the risk reward was better and they therefore took their business forward. We had a lot of complications in the old days, when we had marginal rates and businesses had to go from the lower small company rate to the bigger company mainline rate. It was a complicated calculation, and my hon. Friend the Financial Secretary referred to that. It was not only that that was complicated; those with a number of associated companies had to divide the limits, and it was a dreadfully complex calculation. She said clearly that the lower rate of 19% will remain for companies on up to £50,000 of profits, which is welcome and will catch a lot of the numbers as a percentage of the entirety registered at Companies House, so many companies will not be affected.

[Richard Fuller]

I do not want to disagree with my hon. Friend, but we on these Benches must stop being grateful when some of our businesses are exempted from increased taxation. We are the party that believes people know best how to spend their own money. We should be arguing for the widest spread of low taxes. He is talking about history, and the other aspect of corporation tax is the ability to attract capital. Back in the 1970s and ’80s, the largest source of capital to support our businesses was from a domestic pool of capital, but now we are competing for an international pool of capital. What effect does he think this increase in corporation tax will have on our ability to tap into those competitive global markets?

[Craig Mackinlay]

I do not think that was a criticism from my hon. Friend, but I was trying to be kind and find some good news in what is a fairly miserable story on corporation tax. He makes a good point: the world potentially has an almost limitless amount of global capital looking for a home, and I want that home to be here, and having a lower headline rate of corporation tax would be a very good way of achieving that. I want to develop the argument about the complication we have now added to the system.

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

I draw attention to my entry in the register. My hon. Friend is making a powerful point and is right about the impact of thresholds on behaviour. There are a number of thresholds, including the VAT threshold and income tax rates, and these marginal rates have a massive impact. Does he think that during the passage of this Bill the Government should consider whether the threshold of £50,000 to £250,000 ought to be higher, not least because catching a company just as it makes £50,000, on an ellipse of growth, and taxing it more is effectively to punish it for success?

What is his view on the notion that not just the rate but also consistency has an impact on the national and international sentiment about investment? The fact that we do not muck about with our rates all the time and they do not vary very significantly from year to year has a big impact on businesses’ ability to plan for the future. The Americans have a higher corporation tax rate than we do, but they have not touched it for years—it has been the same for many years—which allows businesses to trade a higher rate for a longer planning horizon. We might benefit from such a perspective.

[Craig Mackinlay]

My right hon. Friend makes a powerful point on the lower threshold for where 19% goes into the higher rate, and I am going to expand on what that rate actually is. He is right that £50,000 is not a king’s ransom these days; this should be in the phase of growth of a company as it goes on to higher levels.

I have some sympathy with my Front-Bench colleagues on the stability point. We need only think of the journey we have been on in just the last year. The former Chancellor, now the Prime Minister, declared that the rate would be going up to 25%. Then in autumn statement No. 1, it was going to stay where it was at 19%, but then we had autumn statement No.2, which confirmed that it would be going up to 25%. I was hopeful—I am sure my right hon. Friend and others were in a similar camp. I thought, “I will have a yo-yo this time; I am happy with a yo-yo. Let’s keep it at 19%.” However, my right hon. Friend makes the powerful point that stability is good. The rate might not be the one we prefer, but we can at least see to the horizon of where rates are likely to be quite a few years hence.

I want to expand on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) that the rise from 19% to 25% represents a 31% increase. I am afraid it is far worse than that on the marginal pound—say, if a company earns £50,001. To start at a 19% rate for up to £50,000 and get to a 25% rate at £250,000, the rate has to be more than 25% in between. The real rate on that marginal pound above £50,000 is 26.5%, so it is actually far worse. As I have said, we are going back to the bad old days where we have to divide those levels by the number of associated companies involved.

The full expensing is, of course, very welcome. I am sure that the Treasury has offered that as a quid pro quo in trying to encourage behaviour, so that companies can invest or are encouraged to invest in new plant, machinery, equipment and all the other stuff that will perhaps help our productivity gap, which we all know has been fairly poor for some time.

My hon. Friend the Financial Secretary mentioned the seed enterprise investment scheme under clause 15. There is also the old EIS, which is even more attractive to the small investor and is a means by which growth companies in early phases can get some capital from investors who may be looking for a home. The new higher levels are welcome, but I hope HMRC has the administration to cope with the applications. As my hon. Friend will know, we have had some problems with HMRC recently.

