Saving for Later Life

Debate between Jim Shannon and Nigel Mills

Tuesday 7th February 2023 Westminster Hall

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie. I congratulate the Chair of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms), on securing the debate. As a member of the Backbench Business Committee, I thank him for applying for time for us to have a debate on this important topic.

Pension debates are bit like buses: we have had none for ages, and now we have had three in the last four sitting days, so we can certainly explore the topic thoroughly. By some fluke, we have ended up with all the key planks of pensions status being considered over the last few days. We looked at the age at which people should get their state pension and, last night, we looked at increasing pensions to keep them in line with inflation, which is key plank. If we are going to have a model where the state pension should be enough to keep people out of poverty in retirement, and after that is up to people to save for the kind of living that they want, we need to ensure the minimum floor is in the right place. We should welcome the fact the Government did that last night.

However, that leaves our whole pension-saving approach relying on how much people and their employers save for their own retirement. It is almost impossible to avoid the conclusion that people are simply not saving enough. The vast majority of people who work now are not saving enough, and the younger they are the more likely they are not to be saving enough.

The situation is stark. Around 28% of employees are still in defined benefit schemes, mainly in the public sector. Some 87% of those get an employer contribution of over 12% of their pay. However, for the 51% of people in defined contribution schemes, that number falls to 9%, so 91% of people in defined contribution schemes are not getting an employer contribution that is anything like the level that they used to have, or the level that we get.

The situation for the self-employed, as the Chair of the Select Committee set out, is even worse, as only 16% of self-employed people are saving anything like a material amount in a pension. Despite the incredible growth in the employed having a pension, that number for the self-employed is down from 48% 20 years ago, so they are going in the wrong direction. I suspect that is mostly because there is now a lot more self-employment in the gig economy. We can argue whether they are really self-employed, but they are the ones without any pension provision at all. There is clearly a huge problem, and we need to find a way to solve it.

Auto-enrolment was a tremendous start, getting people who were not saving anything to at least save something. The problem, of course, is that they are not saving anything like enough, and they probably do not even know that. The reason why auto-enrolment was chosen and was such a great success was that it did not require any engagement from the individual. In some ways, engagement is a bad thing, because if they do not know that this money is being taken from them and put in a pension scheme, they will not opt out.

We are trying to build a model that requires engagement to boost savings levels on a model where success was based on not having very much engagement. That is a real problem that we must wrestle with carefully. We do not want people to start opting out, but we do want them to realise that they are not going to have much quality of life in retirement if they do not do something materially different.

That brings us to two initiatives. The first is the dashboard and the second is access to guidance. There is a general consensus that the dashboard will be great, and that it will move us forward by enabling people to understand how much they have got in savings. It would be helpful if the Minister could give an update on when people will have live access that enables them to see at least the majority of the pensions they have saved for in their life. I think we would all accept that it is better to have it later than to have something that is rubbish, but let us not have perfection delay it too far. There probably will be some pensions schemes that will not be able to meet any kind of realistic starting date soon, but they will have so few savers in them that there will not be a problem for the vast majority. I hope that some time next year, people will have live access so that they can find out how much pension saving they have.

Having spent years working out the mechanics and how to make the system safe, what we really need to fix is what people will see when they go on the pensions dashboards. Will the Minister set out the process and her vision for it? People need a clear statement of what they have already saved and some objective, fair and consistent comparison with what they need to have saved, what other people have saved by that time and what they are on track to achieve. Otherwise, they will just see a large-looking pot of money. For someone with no other savings, having 20 grand in their pension might look like they are rich and everything is going to be fine.

[Jim Shannon]

I want to pick up on the point about national insurance contributions, and ladies who thought they were on a pension scheme that would reward them when they reached pension age. As an elected representative, I have had a number of constituents come forward over the past few years to tell me that, as they were part-time workers, their national insurance stamps were paid only for a certain period of time. That means that when they reach pension age, their pension is not there for them, although their understanding was that they would have a pension. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that for ladies of the generation now coming to pension age who will not have a pension because they have not paid their national insurance contributions to their full entitlement, the Government should make people more aware so that they can take steps early?

[Nigel Mills]

Yes, the hon. Gentleman is right that we need people to understand if they have gaps in their state pension record. That can be found relatively straightforwardly on the state pension system. The dashboard will need to show the state pension entitlement. I urge ladies who might be in that situation to check, because they ought to have got credits while they were receiving child benefit. They might not have been working, but they had other caring responsibilities. It is always worth checking whether they have entitlements of which they may not be aware, and which the system has not picked up.

