Community Pharmacy in 2016-17 and Beyond

Debate between David Mowat and Nigel Mills

1st reading: House of Commons
Thursday 20th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[David Mowat]

Not that I know of, but there may well be. The facts are that the £2.8 billion that we currently spend is for services and for disbursing £8 billion-worth of drugs. It is a valuable service, but it is right that we look to see that that money is spent effectively and as effectively as in other parts of the NHS. It is the Government’s job to make sure that every penny that we give the NHS provides maximum value for patients.

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

May I declare an interest, in that my wife is a community pharmacist? I should therefore probably be cautious in welcoming this statement, for obvious reasons. Will the Minister confirm that the proposals to have a hub-and-spoke model, which would have been even more damaging to community pharmacies, are not part of this step forward?

[David Mowat]

I can confirm that no part of what we are talking about today is in respect of the hub-and-spoke model that my hon. Friend talks about.

Diverted Profits Tax

Debate between David Mowat and Nigel Mills

Wednesday 7th January 2015 Westminster Hall

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

My hon. Friend said that this unilateral action should not affect a global agreement that may be reached in the future. What concerns me, however, is that some countries—Luxembourg, the Republic of Ireland and, possibly, Holland—are acting as de facto tax havens. They regard helping big companies avoid tax in our country as a method of increasing their GDP. Given that, it is unlikely there will ever be a global agreement of the type my hon. Friend is talking about.

[Nigel Mills]

I have always been cynical about the OECD process, for exactly the reason my hon. Friend gives: the risk is that some countries will block it or undermine it out of self-interest. If the main countries are serious about tackling multinational tax avoidance, one country that really needs to change its rules is the US. The US could stop a lot of this by changing some of its rather strange entity classification rules and other things. That would stop US corporates getting the real tax saving they are after. I sense that until the US is willing to do that, we will never see these things stop completely.

[David Mowat]

I should have added that our hands are not clean. We appear quite sanguine about the status of the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey. I am always a bit surprised that neither Front Bench has ever regarded that as an issue on which more action is needed. People in Luxembourg would raise that issue with us, just as I am accusing them of acting as de facto assisters of tax evasion.

[Nigel Mills]

My hon. Friend makes a fair point about the UK doing some sponsoring of the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, but I will leave the Minister to answer for the Government’s policies on tackling that. My hon. Friend says our hands are not entirely clean; it is interesting that we have introduced the Patent Box to try to have a lower tax rate for intellectual property in the UK—presumably on royalties charged in countries around the world. We have also been trying to get our tax rate down to a low level to encourage international investment. Someone sitting somewhere with a tax rate much higher than 20% might think that we are trying to encourage profits to be taxed here that perhaps should not be, but I am sure that is not the Government’s intention.

To wrap up on the BEPS process, the Association of Revenue and Customs—the trade union for professionals at HMRC—raised the concern that the Government’s proposals were unilateral and stood outside the BEPS proposals. The ARC suggested an alternative approach, whereby the Government remain in the BEPS process and timetable, but use their current initiative to show they will have legislation in place in case the process falters or is impeded. I presume the Government will confirm that they do not intend to slow down on the rules and wait for the BEPS process and that we will see them on the statute book later in the year.

The second area I would like to look at briefly is how likely the rules are to be effective. We all want the tax to be collected in the UK. We do not want to see these corporates able to artificially avoid paying the tax that is due here, but there is a question on whether the rules will survive a challenge under the UK’s many double tax treaties or under EU law. People suspect that the Government have chosen to do a whole new tax, rather than just tweak the existing corporation tax rules, to try to ensure that the rules are not struck down by our international treaties or by EU law. Can the Minister confirm that the Government have looked into that and are satisfied that the treaty analysis is correct? Paragraph 4 of article 2 of the OECD’s model tax convention states:

“The Convention shall apply also to any identical or substantially similar taxes that are imposed after the date of signature of the Convention in addition to, or in place of, the existing taxes.”

At first glance, it looks as though the direct profits tax will be a tax on corporate income, which sounds similar to a corporate income tax and our corporation tax. The definition in the convention suggests that the tax might be caught by the treaties. Article 7 of the convention, which is on business profits, states:

“Profits of an enterprise of a Contracting State shall be taxable only in that State unless the enterprise carries on business in the other Contracting State through a permanent establishment situated therein.”

The problem we are trying to fix with the avoided permanent establishment part of the rules is that if a company does not have a PE, we cannot tax them. We think they are diverting profits out of the UK and we want to tax those profits, but if we are dropped back into the treaty, we might end up in the same position as we started. It would be useful to understand how the Government have satisfied themselves that the tax will not be caught. Is it because they are trying to tax the UK establishment that already exists, or do they believe that it is a new tax that falls outside the treaty?

On the EU law point, I am no big fan of the EU interfering in our tax system. Tax is meant to be for nation states and not the EU. I have never been keen on the view that the European Court of Justice should interfere in sensible tax avoidance rules, so I will not advocate that here, but there must be a risk for the many companies that choose to site themselves in Luxembourg, as my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South (David Mowat) said. We have all seen the tax rulings that have been published, and we know how many companies are doing that. A company based in Luxembourg might say, “Wait a minute: if I am established in the UK and pay tax there, I pay it at 20%. Why, because I am in Luxembourg, do I pay a slightly different tax at 25%? Is that not fundamentally contrary to some kind of freedom of establishment principle?” There is a risk of a legal challenge to the rules on that basis. It would be useful to understand how the Government have satisfied themselves that the European courts would not strike down what many of us see as a sensible anti-avoidance measure that we would not want to lose.

The flipside to that is whether the provisions have been drawn up in the right way, so that they catch those we are aiming at, but do not create onerous burdens for loads of “innocent” corporations or place a ridiculous burden on HMRC. We want targeted rules that attack the corporations engaging in what they must know to be pretty aggressive artificial structuring. The guidance is clear on some of the structures that HMRC and the Treasury are targeting. We would all probably agree that it looks artificial if a sales force gets 95% of the way through a sale and cannot sign the final contract, but has to refer it to Luxembourg, Switzerland or somewhere else. If the rules are drafted too broadly, there is a risk of thousands of companies that the Government had not intended to be caught fearing that they will be caught. That creates a burden on them, and they will have to go through the whole compliance process to satisfy themselves that they are not caught.

The flipside to that is the risk that HMRC gets thousands of notices that it cannot possibly deal with, and then misses the notices that have all the tax at stake. By drawing the rules too widely, people could sneak through the middle who should not. The adviser community is expressing sensible concerns and asking, “Have the rules been drawn too broadly? Is there any way that they can be focused, perhaps through filters, such as those in the controlled foreign company rules?” Through that, we could be clear to taxpayers on who is intended to be caught, and what the hallmarks are that let them know that they are caught. That can give those who are not trying to avoid UK tax artificially some kind of comfort that they are not in the rules and do not need to do the self-assessment.