Lord Beecham
Main Page: Lord Beecham (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Beecham's debates with the HM Treasury
(14 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Sassoon
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend, who has made the position absolutely clear. Minimising tax payments is perfectly reasonable. Where it gets into the avoidance on which HMRC needs to focus is where people have minimised their tax payments in a way that HMRC believes to be contrary to the way in which Parliament intended the tax laws to operate.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, will the Minister ask Sir Philip Green to complement his report on efficiency savings with a report on tax avoidance?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, I think that Philip Green has done the nation a single service in exposing the extraordinary amount of waste in government that was left unattended to by the Labour Government for 13 years. We will come on to the consequences of that later this afternoon.