Back to my theme on the dashboard: for the dashboard to have the impact we want—for people to change their saving behaviour—the information needs to be there. It needs to say, “Yes, you have saved this amount, but most people by your age have saved this amount. If you want to have £10 grand of extra income in retirement over your state pension, you are not on track to do that, and you need to increase your saving.” We need to find a way to give people a context for their savings information. Otherwise, we will have a meaningless number that might not drive behaviour. It might even perversely make people think they are better off than they are.

It is important to understand what the Government and the regulators will allow to be shown and want to be shown. We must ensure that the data is objective, fair, accurate and preferably consistent, because we do not want people to get slightly different pension target across six schemes; they should be told the same information so they can make an accurate comparison.

The second area is the thorny issue of access to guidance and when people should have it. The Work and Pensions Committee has argued with the Government and the regulator about that for a few years. I hope the noises coming out of the Government about trying to get people who are not in economic activity back into work, and about wanting to do more than a midlife MOT or a financial review, mean that they are moving our way now, but the take-up of Pension Wise has been far lower than everybody wanted it to be. The Minister at the time said that Pension Wise take-up should be the norm. I am not sure how 8% or 14% take-up could be described as the norm; I would have thought that the norm would be just below half, or something. Perhaps the Minister can tell us what she thinks the norm is in that context.

There is no room for doubt: even with the stronger nudge that the Money and Pensions Service is trialling, Pension Wise will not get anywhere near that take-up. It is absolutely right that people should have access to that service when they are about to do something with their pension pot. It is a decision that they will not be able to change for the rest of their life, and if they get it wrong, it could be disastrous. Equally, given that we have so much unused take-up, can we not find a way of getting people to access the scheme earlier, soon after their 50s? That would allow them to get a proper review for half an hour or an hour and have all these things explained to them, so they can see what their situation is while they still have a chance to change it, rather than when it is too late? I am old enough to remember “Bullseye”—at the end of the show they used to say, “Here’s what you could have won.” Having a pension review at the age of 65 and a half that says, “Here’s what you could have had if you had saved a bit more,” is not all that helpful to people, so they should get that intervention earlier.

I was a little disappointed by the Government’s response to the Work and Pensions Committee. They said they did not want to go forward with a trial of auto-enrolling people into a Pension Wise appointment shortly after their 50th birthday. I understand that some pension schemes are willing to put their members forward in some sensible, random way so we can find out whether that works. All we are asking the Government to do is to allow MaPS and regulators to commission one of those trials so that we can see whether enrolling people into an appointment in their early 50s gets positive feedback and changes their behaviour. If it does not work, fine—we will have to find some other way—but it looks to be a low-cost way of seeing whether an intervention might work. It would use capacity that is already there and is not being taken up, and it would be a powerful way forward.

I hope that the Minister will be a bit more supportive than her predecessor. If we want to work out how to give people some kind of nudge, hint or push at an age when they can make a change, that is the best idea out there. If the Government are looking for ideas to get people in that age bracket to come back into work, because they have not saved enough for retirement but they think they have, a half-hour or hour session with an expert who can explain what they really need and what they have really got may be the best way of doing it. The online midlife MOT that the Government have produced contains some very useful information—I am not saying it is a bad thing—but it will not change behaviour. It is not an intervention that will really make a difference.

Diverted Profits Tax

Debate between Jim Shannon and Nigel Mills

Wednesday 7th January 2015 Westminster Hall

[Jim Shannon]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We need to have legislation in place that enables us to oversee the loopholes that have been outlined. We are all hoping that the Minister will tell us how it will work in her response. I hope she will address the questions that have been asked.

Starbucks employs 8,500 people in the UK, so it makes a contribution in employment, wages and associated taxes, but it pays no corporation tax. Amazon, another global company, employs 15,000 staff in the UK and reported sales of £3.35 billion in 2011, as well as profits of £74 million, but it paid only £1.8 million in corporation tax. That annoys me greatly. Google, one of our favourite search engines, made £396 million in 2011 and paid only £6 million in corporation tax. Some of the companies have of course been stung into making tax contributions, although those have been minimal.