What does the message on higher corporation tax say to international investors? Big international investors will probably have a global accountancy firm that will analyse the tax rates, the deductions, the super deductions and the weave of things that go on in different countries, but the headline rate of 25% is not appealing. If a company is doing a first sort through Europe deciding where to go, Britain will not be appealing with one of the higher rates.

I worry that we are going for a sugar rush today that will lead to a deferred tax loss in the future because of the lack of domestic and international investment that otherwise might have come our way. That is a game of sliding doors—the title of a film I rather like—and one will never quite know what the future might have held, but this cannot be attractive to international investors. We raise taxes on things that are bad, such as cigarettes, to try to stop their use; why are we raising tax on something we want a lot more of?

I made a fairly lengthy speech on Budget day about the dividend tax—the dividend-free amount—and there is nothing on that in any of the clauses. I explained on the day that it has been through a story very much like the corporation tax story—up and down, with rates all over the place. We settled on the £5,000 amount of dividend-free allowance in about 2016. That did not last very long and went down to £2,000, and it is due to go down to £1,000 from next week. I stated on Budget day how I could live with £1,000 because it accords with other small amounts of income that HMRC is quite happy to disregard.

We have a disregard on trading allowance. Where someone has an eBay business that has advanced from selling the contents of the loft to doing a bit of trading, HMRC is not interested if it is under £1,000—it does not want to know and they do not have to do a tax return. A similar £1,000 allowance is in place for rent. Where someone rents their driveway out to a commuter or someone rents out their holiday home, if they are lucky enough to have one, for a couple of weeks a year, as long as the income is less than £1,000 they do not have to do a return, as no one is interested. A similar thing applies in respect of interest for basic rate taxpayers; £1,000 of interest may be earned and it does not need a tax return, as we are just not terribly interested.

The £1,000 level for dividends therefore has some common sense behind it. Obviously, as a low-tax Conservative, I would rather it were more, because this has already been taxed through the corporation tax system—it is not a deduction against corporate profits, so it is already a double tax. Reducing it further to £500 in 2024-25 breaks that £1,000 rate that we have established as reasonable. Not only that, but do we really want to drag in people who have been PAYE—pay-as-you-earn—all their lives?

We are talking about people with fairly simple affairs, who are perhaps retired and, for all the right reasons, have been in the Sharesave scheme. Let us suppose someone has accumulated a mere £10,000 over years of Sharesave in Lloyds Bank plc. The dividend from Lloyds, now that it is back paying dividends, is generally 5%. So for a mere £10,000 of Sharesave, which may have been accumulated over 20 years of work—hardly high amounts—these taxpayers, who have been PAYE all their lives, will now need to do a tax return in order to recover 8.75% on that marginal pound over £500. This seems to be unduly parsimonious, and I sincerely beg those on the Front Bench to look at it again. It will cost more for HMRC to administer these small amounts of tax receipts; there is no sensible intention here at all.

Clause 18 deals with the lifetime allowance for pensions. We are having a debate this afternoon, and Labour Members obviously think that this should be carved out just for those in the NHS and nobody else. We already have a carve-out for senior judges, and there is even a special one for the Leader of the Opposition. Why have this just for doctors? There is a saying in tax, which is that we should never allow the tax tail to wag the commercial dog, and that is exactly what has been happening with pensions: people have been retiring early and not taking up extra work because of this tax trap. I am delighted that we are getting rid of that trap. Surely a senior teacher who has been in employment for a number of years, a senior civil servant, or someone senior in the police or the armed services will be accumulating in excess of the old threshold of £1,073,000. Those very senior people are now likely to stay in post for longer, offering their services to the nation.

I could have lived with the £40,000 annual threshold, so I am delighted that it has gone up to £60,000. Why should a taxpayer—not a civil servant paid for by the public purse in any way—be penalised for good management of their pension fund? I have always found that bizarre. If they have been clever, they have had a great independent financial adviser or they have managed their own self-invested personal pension and they have exceeded that limit because of their own research and endeavours—and perhaps a bit of good luck—I say, “Good luck to them.” Why should there be a tax hit on that? Clause 20 and the annual allowance increase from £40,000 to £60,000 are therefore very welcome. The £40,000 threshold has been in place from 2014-15 and I calculated that, with inflation, it would be at £52,000 today. We have therefore done something outside the fiscal drag here, so that must be very good news. I would have thought that the Labour party, which has mentioned fiscal drag, would be grateful for that.

