(8 years, 7 months ago)
Westminster HallWestminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
With due respect, I have had a release after 17 and a half years.
Yes, that is a very long sentence. I hope you are enjoying your new role, Mr Hanson.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) on securing this debate and setting out the case so well. I also congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) on his passionate speech. He is correct to say that I have met Mr Juretic and listened carefully to the points he raised.
I will turn to specific points, but first I want to acknowledge the important work that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs is doing in collaboration with other agencies, both in the UK and internationally, to tackle tax evasion, which, as the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West pointed out, is what we are talking about today. Tackling tax evasion in all its forms is a priority for HMRC. Last year, HMRC collected and protected a record £26 billion in revenues from compliance activities and secured more than 1,200 prosecutions using intelligence, sophisticated risking systems and smart data.
The phenomenal growth in online sales in recent years, which we have heard about this afternoon, has made many people’s day-to-day lives much easier but presents significant challenges for HMRC. That is because the supply chains are often very complex and involve a number of different entities. Suppliers can be located overseas and their records are not always available alongside the goods. All those factors combined make it much more difficult to spot where tax and duty have been paid.
To make things more complicated, HMRC is looking for frauds taking place in the midst of large volumes of legitimate trade. It is far from our, or HMRC’s, intentions to get in the way of legitimate trade, so HMRC is mindful of the need to target its activities proportionately. Nevertheless, this is a significant issue that we are determined to tackle. Building on its expertise in tackling evasion, HMRC has brought together specialists from across the Department and established in spring last year a taskforce to tackle the specific customs and VAT frauds that we have been talking about. That taskforce currently has more than 75 live investigations open into businesses or entities suspected of flouting the rules, and that figure is expected to grow to 150 before the end of the 2015-16 financial year.
Retailers Against VAT Abuse Schemes has highlighted about 500 businesses that it alleges are complicit in these frauds in some way. My hon. Friend the Member for Daventry drew attention to that list, and other hon. Members have referred to it. I assure the House that HMRC has examined the RAVAS list closely. For reasons of taxpayer confidentiality, I am not in a position to know, let alone say, what conclusions HMRC has reached in respect of each of the companies listed by RAVAS. However, it would only be fair for me to say that one cannot assume every company on the list is non-compliant.
At this point, I should touch on VAT registration numbers, which a number of hon. Members raised, including the hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford). Not all sellers are required to be VAT-registered. Overseas sellers that supply goods, located outside the UK, have no requirement to be registered for UK VAT. If they are compliant, in those circumstances, they would pay import VAT at the border. Of course, that would be a sticking tax, as they would not be entitled to reclaim that VAT. There are complications in this area, and the absence of a VAT number does not, in itself, suggest that a seller is breaking VAT law.
[Philip Davies in the Chair]
The issue is if sellers are claiming to be outside the UK and selling from outside it, but are in fact storing goods in a warehouse in the UK and dispatching them from the UK to a customer here. That changes the circumstances, but I want to be clear that the absence of a VAT number does not necessarily mean that fraudulent activity is occurring.
HMRC is working jointly with other Government agencies, including carrying out joint visits with trading standards and sharing intelligence with UK Border Force, to address risks across the entire supply chain to ensure that all sellers who sell online pay all the taxes that are due. To give hon. Members a flavour of that work, in an operation just before Christmas, HMRC and trading standards seized goods worth half a million pounds. As HMRC’s programme of activity continues, and both its operational intelligence and understanding of fraud improve, it expects to make more interceptions and seizures of illicit goods.
I should stress the point about illegitimate and legitimate trade. HMRC has the powers to seize or detain all goods in a warehouse, for example, but it also has to think about the potential impact of its actions, for instance, on the end consumer. If HMRC were seizing goods that subsequently turned out to be there legitimately, I suspect many of our constituents would want to raise concerns.
We recognise the concerns that have been raised by compliant businesses. Clearly, it is very important that non-compliant businesses should not be allowed to establish any unfair advantage over compliant businesses, as that would distort competitiveness. Again, that point was rightly made by a number of hon. Members. Tackling these frauds is just as much about maintaining a level playing field for business as it is about collecting the tax and duty that should be paid.
That operational work is the first strand of HMRC’s work to tackle these frauds. The second strand is engagement with the online platforms on which goods are sold.
(8 years, 8 months ago)
Westminster HallWestminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) on his contribution and welcome this further debate. I welcome the work of those outside the House who are campaigning daily to try to get to the truth of what happened more than 40 years ago. It is clear that an injustice has taken place and that the convictions were wrong. It is clear that those convictions caused tremendous difficulty to people at the time, but many, including a number of my constituents, bear the cross of those convictions still.
My hon. Friend made a strong case, and I do not wish to repeat it; it speaks for itself. It is, however, important to remember that the strike was about pay and working conditions. In the three years before that strike took place, 571 people had been killed and 224,000 had been injured in the building industry. The strike was about trying to get fairness at work. Such issues will of course generate strong passions, but the key question is whether the strike generated criminal activity. I believe that the Government have information on that and that the ongoing criminal review will show that the strike was not a criminal act, but an argument about conditions at work.
My hon. Friend has covered the long history in detail, but I have taken an interest in this case and campaign for some time. I am a Member of Parliament for a north Wales constituency and I represent a large number of the people who were charged and convicted at that time—some are still alive and some have died.