An article by Joseph Brothers that I read last month in the magazine Tax Notes International sums up the subject of the earlier intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Upper Bann (David Simpson) on brass plating. Brothers suggested that Apple, reacting to a threat by the Irish Government to shut down one of their lucrative, corporate-friendly, tax-avoiding laws, would switch strategies to escape taxes in Ireland. He wrote that the so-called “Double Irish” might soon be replaced by a new “Bermuda Triangle”: instead of ships and planes mysteriously disappearing in it, it would be a triangle of tax treaties between Ireland, the Netherlands and Bermuda, exploiting rules that do not quite align and creating the space for profits to vanish, at least to the eyes of the Internal Revenue Service auditors.

If that strategy works, Google and others are likely to follow suit. The outcome could well be that the big corporate tax dodgers achieve what a noted tax lawyer calls “stateless income”: siphoning profit out of high-tax countries in Europe, Japan and North America and moving it around under tax treaties until it is not subject to any tax, because any profits are being reported in a non-existent country called “nowhere”. That is the bottom line of what could happen if our legislation is not correct and if the loopholes, disparities and open questions are not dealt with.

I am using those three companies as examples, but there are many others. Unfortunately, a common trend is filtering down through to a large number of companies. At the end of the day, we must remember that UK-based companies pay corporation tax on their taxable profits wherever those are made. It is only right, therefore, that foreign companies pay tax in the UK on profits made in this country. We must make it clear that the UK is not a country to come to for freeloading. Those are the issues.

Many British-based global companies do pay their taxes. They are concerned that the new legislation might give HMRC too much discretion. Furthermore, as the head of the tax policy unit of KPMG here in the UK noted in the company’s latest annual tax competitiveness survey, companies value “stability” and “simplicity”, but unfortunately, one criticism of the proposed legislation is that it does not offer simplicity. Many questions therefore need to be answered and much transparency applied to ensure that the legislation, while welcome—we have to take a step in the right direction—can work in practice.

The aims of the legislation are admirable as well as necessary. In a recent poll of more than 500 accounting and small business professionals, taken immediately after the Chancellor’s autumn statement, 56% of respondents said that the most significant tax announcement in the speech was the one about the diverted profits tax. Many, perhaps all of us—if not the companies trying to avoid the measure—welcome it, but we need to be sure that everything is in place.

Will the Minister tell us about another issue raised by the hon. Member for Amber Valley: the IT equipment necessary to ensure that expertise is in place? There is also the question of the resourcing of moneys. I understand that the initial set-up will cost £2.3 million in staffing for the first year and £1 million per year thereafter. At a time of HMRC cuts, of which we are all aware in every area, perhaps the Minister will indicate whether provision has been made for the IT equipment and the necessary staffing resources to ensure implementation.

It is of course important to remember that big businesses are always welcome in the UK and, as other Members have said, we do not intend to turn any away. We want companies to be based in the United Kingdom, but we, like everyone else, want them to make their contribution to the tax system. It is always extremely pleasing to hear that another company has made the decision to expand in the UK, and we are seeing a lot of that at the moment in Belfast. It is good to have those companies providing employment opportunities and taxes, and spending money so that our economy in Northern Ireland grows. That is super news for local people, local business and the local economy. It is also vital, however, that those big companies pay their way, otherwise it is not so lucrative after all for local businesses, people and economies. Instead, the money will simply stay in the hands of the global giants.

Will the Minister say what steps the Government will take to deal with the tax havens in the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands? Will we have some influence there, or access to information? Gone are the days when money was hidden under the mattress, the bed or the floorboards; people now put it overseas in tax havens. Will the Minister give some indication of the direction of policy?

[Nigel Mills]

I am keen to check the view of the hon. Gentleman’s party. In the event that Northern Ireland chooses to reduce its corporation tax rate, does he agree that Northern Ireland should not use that lower rate to attract artificial income into Belfast, as the Irish did in the Republic? The lower rate should be for the purposes of getting real jobs and real substance into Belfast, instead of dragging profit out of the UK mainland, perhaps through the financing of intellectual property companies or other ways of artificially moving tax.

[Jim Shannon]

The hon. Gentleman will find that my party, through the Northern Ireland Assembly and the First Minister, will hold an upstanding position in working the policy. We will not be developing into a tax haven. We want to see real jobs for real people on the ground. That is the way forward, and it is what we support.

