Tax Avoidance

Debate between Frank Dobson and Ian Swales

Wednesday 11th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Ian Swales (Redcar) (LD)]

This whole area of tax ranks as another mess that the Government are having to clear up. We inherited a situation in which the Labour party had put into action the philosophy of its former Business Secretary in being

“intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”.

[Frank Dobson]

The hon. Gentleman should complete the quotation. I am not usually regarded as the greatest defender of Lord Mandelson, but the part-sentence he has just quoted was followed by the words “providing they pay their fair share of tax”.

[Ian Swales]

I accept that correction. On Labour’s watch, the rate of capital gains tax was 18%, and it had been as low as 10%, which especially benefited hedge funds; it is now up to 28%. There was pensions tax relief on up to £250,000 a year; the figure is now £40,000. The rate of VAT on their yachts, sports cars and Rolexes was 2.5% lower. There was lower stamp duty on property, and there was no duty on property bought and sold through corporate envelopes. The rate of income tax was 5% lower throughout the 13 years of the previous Government until 5 April 2010, the day before they left office. There was also tax avoidance on an industrial scale.

We have to be careful of our language, but it is worth saying that avoidance is fine as long as it follows the law. As with pension contributions, many ways of saving tax are perfectly legitimate—in fact, they are encouraged by the Government, sometimes to support economic activity—but many others are not. For example, a Radio 1 DJ used the so-called “working wheels” bogus scheme to create losses on a used car business. That scheme was promoted by NT Advisors. The clue was in the name, because NT stood for “no tax”. That happened in 2007-08. The appropriately named Take That and many others used a scheme to shelter £340 million from the taxman. There was the case involving Patrick Degorce, in which Goldcrest Pictures sold him the rights for two films for the artificially inflated amount of £21.9 million. They were immediately sold back for a fraction of that, which meant that his hedge fund profits of £18.8 million could be entirely sheltered from tax. The promoters of that scheme made £1.6 million on the deal and HSBC made £438,000 for giving the advice. Incidentally, Patrick Degorce later worked with Lansdowne Partners, which is a hedge fund founded by a Conservative donor. To me, such schemes look not just like tax avoidance, but like fraud.

I welcome the moves that the Government are making. The number of prosecutions is up from 165 in 2010-11 to 1,165 in the current year. However, there is a lot further to go. A culture change is needed. When people engage in such activity, they are depleting the public purse. Whereas benefit fraud is treated as a crime in this country, tax fraud is treated as a sport. It is perhaps ironic that tax avoiders often give a great deal to charity. I do not know whether that is because of guilt or because they feel like giving back some of the money that they have salted away.

I have often spoken about tax avoidance in this place. I will repeat what I have said before about one big issue that I constantly raise, where there is more that the Government need to do. International finance directors will say that the main way in which they shift profits around is through their financing structures. It is simple and totally legal to finance a UK activity from offshore, then export the UK profits via interest payments to a low-tax regime. Many companies do that and those that do not may be aggressively taken over, as was Boots, so that somebody else can do it.

Large parts of the financing of the private finance initiatives that ballooned under the last Government have been moved offshore. Some 50% of the PFI schools in my constituency are owned in Jersey. Junctions 1A to 3 of the M40 are 50% owned in Guernsey. Famously, HMRC’s own offices are wholly owned in Bermuda after a deal that was done in 2001.

Dealing with tax evasion and avoidance is important to my party because they are not victimless activities. Every pound that is lost is a pound less for public services or a pound extra that has to be raised from other taxpayers. As the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Anas Sarwar) said, charities such as ActionAid and Christian Aid point out that aggressive tax avoidance is a drain on third-world countries. I disagreed with him when he said that the UK is not taking a global lead on the issue, because that is one of the things that the Government are doing. We are changing the international climate, as well as closing many loopholes and spending much more to deal with the issue in this country.

There is more that needs to be done. We have not made much headway on tax simplification in this country. We still have the most complex tax code in the world. We need more transparency and more country-by-country reporting. As I said, we need a culture change, so that tax cheats are seen as just as antisocial as benefit cheats.

Based on my experience of this issue in this place, I am left with the nagging feeling, which I think is shared by the public, that Labour lacks the competence to deal with it and the Conservatives sometimes lack the will, whereas the Lib Dems are proud of our contribution and will keep campaigning.

