Tax Avoidance
Debate between Oliver Heald and Shabana Mahmood(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Shabana Mahmood
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention, which goes to the central point: we need to make sure we are collecting all the tax that is owed. That is fundamental not just for trust in the system for our taxpayers and businesses, but for our public services that depend on that tax take.
Sir Oliver Heald (North East Hertfordshire) (Con)
Does the hon. Lady not accept that Labour was lax on tax? Look at the arrangements for hedge fund managers paying 18% tax, when their cleaners were paying a lot more. It is quite wrong for her to take this high position. When was the Lagarde list from? It was from 2007, when the shadow Chancellor was City Minister.
Shabana Mahmood
The hon. and learned Gentleman should look at last week’s Financial Times report on tax avoidance and tax collection. It compared the Government’s anti-avoidance measures for companies with the measures Labour put in place to tackle corporate tax avoidance during its time in office. It found that the tax collected by the Government’s measures was going to be 90% lower than under measures introduced by the previous Labour Government:
“Measures put in place by Labour during its 13 years in power to counter corporate tax avoidance are projected to raise ten times as much over the next four years as those introduced by the current coalition government.”
Stamp Duty Land Tax
Debate between Oliver Heald and Shabana Mahmood(10 years ago)
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Sir Oliver Heald
The hon. Lady seems to have forgotten about the great recession that her party visited on this country. It is not surprising that, in those circumstances, fewer houses were built during that period.
Shabana Mahmood
I find it interesting that Government Members are happy to plead global circumstances to explain their failures in Government yet conveniently forget that we had a global financial crisis in 2008. I think the hon. and learned Gentleman made that point in a slightly petty way.