Nia Griffith
Main Page: Nia Griffith (Labour - Llanelli)Department Debates - View all Nia Griffith's debates with the HM Treasury
(9 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Osborne
The hon. Gentleman asks a good question. There are two approaches. The first involves introducing into our domestic law things like the general anti-abuse rule, which is more of a catch-all and tries to anticipate changes by accountancy firms and others who devise aggressive avoidance schemes. The second approach, which is not to be underestimated, involves the major international agreement on the automatic exchange of people’s tax information between jurisdictions such as Switzerland and the United Kingdom. That agreement has happened only because the Prime Minister put it at the top of the G8 agenda; no previous leader of the G8 had done so. That is why we will have the automatic exchange of information, which will be a revolution in tax transparency.
Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)
What explanation can the Chancellor give in response to comments by the former tax inspector Richard Brooks that the Treasury and HMRC
“knew that there was a mass of evidence of tax evasion at the heart of HSBC”
in 2011, but that the Government
“simply washed their hands of it”?
Mr Osborne
As I have explained, HMRC received in April 2010 the disc that had all the information on individual bank accounts. It then set about investigating all those individuals and bringing those prosecutions. We have known—[Interruption.] The shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury says that we have known this for five years. We have known for five years that there was egregious tax evasion 10 years ago under the Labour Government. We have put the resources into pursuing that, collecting the money and passing the international agreements to ensure that it never happens again in our country.