Finance Bill

Debate between Frank Dobson and Ian Swales

Tuesday 1st July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Ian Swales (Redcar) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali). I agree that we should be aiming for a tax system that is as fair as possible and accept that the timing of the top rate cut was not good for public relations or for feelings throughout the country. But let us examine the genesis of this situation.

In 2010, 6 April was an important day. It was the day that the top rate of tax was raised from 40p to 50p. It was also the day that Parliament was dissolved—the very last day that Labour Members sat on the Government Benches. They were sat on these Benches for one day with the top rate of tax at 50p. Clearly, as the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) said, the rate was raised in the full knowledge that Labour was likely to lose the general election. It was the then Chancellor’s leaving present, which he knew would keep leading to headlines and would be the gift that kept on giving. Listening to the speeches made by Opposition Members today one would imagine that there had been a 50p tax rate throughout their time in government, and not simply on the last day on which they sat on the Government Benches.

[Frank Dobson]

Does the hon. Gentleman, as a Lib Dem, not recall that that date was significant in another way, as it was the day that the leader of the Liberal Democrats signed a pledge to get rid of tuition fees?

[Ian Swales]

Mr Deputy Speaker, I am sure you would call me out of order if I responded to that point.

Labour’s Chancellors were not slow to raise taxes—in fact, there is a long list of almost 100 taxes that they raised in 13 years—but strangely enough, they did not raise this one. Again, as the right hon. Member for Wokingham eloquently said, they knew that it was dubious that raising the top rate of income tax would lead to actual benefits. He mentioned the experiments of the 1980s in this country; François Hollande is conducting a live experiment right now across the channel and is getting very much the same results, with one prominent French citizen, Gérard Depardieu, moving all the way to Russia to avoid penal tax rates.

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood)talked about the need for analysis. I make two suggestions. First, I presume that during the 13 years of the previous Labour Government a great deal of analysis was carried out on whether raising the top rate was the right thing to do—as I said, they were not slow to look at new ways of raising money and clearly kept on rejecting it as an option. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has now studied Labour’s proposal to raise the top rate back to 50p and has said that it is of dubious benefit. In fact, I think the hon. Lady herself said that it could cost money and would not be drawn on whether that would make her change the policy.

We ought to take what the Labour party says with a pinch of salt. It cut taxes every single year for millionaires.

Finance (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Frank Dobson and Ian Swales

Monday 15th April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

Whatever else can be said, it is quite clear that this Finance Bill will not sort out the public finances. As a result, we have got all sorts of efforts to distract people’s attention.

We have got the Work and Pensions Secretary going on about new punishments for people involved in benefit fraud. I am against benefit fraud, but I am against all fraud. Let us try to get things into perspective. In the last year for which figures are available, benefit fraud cost £1.2 billion. A recent study by Oxfam says that in the last year for which it has figures, tax fraud cost the taxpayer £5 billion. Needless to say, the Treasury said it did not recognise that figure, which is officialese for: “I can’t think what to say; I’ll have to find out what the boss says.” However, the Treasury has to acknowledge—because it produced this figure itself—that in the last year for which official figures are available, £4 billion was lost to tax fraud. It also produced figures for that year showing that tax avoidance—not tax evasion—cost the taxpayer £5 billion. There was a further loss of £4 billion for what is called “non-payment”—in other words, businesses making sure that when something went wrong, it was not the taxpayer who got any of the money. That makes a total of £13 billion lost in one year, mainly as a result of the desire and effective efforts by the rich and big businesses not to pay tax. That means that the taxpayer was swindled out of £13 billion in one year alone.

To be fair, that is partly because this House is notoriously bad at producing tax laws that actually work. That might be partly an effect of the fact that for years the Treasury has been advised on such matters by the very banks and accountancy firms that are doing the swindling in the first place. However, there is little real conviction in the idea that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs will do a good job of getting the money that we have voted should be taken. In fairness to HMRC, tax avoidance has become a major British industry. It is not a sideline of the big four banks or the big four firms of accountants; it is a major part of their industrial activity. They are not exactly big taxpayers themselves: in one year, Barclays paid just 1% of its profits in tax.

