Tax Avoidance

Debate between Mark Garnier and Shabana Mahmood

Wednesday 11th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House notes with concern that following the revelations of malpractice at HSBC bank, which were first given to the Government in May 2010, just one out of 1,100 people who have avoided or evaded tax have been prosecuted; calls upon Lord Green and the Prime Minister to make a full statement about Lord Green’s role at HSBC and his appointment as a Minister; regrets the failure of the Government’s deal on tax disclosure with Switzerland, which has raised less than a third of the amount promised by Ministers; welcomes the proposals of charities and campaigning organisations for an anti-tax dodging Bill; and further calls on the Government to clamp down on tax avoidance by introducing a penalty regime for the general anti-abuse rule, which is currently too weak to be effective, closing the Quoted Eurobonds exemption loophole, ensuring that hedge funds trading shares pay the same amount of tax as other investors, introducing deeming criteria to restrict false self-employment in the construction industry, and scrapping the shares for rights scheme, which the Office for Budget Responsibility has warned could cost £1 billion in avoidance.

When citizens hand over their hard-earned cash to the Government in the form of taxation, they do so on the basis that at some level they have faith in our system of democratic governance—a system in which the Government are entrusted to make decisions about how to use that money in the best interests of all their people, and to keep them safe. The collection of tax is a core responsibility, and trust underpins the whole structure—trust that if I pay my fair share, so will my neighbour, and trust that the rules are applied as vigorously to the sole trader as to the huge multinational, and as fairly to the basic rate taxpayer as to those in the higher band. However, that foundation has been profoundly shaken.

The global crisis, austerity and a series of media disclosures about the low tax bills and complex avoidance schemes of multinationals and high net worth individuals have led members of the public to question like never before whether, when they pay their tax, their neighbour is doing the same. This week’s revelation that an arm of a leading high street bank, HSBC, helped clients to evade and avoid tax using Swiss bank accounts has simply added fuel to an already roaring fire. It seems that the Government have neither the will nor the ability to get a grip on the situation, which is fast spiralling out of control.

[Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is quite right that the news is coming out this week, but is it not fair to say that the crime, if you like, happened in 2007 during the lead-up to the financial crisis? This is old news being brought out today, not new news.

[Shabana Mahmood]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He and I have had a number of discussions on the airwaves about these issues, given that the Government have failed to field any Ministers to debate on those media channels. He has been doing a grand job of trying to defend the indefensible, but he is quite wrong. The central point in what we have discovered about HSBC this week is that the data with evidence of what had happened with tax avoidance and tax evasion were handed over by the French authorities to this Government in May 2010. That is the central point: that is the point at which we had evidence of wrongdoing that needed to be acted on, but that is not what happened.