May I pay a particular tribute to the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, because I believe that I have had a success in this Finance Bill, and I do not get too many of those? I spotted it! It comes in clause 29, which deals with estates in administration, and in parts 1 and 2 of schedule 2, under the heading “Low income trusts and estates”. I am ignoring the complication of multiple settlements, so let us put that aside. There has been a concession by HMRC for many years that if someone had an estate in administration and the tax payable was £100 or less, HMRC did not want to know. What a lovely simplifying measure that is. However, it did not apply to small trusts, for example, where granny had left the Lloyds shares. I am being very nice to Lloyds this afternoon, so let us use a different share—

[Kit Malthouse]

Standard Life.

[Craig Mackinlay]

I thank my right hon. Friend for the prompt.

Let us suppose the Standard Life shares had been left for the grandchildren to get the capital when they are 18—I am talking about the usual little family trust. Under the changes that were made some years ago, any small amount of dividends required a full tax return, because 7.5% of dividend tax had to be found and the stopping of withholding tax on bank interest received required that to be returned. We therefore had the mad situation where people with the smallest trusts, created perhaps many moons ago for austere reasons and with parsimonious amounts, were having to do a full trust return.

I have been pushing on this since 2017, when my right hon. Friend the Member for Central Devon (Mel Stride) was the Financial Secretary, and I saw in the Bill that we are not going to have the £100 disregard on tax and that there will be a £500 income in total disregard. Thankfully, these small trusts will be able to save their accountant’s fees, if they had even thought they needed one thus far. I hope that this measure will have a degree of retrospection and HMRC will not be raising £100 fines and more all over the place for the granny trusts with a few Standard Life shares in them. This could have been achieved just by HMRC practice or an old-fashioned extra statutory concession, but it is being done legislatively and I am delighted about that.

So we are up to clause 29 of the 352 in the Bill. Members will be grateful to hear that I will leave it to others to comment on the alcohol duty changes, which range from clauses 44 to 120. So we have cut out a good amount there, Mr Deputy Speaker. What I am going to say now will perhaps be aired by others this afternoon. There was nothing on Budget day—not even the barest word—about these OECD pillar two proposals. To the Financial Secretary’s credit, she did mention them, but perhaps rather more briefly than required, given that half the Bill relates to them. In easy terms, as the Bill mentions, this is about the “multinational top-up tax”. It sounds cosy, does it not? Additionally, between clauses 265 and 312, there are measures on the “domestic top-up tax”. The House might be pleased to know that I am now up to clause 312 of 352. I have, constitutionally, an extreme disquiet, not about the proposal itself, but about what such a major international treaty commitment is doing within a Finance Bill. This has far-reaching consequences for UK corporation tax rules, yet it has been barely mentioned before today, and it is in a Finance Bill when it should be standing alone as an international treaty.

What worries me further, and it has been raised in interventions, is that most of the rest of the world is saying, “Thanks, but no thanks.” It seems that only the UK and South Korea are making substantial progress on this. I know that Switzerland, Holland, Germany and Japan have begun drafting, but 100 other countries are doing absolutely nothing at all at the moment and the EU has allowed a six-year run-on for the directive to take full effect. Four countries—Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore and the USA—are saying that it is not for them at all.

Why, having had multiple years of Brexit battles, which were, at their core, over the sovereignty and independence of this nation, would we wish to outsource our own international corporation tax affairs to a supranational body? We are already having battles in the House with the Illegal Migration Bill about how the 1951 convention and the ECHR obligations are coming home to roost. Those conventions and treaties were signed with the best of intentions at the time, when the world was a rather different place, but they are now coming home to roost in ways that we perhaps did not expect.

The manifesto commitment on which I and every Conservative MP stood in 2019 was to take back control of our money and our laws. To see us almost unilaterally adopting this international accord on corporation tax seems rather strange. I am afraid that we are seeing rather a lot of this, including in terms of climate change commitments. We seem to be promoting a Betamax when the rest of the world is waiting for the VHS to come down the line. Being first in the field is not always the best place to be.