Then there is the massive and disgraceful involvement of the British financial sector in tax havens round the world, usually in British dependencies. When the British empire was at its zenith, the slogan was “Trade follows the flag”, and it still does, because the British dependencies, flying the British flag, are the major tax havens all over the world. The mighty British empire has been reduced to a scatter of sordid tax havens, where most of the fiddling is done by British banks and British firms of accountants. They are there helping the tax avoiders and helping the rich freeloaders to avoid the tax they should be paying here and in other countries. Let me give one or two examples. Barclays has just over 1,000 subsidiaries, 36% of which are located in tax havens. HSBC has 1,500 subsidiaries and, again, 36% are in tax havens. The Royal Bank of Scotland is slightly better—only 31% of its 1,300 subsidiaries are located in tax havens—while just 21% of Lloyds’s subsidiaries are located in tax havens.

[Ian Swales]

The right hon. Gentleman is making a powerful speech, but I am sure he is not suggesting that all this has arisen in the last three years. Can he remind the House of any steps that his Government took in this regard and does he welcome the steps that this Government are taking? They have resulted in, for example, Barclays closing down its structured capital markets department, which was basically about tax avoidance.

[Frank Dobson]

I never said for a minute that it started recently. It has been going on for donkey’s years. I am not sure about the Lib Dems, but I cannot remember an organisation when Labour was in government called Tories in Favour of Stopping Tax Avoidance. Perhaps the minutes will be produced by someone, but it seems extremely unlikely, because everything the Tories ever said when they were in opposition was about Labour being too nasty to the finance industry and proposing things that might damage it. So we trundled on, until the finance industry damaged the rest of us. It is worth remembering that the banks’ wrongdoing has cost us £700 billion in lost production since the crash. That is what we have all lost.

These British banks and firms of accountants are not just organising tax avoidance in the tax havens for all the swindlers. We now know—from prosecutions and from agreements that they have come to with the American authorities—that they have been organising money laundering from massive drug dealing, gun running, people trafficking and busting sanctions on places such as Burma.

I think the British banks should be doing something a bit different. I think they might possibly have done a bit of investing in this country. In the past, small businesses all over the country could go and see their local bank managers at one of the big banks and talk to them about their problems. They knew one another and knew what their prospects were. People could borrow money that way, and it worked. Then the banks started centralising all the funds, so nothing is left with the local bank manager and local firms now have to be interrogated by an algorithm—that is what it boils down to—in the banks’ headquarters. They have not been investing in this country. We have to ask ourselves why a large proportion of the industries that were privatised are now owned by foreign owners, such as Électricité de France or the Australian outfit that owns Thames Water. Could the British banks not have invested in British businesses? Was there not enough profit for them? Does that mean that the profits in the tax havens and from all sorts of derivatives activities were going to raise them more money? That may be so, but what has happened demonstrates just how awful the performance of the British banks and finance industry has been.

I do not think this Finance Bill, any of the proposals the Government have put forward or even the one or two they have started implementing reflect the scale of wrongdoing that needs to be put right—the swindling that involved British companies and the damage that does to us as a trading nation with, until recently, a reputation for honesty and fair dealing. At its core—I say this with some care—this is a corrupt set-up. We have a banking industry and an accountancy industry that are involved in criminal and semi-criminal activity all over the world, yet we say to countries such as Bangladesh, “There’s too much corruption in your country.” If we are going to start trying to sort out corruption in other places, it is about time we did it here and where British companies are operating. We need transparency, and we certainly do not need tax havens, especially those that fly the British flag. Their objective is not transparency but the complete opposite: it is to be as obscure as is humanly possible in order to keep the tax authorities out.

Another point that is constantly made is that, if we were to change the rules on banking and accountancy, the very clever people in the City would simply get round them. That is unacceptable. Why should such behaviour be acceptable in the finance industry? We would regard it as totally unacceptable if the building industry said, “You can rely on us to get round the building regulations,” if the aviation industry said, “We can get round the safety rules,” or if the pharmaceutical industry said, “We won’t carry out the proper checks that are required. We can get round those rules.” We ought to regard it as totally unacceptable when people representing the finance industry say, “Whatever you do in the House of Commons, we’ll get round your rules.”