Digital Taxation

Debate between Neil O'Brien and Nick Boles

Tuesday 27th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered digital taxation.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Cheryl. Let me start by thanking all hon. Members who have come to take part in the debate. I feel we have a slight imbalance of forces in the Chamber, but none the less it shows the high level of interest in the subject.

My interest in it comes from talking to the small businesses in my constituency. Those Members who know my constituency well will know it is not a place with one large or dominant employer or sector but a place of very successful small businesses. We have wonderful independent shops in Market Harborough and on Bell Street in Wigston, we have fantastic manufacturing businesses such as COBA in Fleckney, which I visited the other day, and we have great high-tech businesses, particularly around Kenilworth Drive in Oadby. A lot of small businesspeople ask me, “We are paying our business rates and taxes, but are large international digital businesses paying their fair share of tax?” We need to ensure that the answer is an unambiguous yes.

This debate is timely. At the time of the spring statement, we saw the Treasury publish its position paper, “Corporate tax and the digital economy,” and since then the OECD has produced a report on the same issue as part of the work on base erosion and profit shifting that the UK has led on and, just last week, the European Commission published a paper on the same subject. It is significant that both the European Commission and the Treasury have independently arrived at some similar conclusions. In fact, both the Treasury paper and the European Commission put forward two options: a comprehensive international reform, or an interim tax to be levied before such a reform can be agreed internationally.

It is clear from reading all of those documents that taxing large digital businesses and distinguishing them from other firms that trade internationally is not simple or straightforward at all. None the less, I was encouraged to see the Treasury consulting on that question and being prepared to think radically about what we need to do to address it.

What is the case for action? Put simply, international tax treaties were designed in an era when doing business internationally inevitably meant having to have physical premises, offices, factories and lots of people in the country where business was to be done. However, today things are different. A large digital business could sell advertising to firms in country A, to be seen by users in country B, served off servers in country C, perhaps under a brand owned in country D, which is financed and owned by a company in country E. That business can ensure that its profits are booked in whichever jurisdiction taxes are lowest.

That is the issue in abstract; let me give a concrete example. I do not want to pick on a particular business, but I use the example cited by Jonathan Ford in the Financial Times relating to Google in 2014. He reported that the firm had made about £4.3 billion of sales in the UK and that, in line with its global profit margin of about 26%, that would have meant about £1.1 billion of profits to pay tax on—and, in turn, a corporation tax payment of £220 million. However, he reports that in that year it paid only £30 million in corporation tax.

A simple division of Google’s global profits by its share of users in the UK would not be a fair basis to work out its tax liability here, because obviously a large proportion of its engineers and research and development are in the US. None the less, it feels like we might expect a bit more of the value created by UK users to be reflected in taxable value in the UK.

Since 2014, things have moved on. We have seen the introduction of the so-called Google tax to stop some of the worst abuses of the international system, stopping firms from artificially signing all of their contracts in a particular country, and looking through some of the artificial arrangements put in place by some firms. However, there is much more to do.

In fact, this issue is far from unique to the UK. The European Commission reports that digital companies pay on average roughly half the effective tax rate of firms in the traditional economy. A revealing map in the Commission’s impact assessment shows very little correlation between where digital businesses’ user activity is and where in Europe their profits are booked. In other words, there is no real link between where value is being created and where tax is being paid. It is therefore absolutely right that the Treasury is consulting on going further.

That is the case for action. Our approach should be guided by three principles. First, any new tax has to be for the largest international businesses only, with generous allowances to carve out small firms. We do not want to do anything to hamper the vibrant tech start-up scene we have in the UK, and it would make no sense to try to impose a large and complex tax on minnow-sized companies where the cost of administration would outweigh the benefit of the tax we might collect. I was glad to see a nod in the direction of carving out smaller firms in the Treasury paper, if I have interpreted it right.

Secondly, we need a tax that has a clear distinction between tech businesses and other international firms. We do not want to unravel the complex web of global tax agreements we have at the moment or come up with something that can never be agreed internationally. We need to distinguish between tech and other sectors. Let me give an example. There is no real difference between selling advertising on a British newspaper website or a popular blog and selling it in a physical newspaper—the value is still created by the journalists based in the UK. If, on the other hand, I post a video I have made or a song I have recorded—many Members will be horrified by the idea of listening to me singing—even if that website is ultimately owned in some tropical tax haven, I have created the value in the UK, and it is right that the profits should be booked here and taxes paid here. The emphasis in the Treasury’s paper on the concept of user-created value is the right way to make that distinction.

Thirdly, we need small businesses to reap the benefits from any new tax on large digital firms. I am proud that we have helped hard-working people in the small firms in my constituency by reducing corporation tax and taking large numbers of small firms out of business rates altogether, but many still do pay a lot and it would be good to be able to go further.

Realistically, a new tax on large tech firms is unlikely to raise more than a few hundreds of millions of pounds, which is not a huge amount in the grand scheme of Government spending but none the less enough to help level the playing field a bit and allow the Government to do more to cut tax on small businesses. For example, the Government recently allocated £25 million to reduce business rates for small pubs, which has been a huge help to many of them. If we could raise more from large tech firms, we could do even more of that.