We are pleased to have the Minister in her place today. Responsibility for answering our questions and for how this will work lies very much with her Department. We are committed to having the new legislation in place, I hope by 1 April. We want the big companies to be brought into line and made accountable for tax avoidance. We want the issue of the tax havens over which we have control to be dealt with, and for our neighbours in the Republic of Ireland to have the same opportunity. In addition, we have to look at the global picture, because although legislative change may take place in this country, what will really make it work is how we interact with other countries.

Northern Ireland (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill

Debate between Jim Shannon and Nigel Mills

Tuesday 9th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Mills]

No, of course we did not receive any such evidence. We do not know who the donors are, so we could not go and ask them. That question was raised with some of the parties; they were asked whether they had any evidence from their donors that could be put on an anonymous basis, and I do not recall any evidence along those lines being received.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

A few moments ago the hon. Gentleman drew comparisons between elected representatives and donors, but elected representatives chose to put their names forward—in the same way as some of us on this side of the House chose to wear the uniform of the Crown, and served in Northern Ireland. That is a choice we made. The donors do not necessarily make a choice to have their names and addresses and businesses all known. That is the difference. The difference is between those who make these choices and those who donate and do not want to make anybody else aware of that. Derbyshire is not like South Down. Amber Valley is not like Belfast. They are two different places—there are different situations and different circumstances—and, with the greatest respect, I am a wee bit unsure that the hon. Gentleman is aware of all the background in Northern Ireland.

[Nigel Mills]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. Clearly, people who make donations before October 2014 should not have their details published, as that would not be their understanding of what would happen. My argument is that if they choose to make a large donation after 1 October 2014, they would be doing so on the understanding that they will be named—they would be choosing to be in that situation. I have no desire to force someone into a position that is not what they understood it to be, as it would be entirely wrong to do so.

I do not doubt that my constituency is very different from that of the hon. Gentleman and I do not want to underestimate his understanding of those risks, as they are clearly far greater than those in my constituency will ever be. However, we are all asked, as Members of Parliament in the UK, to vote on this Bill and to make these choices. We need to be in a situation where there is sufficient normality in Northern Ireland to be able to publish details of these donations. I am not convinced that we have not reached that point now and that for large donations it would not be the right way in which to tip that delicate balance, especially when we are not getting credible evidence from anybody that there is a real threat or that any past incidents would give us real cause for concern. Perhaps that evidence exists and just cannot come into the public domain. I have no doubt that the Minister will have information that is far stronger than the Committee could get its hands on or perhaps should get its hands on.

On the current balance of the arguments, I think we should be publishing details of those larger donations. I accept that we are not in a position to do that in respect of smaller donations, but let us make that change. Let us say that we have progressed far enough, 15 or 16 years on from that historic agreement, to think that the situation in Northern Ireland is strong enough for us to be able to publish details of those large donations. Let us go for transparency for the whole political process, and let us show that it is clean and that people cannot be bought. Let us not continue any longer with this fear or misunderstanding that the process is corrupt. That is where we are, and the events of last week and that television programme have raised again fears that something is happening which should not be happening. We all sincerely hope that it is not.

Extra-statutory Concession A19

Debate between Jim Shannon and Nigel Mills

Tuesday 4th December 2012 Westminster Hall

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Mr Streeter. I can assure you that we are discussing a tax issue and not a road or an aeroplane, which is probably a relief to the Treasury Minister responding.

Several of my constituents who sought to make use of the A19 concession have expressed concerns after, in their view, being unreasonably denied. For the record, that is the concession whereby if a taxpayer has underpaid tax because the Revenue failed to use information that it was provided with in a timely way, it can agree not to collect that tax from the individual. That is particularly relevant when collecting that tax, which may cover several years, would cause hardship to the individual. The most severe cases I have seen are those involving pensioners who have been presented with a sizeable bill.

I want to raise three aspects this afternoon. The first is how HMRC currently applies concession A19 or, in many cases, does not apply it. Secondly, I wish to ask what an appropriate appeal or review process for those decisions might be. Thirdly, I will say a few brief words about HMRC’s consultation on changing the concession from next year.

The easiest way to illustrate my concern is to talk through the case of one of my constituents. I will not name him for confidentiality reasons, but he had a job working in a factory from 1997. In 2001, he started to receive an occupational pension from a previous job. Everything worked well, and his tax was collected accurately, his employer had a coding notice with his personal allowance, and his pension was taxed at the basic rate.

