Digital Taxation

Robert Courts Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Robert Courts (Witney) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Cheryl.

I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough (Neil O'Brien) on bringing about this extremely important and timely debate. I know that many points will be made that reflect the strength of feeling in our own constituencies, as well as points about what we will look for from the Government in due course. I declare an interest at the outset as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group for small and micro business.

Online businesses are growing rapidly and will continue to do so. I think we probably all agree that, as that happens, our tax system must catch up. As my hon. Friend said, international tax treaties and much of our domestic tax system were designed in an era when doing business necessitated having a physical presence. Large tech companies are able to create large, complex international tax structures to keep their taxes as low as possible, at the same time as their businesses stretch across borders. Small businesses in west Oxfordshire often ask me whether those large companies, which now take up so much of the market, are paying their fair share of tax. It is a real sore point and a bone of contention for small businesses that are required to have a concrete, bricks-and-mortar presence when many larger companies do not.

Independent high street shops, trading from brick-and-mortar premises, are now competing, in a very real sense, against large online companies that do not pay the same business rates in particular, because they do not have that same physical high street presence. Moreover, large companies can absorb the costs of bureaucracy and overheads—the costs involved in all businesses—much more because they have a larger presence but without the physical footprint.

Small businesses do not have international structures, and they do not have teams of expensive accountants and lawyers to help them to make the system work for them. In many cases they are run by a husband and wife, a father and son or members of a family who have owned a business for years and still work every hour God sends to make it work. The role of Government is therefore to help to level the playing field, to make sure that these engines of our economy and these jewels of our high street are able to compete with the large multinational companies on the internet.

We can all agree that we want our high streets to remain vibrant, buzzing and full of different businesses that sell, make and create all sorts of different products and jobs. I am particularly reminded of that every time I spend a day in my constituency in west Oxfordshire, or when I go around the streets of Witney or Chipping Norton or Woodstock. I know that the shadow Chancellor has a red book that he likes to illustrate his points with. I also have a red book that I will illustrate my point with. I can see the alarm on the Minister’s face as he wonders precisely which red book I am about to brandish, but it is a leaflet for the west Oxfordshire business awards 2018, which I attended last Friday night.

There are an extraordinary number of businesses in west Oxfordshire that do wonderful work, covering everything under the sun that one could possibly imagine: coffee, children’s clothing, travel, gardening and speciality milkshakes—who would have thought it? That is only the finalists for this year’s competition. Hundreds of others were not listed as finalists, and hundreds were listed last year or the year before.

If ever there was an illustration of quite why it is important that the Government pursue the business-friendly policies that they do, it is contained in this little red book—this bible, if you will, of economic success. It is a real testament to the dedication, passion and commitment of people all over west Oxfordshire who wake up one morning, have an idea, take a chance and then, without a large physical presence or large teams of international lawyers and accountants, make that idea a success. It is to help them that I rise today.

I have set out my stall, but what can the Government do? I submit that they can take a number of actions. In 2017, Amazon—I should say that other large online retailers are available—paid £7.4 million in corporation tax, despite making sales worth more than £7 billion in the UK, because tax is of course paid on profits, not on revenue. I suggest that more can clearly be done, and I know that the Government are starting to look at doing it, to reflect the true value of such companies and to ensure that our tax system is designed for the 21st century, not the 20th or the 19th.

I welcome the Treasury’s consulting on a new tax on the tech giants. We need to ensure that they pay their fair share alongside the smaller companies, and moreover that small companies are confident that the tax system is not stacked against them. I draw a distinction between types of online companies. My point is about large online companies; of course, many tech start-ups are online but are very small. I suggest that any such taxation—whether a new tax or an amendment to the existing tax system—should be reserved for the largest international businesses. What better way could there be to fund the NHS, defence or schools than by ensuring that those larger online companies pay their fair share of taxation alongside the small companies?

I am delighted that the 2017 global start-up ecosystem report from Startup Genome ranked London as the third best city in the world for tech start-ups—the only European city in the top five—behind only New York and Silicon Valley. Large cities tend to dominate the headlines, but as I hope I have illustrated, in the green lanes and rural villages of west Oxfordshire are hundreds of companies that drive our economy every day. It is those businesses that will make a real difference to all our constituents, our constituencies and the nation’s economy overall. We must not burden those start-ups with further administrative costs or further taxation. I welcome the action that the Government have taken to reduce corporation tax, but the additional revenue from any tax on big online retailers could enable us to help small businesses further with their corporation tax or to provide for further relief or exemptions for small firms—particularly those on the high street.

The Government can help with this issue, but I am very keen, in the final moments before I let others have a say, to say that there is more that we can do as well. The Government can help to level the playing field, but we must not forget that we all have a responsibility to shop local whenever we can and to support local businesses when possible. We must try to shop from them and not simply go to the large online retailers. That may make things easy, but it does not support those who are living in our towns and villages. We need small businesses—they are the engines of our local economies and they bring jobs, services and colour to our high streets. I ask the Government to bear those points in mind as they consider a way to tax the large retailers.