Finance Bill

Roger Mullin Excerpts

Monday 26th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Roger Mullin (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (SNP)]

I rise to support new clause 3, tabled in my name and those of my hon. Friends. I also welcome the hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey) to the Front Bench. I was pleased to hear the Minister talk about his desire to see fairness in the tax system. We all welcome that.

If you will allow me, Madam Deputy Speaker, I want to start with a quote I used in Committee:

“I was shocked to see that some of the very wealthiest people in the country have organised their tax affairs, and to be fair it’s within the tax laws, so that they were regularly paying virtually no income tax. And I don’t think that’s right.”

Those were the words, of course, of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, speaking in April 2012. He was right then, but we need to do more about it now. I acknowledge that, as the Minister said, some progress is being made in the clauses proposed by the Government in the Bill, and I welcome that, but for us they are not nearly sufficient. Not enough is being done, so we have brought back this new clause on Report.

As I also noted in Committee, support for our argument comes from many quarters. Of particular interest to me is the fact that in May 2014 the OECD, not known for its radical tax positions, released a raft of recommendations to tackle rising income inequality in the OECD area. They included

“taxing as ordinary income all remuneration, including fringe benefits, carried interest arrangements, and stock options.”

Private equity fund managers shrink their tax bills by arranging to pay what will now be 28% capital gains tax rather than 45% income tax on their carried interest. Carried interest is in effect their remuneration for managing other people’s money and should therefore be taxed as income tax. Their ability to pay capital gains tax on what is properly income also allows fund managers to avoid paying any national insurance contributions on a major portion of their income. I note, however, that those who would be affected if we closed the so-called Mayfair loophole are, as a group, the highest donors to the Conservative party, which might be purely accidental.

I also note that not closing the loophole costs the Treasury between £250 million to £600 million annually. But this Government, through their moves on tax credits, seem more intent on hammering someone earning, say, £15,000 per annum than on asking someone earning £15,000 per week simply to pay their fair share. Stephen Feinberg, head of the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, said back in 2011:

“In general, I think that all of us are way overpaid in this business. It is almost embarrassing.”

[Interruption.] Yes, I was rather surprised that it was “almost embarrassing.” I would have thought it was thoroughly embarrassing.

The average European PE firm’s managing director can expect to receive around £8 million per annum in total personal compensation. The largest funds pay out some £15 million or more. Some very junior people can earn £1 million. These figures will be conservative for many in the London area, which has some of the highest paid equity fund managers. In Committee some Members implied that no other developed country was moving to close this loophole. This is not so.

[Mark Field]

Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that the concept of carried interest is integral to the way that private equity and venture capital industries operate? The Government have been pretty robust at trying to draw the distinction to which he refers, between capital and income, and any abusive schemes will be closed down. Carried interest is not a con. It is the very nature of the way in which venture capital funds operate in investing the funds they have for future projects.

[Roger Mullin]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman. I do not think I accused anyone of being engaged in a con. It is not a con; it is perfectly legal, as George Osborne himself recognised in 2012. The issue is that, despite the technicalities, the ordinary member of the public will look at this and say, “Is this fair, particularly at this time in the development of our economy?” I am primarily driven by what is fair to the wider public in our society.

[Mark Field]

I do not want to get involved in a philosophical debate about fairness or otherwise in relation to the tax system. The hon. Gentleman is making a perfectly logical argument and one that I have some sympathy with—that in the longer term we should try to move towards a system whereby capital gains and income gains are considered at similar rates. The fact that there is such a big disparity between those rates causes the imbalance.

[Roger Mullin]

I agree with much of what the right hon. Gentleman says, but I would go wider. Our whole tax system is incredibly and unnecessarily complicated. Why do we not begin to think about moving towards an alignment, say, of income tax and national insurance in the longer term? There are many areas where the over-complication serves nobody’s interests well. It does not serve the Exchequer or the wider public, so I have some sympathy with the right hon. Gentleman’s argument. I return to the point I was trying to make before his two excellent interventions.

In Committee some Members implied that no other country in the world was doing anything to close the loophole. My recent research shows that that is not the case. For example, the Netherlands has already tackled the issue more thoroughly than we have in the UK. France has moved—perhaps not as far as some in France would have liked at the time—further than the UK to address the problem, and in other countries, such as Sweden and even the United States, it is a growing element of the political debate.