Everything worked fine for five years until June 2006 when, for reasons unbeknown to the Revenue and certainly to my constituent, it decided to change the tax code for the pension, effectively giving him a personal allowance on two sources of income. That went undetected until February 2011 when, following a reconciliation process, the Revenue sought to collect the tax from my constituent for the previous four tax years—a bill of £5,000.

The Revenue issued the demand to my constituent, and did not think to go after either his employer or the pension fund. I believe that the pay-as-you-earn regulations state that in the first instance the Revenue should go to the employer if it believes that it has misapplied the rules. It would be helpful if the Minister confirmed that that is his understanding of the process. It does not happen often, sadly.

My constituent eventually took advice from a local firm of accountants, which advised him that concession A19 might apply. However, the Revenue rejected that on a couple of occasions, and there is concern about the thoroughness of the review and the fairness of the summation of facts. It rejected the application because its only failing was that it had not reviewed forms P14 and P35 provided by the employer and the pension fund and realised that the personal allowance was being used twice. Its reason was that the purpose of the forms is not to inform the coding notice process, as required by the wording of statutory concession A19.

That logic is bizarre, because the best information that the Revenue receives to decide whether someone is paying the right tax is those two forms, which all employers must file within so many days after the year end, and I suspect that that is how the Revenue has reconciled people’s tax affairs manually in the past. I think it now uses the information electronically to make that reconciliation, so I struggle to see much logic in saying that the information about what an employee has earned in a year and what tax they have paid is not relevant to the coding process. That process is designed to find out what income and benefits someone has had in previous years, and to work out what tax they should pay in the next year and therefore what code they should have. The issue has been raised with the Minister by the Association of Taxation Technicians, the Chartered Institute of Taxation, and the Institute of Chartered Accountants in a letter that they sent him in August.

The Revenue’s other argument was that the taxpayer should have understood that the coding notices were wrong. That is even more bizarre, because it was arguing that my constituent had started his employment in 2005, not 1997, and that his employer had never told the Revenue that he was working for it, so it did not issue any coding notices. That was all complete rubbish, because he had been employed for much longer, and the employer had issued coding notices, which had been applied correctly.

It is strange that in its letter the Revenue said that my constituent should have been able to work out that he was receiving two personal allowances by comparing the one coding notice it thought he had with his payslip or P60. That was surprising. The Minister and I might just about be able to work out how our tax code has been arrived at, and to divide it by 10 and add a random letter at the end depending on whether we owe it money or not, but I suspect that when benefits are added the process is much harder, and it is not easy for an ordinary member of the public to work out what a coding notice means. The explanation of how various adjustments are calculated is not clear, and to expect someone to do that by working back from a tax code that they might spot on their payslip is somewhat unreasonable.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for highlighting this issue. As an elected representative, I have had to deal with several A19 concessions in the last few years. I have been successful with most of them, but the one thing that keeps coming through is that people are not aware of the concession. Does the he agree that HMRC should publicise it more?

A record is taken of telephone calls and registration in every case, and that should show that people have expressed concern over a period. That helps when someone applies for an A19 concession, and they may receive the concession and a reduction in payments. Some of the people I have dealt with owed £7,000 or more, which we got reduced.

[Nigel Mills]

I agree with most of what the hon. Gentleman says, and I will come to some of his points. My constituent was not as lucky as those he helped, because he had no idea that his tax affairs were wrong. He was receiving two sources of income, and tax was being taken from both, so he did not realise that a mistake had been made sometime during the process. One could argue that he should have realised that his income had increased slightly, but the impact was not hugely significant on a weekly or monthly basis. Such matters are complicated when personal allowances change every year, and recently they have rightly been changed by quite a lot every year. If someone’s income fluctuates because they are working overtime, they might not notice that their weekly pay is £25 different from what it would be if the tax was deducted correctly.

We must be careful about expecting people in this country who do not have to file tax returns, and who do not generally have dealings with the Revenue, to understand what the complicated bits of paper that come through their door mean. If we base a system on relying on people understanding, we must make sure that what they receive is clear and complete, so that they can work through the calculations and understand where they are wrong. That is not the case with the current coding notice.