Perhaps it is thought that this will be a new tax-raising measure—I have seen it written that £2 billion could be raised by it. I stand to be corrected, but over many years Finance Bills have had substantial anti-avoidance legislation to stop transfer pricing. That has been the feature of much tax legislation over many years, which I would have thought would catch and overcome any mischief on low-tax profit shifting. But will this actually raise anything? I wonder what the OECD is trying to achieve. Will low-tax jurisdictions, particularly those involved in the insurance industry, just sit back and say, “Oh well, profits will be taxed up the line in the UK or elsewhere”—a very limited number of companies are taking this onboard—or will they raise tax themselves? That seems the obvious place they will go, but there is a conundrum. Much of the legislation is to do with how we calculate that profit. We have our means of calculating profit according to our corporation tax law, and other countries do the same. This is trying to overlay a determination of OECD profit out of the books and records of large, multinational corporations in the UK. That is what this is all about. It is about trying to create a new form of profit.

We have seen that—I have commented on it in the past—in something that is quite simple: whether one qualifies for support for childcare. We have three forms of calculation of profit in our tax code relating to the simple sole trader. That is the normal taxable profit in accordance with our tax law. We have a different assessment—it is marginally different—for calculation of profit to qualify for universal credits. Then there is something completely different, if someone wants to calculate their due profit for qualification of child help and support. Therefore, we are overlaying more complication on that OECD framework.

[Kit Malthouse]

Again, I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Does my hon. Friend think that there is a risk that countries may seek to manipulate their tax code in such a way that, while their headline rate might comply with the international minimum, the effective rate could be manipulated by the creation of all sorts of bonkers and crazy allowances, as we have seen in the past? We have full expensing of capital. That is fine for a capital-intensive company, but we have lots of items that are disqualified for corporation tax, which could be allowed if we wanted to make the effective rate lower than the minimum 15% in future. In many ways, that encourages even more gaming of the system by countries, rather than the system that we have at the moment, where it is a bit more transparent, if indeed complex.

[Craig Mackinlay]

My right hon. Friend highlights the problem that different countries could indeed game the system. The peculiarity here is the domestic top-up tax. Even if, under the UK calculation of profit, a business had a profit rate of more than 15%, it could be under 15% using the OECD way of calculating profit and therefore there would be a top-up tax. That is truly perverse. In accordance with UK tax law, perfect rates of corporation tax are being paid, but because it does not comply with these new strictures, of which there are hundreds of pages in this legislation, someone could find themselves paying a domestic top-up.

My concern is whether we will see a rash of new statutory instruments, as we have new external nation-UK tax treaties needing to be looked at and unwound. I wonder, too, whether any thought has been given to potential trade deals; I am given to understand that the US is looking quite negatively at countries that are looking to implement the OECD pillar 2 proposals.

I am just about to conclude, which I am sure will be a great relief to many. What would I like those on the Treasury Front Bench to look at carefully before we get to Committee stage, Report and beyond? I recommend that we strip out the multinational top-up tax clauses, or implement what other hon. Friends have suggested, a start date more in accordance with when the rest of the world thinks this is a great idea as well. Otherwise, as I have said before, we could be buying the Betamax when we should be waiting for VHS.

These measures occupy half of the Bill. I would like to hear assurances that for 2024-25 we can have the £1,000 as a general disregard threshold applied to dividend taxes under a simplification measure. However, given that the Bill runs to such a huge volume, I would like to hear more about how we are going to replace the Office of Tax Simplification. I think it would be fair to say that I know many of the characters in there—there were a number of ex-presidents of the Chartered Institute of Taxation. I do not know quite how wide a remit they had, but one has to assume they did not really get very far with tax simplification.

When I qualified as a chartered accountant in 1991, there was big talk about the tax law rewrite to change seven pages explaining first in, first out with perhaps one word, FIFO. We have a lot of verbiage in our tax system, and to address and simplify the 23,000 pages would aid everybody. Those are my brief observations on the Finance Bill.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Roger Gale)]

I notice that my two predecessors in the Chair this afternoon have paid tribute to Baroness Boothroyd, and I would like to do the same. Betty was one of the two great Speakers of my parliamentary lifetime, the other being Jack Weatherill—that is excluding the current Speaker, of course, who will no doubt take his own place in those annals. Not all Speakers have a facility with names and faces, and Betty freely admitted she was one who did not—something you may have noticed I sometimes suffer from myself. She just used to say, “You, lovey—no, no, not you, lovey; you, lovey.” Happily, I can remember Stewart Hosie’s name.