Those are the principles. Let me turn to the detail of how we might implement such a tax. There are a number of important decisions to make about its design. First, what should we be trying to tax? The clear principle we must push for internationally is that a business’s profits should be taxed in the countries where the value is created. At present, the accounting profits are simply too easy to move to a low-tax jurisdiction. Some in the media have talked about a tax on sales, but ultimately they are not a good proxy for value being added. Sales overseas are far from unique to digital businesses, and the idea of sales is not necessarily easy to define for businesses that have a free-to-use model. The Government are right to focus on the core concept of user-created value. What kinds of businesses does that mean we should try to tax? It means the free-to-use services that many of us use, be they search engines, social networks, app stores or online marketplaces; I am sure we could all name firms in all those categories. Those online platforms are not like other kinds of businesses, which perhaps create or store a bit of data on their customers; they are platforms substantially made up of user-generated content or have very valuable data from deep engagement with their users.

It is sometimes said online that with some of these businesses, “If you aren’t the customer, then you are the product.” Personally, I would put it more positively: the users are both the producers and the consumers for those new types of business. The European Commission uses the rather ugly word “prosumers” to describe that business model. That new business model is the reason why the tax system now needs to change to keep up.

The third question of detail is how exactly to design a tax on that new category of business. There is a distinction to be made between the ideal international agreement and something we could implement in the nearer term. Looking to an international agreement, I note that the Treasury’s paper talks about allocating,

“a share of the profits of the principal companies after routine functions in the group have been remunerated with an arm’s length return. That share would be designed to approximate the value that users generate for the business.”

That is simultaneously the right thing to be taxing, and something that will be quite an art to determine. I will give a couple of examples of the complexities here. The Treasury paper includes a discussion of the different kinds of value created by more or less active users and the issues created by users who cross borders regularly. It also explores some of the potential avoidance measures that firms might be tempted to take.

Looking at the positions that different Governments around the world are taking on this question, it seems unlikely that a new global agreement will be reached soon. Both the Commission and Treasury papers talk about a simpler interim tax on revenues in the meantime, which I think it is right for us to consider despite the difficulties of revenue-based taxes. The Commission paper talks about three types of revenues that would be taxed—revenues from selling online advertising, from digital marketplaces and from the sale of user-provided information. The Treasury’s paper has a similar range of options on the design of a tax: types of business, types of activity or a hybrid of the two. Personally, I think types of activity looks like the simplest option, but any of them could potentially work.

Finally, questions arise about what rate we might reasonably set, how much a tax could raise and who would be paying such a tax. A study by the United Nations of the largest 100 digital businesses in the world suggests that around two thirds of them are based in the United States, compared to only one fifth of other multinationals. We might expect such a levy to fall mainly on US-based firms. The European Commission in its paper goes a little further than the Treasury and sets out some potential thresholds and rates; it suggests taxing firms with worldwide revenues of over €750 million and European Union revenues of €50 million. There are, of course, very few firms with revenues on that scale. To me it feels as though that is the scale of businesses we should be aiming to tax.

[Nick Boles (Grantham and Stamford) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. This is an important, interesting and tricky subject, and one that we need to take a good long run-up to, so it is exactly the kind of debate we should be holding. He seems to be addressing mainly the question of how to make corporation tax, the historic tax on profits, work in a new age with these new kinds of businesses. Does he not feel that we should also be thinking about what is happening to the property taxes we have historically raised from business, and our likely need to replace business rates as a source of revenue? Rather than just fixing the profit tax, which he seems to be mainly suggesting, should we also be thinking about whether we might use whatever new tax base and taxing mechanism is created to also replace some of the property tax that businesses currently pay?

[Nick Boles]

Forgive me, Dame Cheryl.

[Neil O’Brien]

I thank my hon. Friend for his thoughtful contribution. I agree that there are a number of different aspects of the tax system that are no longer very buoyant and need to be modernised. He picks on one that is perhaps a debate for another day, but none the less an important one.

Coming back to my point, few businesses would be affected by a tax with the kind of carve-outs that the European Commission is talking about. I hope that similarly, when a detailed proposal comes from the Treasury, we will also see a generous carve-out for smaller businesses. To give a sense of the difference it makes, I note in the Commission’s impact assessment that reducing the threshold for inclusion from €750 million to €500 million would double the number of firms affected and caught up by such a tax, but only raise revenues received by 7%—a lot more bureaucracy for not a lot of gain. That suggests to me that a focus on the very largest players is the right one.

On that basis, and on that base, the Commission suggests a 3% tax on revenues of those kinds, which it believes would raise around €5 billion a year across the EU as a whole. That would potentially mean hundreds of millions of pounds in the UK if we did something similar. As the Treasury moves towards making its own decisions on setting rates and thresholds, I am sure the Minister will be thinking about the same considerations and thinking about how a UK tax might fit alongside an EU one, if the EU ends up with a consensus to take action.

To conclude, while a new tax on large digital businesses might not raise vast sums, it could raise enough to make a substantial difference to small businesses in my constituency. It would be a welcome addition to the raft of anti-avoidance measures that we have seen in recent years—over 100 measures now, raising over £175 billion since 2010 alone—and if we can get those large, digital businesses to pay a fairer share of tax, we can go further in cutting the taxes small businesses pay, such as doubling the small business rate relief we have seen and extra help for small shops and pubs on top of that.

To get big tech to pay a fair share of tax, it seems to me that the Treasury is gearing up to propose some pretty bold and unconventional measures. I am sure some people and some firms will come out to oppose that, but given that we have completely new business models changing our economy and a clear case for reform, Ministers should be bold and I encourage them to go for it.