My constituent’s advisers and I thought that his experience had met all the requirements for an A19 concession. It had continued for several years, and the fault was clearly not his but either his employer’s or, more likely, the Revenue’s because he had been in the same continuous employment for much longer than the Revenue seemed to realise. Even if HMRC thought it was the employer’s fault, it made no effort to make contact with that employer while it existed. Sadly, it ceased to exist in mid-2011, about six months after the issue came to light.

To the adviser, it looked as if the Revenue was just refusing to accept an A19 claim based on a new policy that it should resist more such claims. The purpose of the concession is to provide fairness in the system if something goes wrong for an innocent victim. Yes, they should have paid the tax and, yes, they have received money that they should not have had, but if that has gone on for several years there might be severe hardship if they were required to find that money several years later. I suspect that we all believe that that concession is right, and it is important that it is applied consistently and fairly, and that people understand when it should and should not be applied. I am not sure that that is the case now, and perhaps that is why the Revenue has considered redrafting the concession, although there is significant concern that the redrafting will not help the situation much, which I will come to.

If an individual goes to the Revenue and has their request turned down, they have almost nowhere to go. It does not count as a tax assessment in the Revenue’s view, so they cannot appeal through the normal tribunal system. The only option is to make a complaint and go to the adjudicator, but even that is not ideal, as the adjudicator is only allowed to make recommendations to the Revenue that are consistent with the law or its own internal policy. Unfortunately, I do not think that the Revenue has even published all its internal guidance, although I am aware that some freedom of information requests have been made for details of the grounds for refusing A19 claims. It is hard to think that there is much chance of success when someone’s only route can be turned down if it is inconsistent with guidance that they have not actually seen.

Does the Minister have any ideas on how we can end up with a proper independent review of some of these cases? R.E. Clark v. HMRC was a tax case in which Mr Clark tried to make a formal appeal based on the P800 assessment notice that he had received being some kind of informal assessment. Interestingly, at the first stage, the judge hearing the appeal refused to accept HMRC’s request to dismiss it out of hand. Probably luckily for Mr Clark—although it not so good for us—the case was settled out of court and we did not see how the tribunal would have taken it. This is an issue of fairness. The concession is a policy that we think should exist, and it is important that a clear, impartial review is available, so that when HMRC has perhaps not come to the right answer, a clear resolution can be found.

The final topic I want to raise in the time that I have left is the recent consultation, which was intended to make the issue clearer. In some ways, it is possible to become cynical after a few years of doing this; clarity appears to mean that a document goes from being two thirds of a side of paper long to more than three sides. Greater length may make things clearer but it can also add a lot more complexity, ending up with a lot of references that have to be chased around, and I am not sure that that makes things clearer.

The consultation raised a more fundamental concern, which was that the new words seem to restrict the application of A19 in future. It is not just a clarification but a restriction, and it seems to impose a duty on taxpayers to ensure that their tax code is correct and up to date, which implies a continuing duty for people throughout every tax year to ensure that nothing is changed, and that their car benefit has not gone up, or whatever else. That is an onerous position to put people in. We all hope that with real-time information and more regular reconciliations, we will not see the sort of situation that we saw in 2010, when several years were unreconciled. The ongoing reconciliation process has been throwing out errors, and we hope that in a year’s time, when things are done in real time, no more people will face the hardship of getting a multi-year tax demand. However, if we are going to have this thing in place, it needs to be clear and only impose realistic burdens on taxpayers. It is right that we all try to understand our tax affairs and check things that come to us, but where things are complicated and the mistake is the Revenue’s, not ours, we should allow the concession to be in place.

I hope that the Minister will help me and my constituent to understand whether there has been a change of policy by the Revenue in how it handles A19. Has an instruction been sent out centrally? An article in Taxation a few months ago seemed to allege that the instruction was almost, “Thou shalt not agree any of these and if any of you do, you will get some kind of action taken against you.” I suspect that that was a little exaggeration, but it was what the article suggested. It would be helpful if the Minister could give us some data on how many A19 applications have been made in recent tax years and how many have been accepted and rejected. I suspect that he may not have that information to hand, but if he could let me have it in writing, that would be helpful, as it would show whether there has been a trend in the last year or so for a lot fewer of them to be approved.

Finally, will the Minister confirm that what the Revenue should do in PAYE cases is go after the employer first when it is their mistake, and only then going after the taxpayer if they are somehow jointly at fault or if there is some reason why the employer cannot be pursued? Various answers would bring much greater clarity to the situation and help people who get caught in this sort of mess.