Let me make a confession, Mr Howarth: I was a Minister at the Ministry of Justice in the latter part of the last Labour Government. I could not raise the issues as a Minister, but as a constituency MP I wrote to Jack Straw, the then Member for Blackburn, in 2008-09. I asked him on behalf of my constituents whether we could release papers relating to the convictions, the trial and surrounding matters. My right hon. Friend, as he was then and still is now, agreed to look at those papers. After consideration, the Labour Government agreed to release the papers relating to the trial in 2012. Obviously, we lost the election in 2010.
I took it upon myself on 8 November 2010 to write to the then Justice Secretary, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke). I said that there was a commitment from my right hon. Friend, the then Member for Blackburn, to lift the blanket ban on those papers and to release them in 2012. I asked whether he would stick to that agreement. He wrote back saying that the blanket agreement was still in place and would be in place until 2012, but that he was reviewing the matter. I gave him the benefit of the doubt.
On 23 March 2011, I wrote to the then Justice Secretary again and asked him to make a decision. He wrote back and said that he was still considering the matter. I wrote to his successor, the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), on 20 November 2012. He said, “Thanks very much, David. It is very nice of you to write, but on 19 December last year, unbeknown to you or the House and without any disclosure, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe signed a new instrument, giving his approval for the retention of the records.” The retained records include the information that my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton mentioned, but also—this has helpfully come to light—information relating to other matters. That is why a Minister from the Home Office is responding to the debate.
Why is that information important and why are those papers still being retained? As my hon. Friend said, we had a debate in January last year on a Back-Bench motion, in which the House overwhelmingly voted to support the release of the papers. The Justice Minister at that time indicated that he would review the matter further; presumably, he said that on behalf of the Government that the Minister here today was and is a member. The then Justice Minister said at the time that under existing public record legislation, papers would be retained past the 30 years only if they were
“retained for any other special reason”.—[Official Report, 24 March 2015; Vol. 594, c. 468WH.]
On 1 January 2013, the same Government began their move to transparency, deciding that 30-year documents would be released after 20 years because they wanted to be open and transparent. Yet in the case of the papers relating to the Shrewsbury trial and convictions, the Government do not want the 20-year rule to apply. They do not even want to stick at 30 years, which is the current figure, but prefer a situation in which my constituents, who face this issue every day of the week, have to wait until 2022 before they can find out what documents the Government choose to release, all because of some nefarious issue relating to “some other special reason”. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton has mentioned what the other special reason could be: the involvement of the security services.
Before I came to this debate, I googled the words “Falklands war”. We might think those words would elicit closure, secrecy and lack of transparency. I can find out anything I want about what was said in the Cabinet, what was undertaken in Cabinet and what was done at the time about the Falklands war, yet I cannot find information about what happened 10 years before that during an industrial dispute, because the Government have undertaken some disclosure, but not full disclosure.
What is so secret, so damning, so damaging and so improbable that the Government, 40 years on, will not let people have full access to the history of their case?
Does my right hon. Friend agree that we live in a very curious state given that Ricky Tomlinson is apparently seen as more of a threat to national security than General Galtieri?
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for putting it that way. I will take that as a compliment to Mr Tomlinson, and also to my friends who live in my town in my constituency who face this issue daily. Where are the people who were working in the security services from 1972 to 1975? How old are they now? We are talking about 42 or 43 years ago. Were they in short trousers working for the security services? They will have retired. They will have gone. They will be off the face of the earth. They will have moved on. They are not there now in senior positions. If they are, let us hold them to account for what they have done.
This 42-year-old case matters to me and my constituents. I do not want to mention people by name—they know who they are—but I will provide one example. I will not put his name on the record; he knows who he is.
A colleague of mine is a town councillor in the town where I live. He is the mayor of the town. He will be putting on his red cloak and his chain in a week’s time for another civic event. He has served as a county councillor, been on the police authority, worked as a lecturer and is a citizen of the community in which I live. He is respected, well known, well loved and well liked, yet he cannot go to America on holiday with his friends and family because of an event 42 years ago: he got a conviction that, if the information was found, could be proved to be false. My constituent, the mayor, cannot get a visa, even today, to travel to the United States, because he is viewed as a threat to security. This person lives in my town, serves on a police committee and is the mayor of the town. He can walk down the street and hold his head high for what he tried to do at the time.
If disclosure is going to be unfair to somebody in the security services or Lord Hailsham or another Conservative Minister, so be it. Their reputations might deserve to be challenged at this stage. What is not fair is for my constituents—not only the one I have mentioned—to live in a community that knows they have been to jail or have convictions when those convictions are false. That is what the issue is about. This is not fun and games between the Government and Opposition Members; this is about real people’s lives and we want to see justice done. We should see the information and let the world judge whether there is something to hide.
I do not know what the documents contain. Let the world judge and not say what the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr Letwin), said to me in a parliamentary answer on the Floor of the House on 21 October. When I asked him about releasing the papers, he did not say, “I am reviewing it”, “I will look at it”, or “There may be a case”. He said:
“No. I have no intention of authorising the release of those papers, which relate to the security services.”—[Official Report, 21 October 2015; Vol. 600, c. 940.]
The Minister needs to justify that answer and not simply say there is no reason to release those papers. He needs to talk about transparency and explain what happened 43 years ago. I support my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton and the case he has made. The Minister must respond and I look forward to hearing what he says at the end of this debate.