[Sammy Wilson]

Is that not the most important point? Provided the tax change does not impact upon the ability of the financial market to do its job, it is right to bring tax rates into line and to close the loophole. If closing the loophole were somehow to distort the financial market or make the financial market work less efficiently, I could understand the argument from the right hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field), but that is not the case. It does not seem to have had that impact in other countries, so why should it do so here?

[Roger Mullin]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I point out that, as I am sure he fully understands, this issue is not unique to the United Kingdom; it has international resonance. It has particular resonance with people who are relatively poor and suffering under austerity. As I said in Committee, my constituency manager—we all know how well paid our constituency managers are—will pay an effective rate of tax that is higher than that paid by the vast majority of highly paid fund managers. That cannot be described as fair, as I think people in this country and elsewhere recognise.

--- Later in debate ---

[Craig Mackinlay]

I agree with my hon. Friend. I hope progress can be made on very many areas, not least on this one.

We should not be like a colony pleading with an empire power. This is clearly a rate that should be set here. I thank again the hon. Member for Dewsbury for raising this issue, which, important in itself, has opened a Pandora’s box on who governs this country.

[Roger Mullin]

I rise to speak to new clause 1, which also relates to VAT. I pay tribute to everyone who participated in the previous debate, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) who, in Committee, was the first to raise this issue and moved new clause 2. At that time, we were favoured with support from the Labour Benches. They can look forward to us reciprocating that support this evening.

On Second Reading, I focused on the fire and rescue service and its punishment by the UK Government in relation to VAT. I should now like to focus in some detail on Police Scotland, which came into being in 2013. I should say that I have a prejudice in supporting the police, as I am a former academic adviser to the Scottish Police College, and have contributed in the past to training programmes for chief officers, police super- intendents and, most recently, crime analysts.

A key reason for the creation of Police Scotland was, according to the Scottish Government:

“Establishing a single service aims to ensure more equal access to national and specialist services and expertise such as major investigation teams whenever and wherever they are needed.”

Allow me to give a few examples of the effect of creating a single force. Assistant Chief Constable Malcolm Graham, speaking as recently as 29 September 2015, stated:

“Since the advent of Police Scotland, every murder committed has been detected.”

He is overly modest. Such has been the improvement in homicide detection that they have opened old, unsolved cases from when there were eight smaller forces and have already solved five of them. Police Scotland has improved the investigation of rape and sexual crimes across the entire country and is now able to treat rape as seriously as murder. The National Child Abuse Investigation Unit has been established as a specialist unit to support the investigation of complex child abuse and neglect across Scotland. Police Scotland has also been able to tackle intellectual property crime much more effectively, recovering about £20 million in criminal assets and making about 70 arrests. The result has been improvements on areas such as cross border co-operation and terrorism, as I discussed in Committee.

The Government, however, say we must abandon the improvements resulting from Police Scotland to satisfy some old rules established in the Value Added Tax Act 1994. Reflecting on the debate we have just had, this is one area on which the UK Government have it entirely within their power to act reasonably on a matter related to VAT. They have chosen to provide VAT exemptions to other public bodies elsewhere in the United Kingdom, while at the same time completely denying the right of the Scottish police and fire and rescue service to achieve an exemption.

Speaking to the Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament last November, Chief Constable Sir Stephen House said:

“I do find it bewildering that we seem to be the only police service in the United Kingdom that is charged VAT. None of the 43 forces in England and Wales pay it. And the answer seems to come back from the Treasury, ‘oh, that’s because you’re a central government organisation’. Well, you’ve got the Police Service of Northern Ireland, they don’t pay VAT. And you’ve got the National Crime Agency and they don’t pay VAT—but we pay VAT. I just don’t understand the logic of it and I frankly don’t think the Scottish public would understand it either.”

Consider what the Government have been willing to do on VAT. At the stroke of a pen, the Government made central Government-funded academy schools in England exempt from VAT. For goodness sake, even the BBC does not have to pay VAT. When it suits the Government, and previous British Governments, they have little difficulty in allowing exemptions.

In Committee, the Minister said:

“If the Scottish Government are now reconsidering their position and wish to discuss how the service can be eligible once again for VAT refunds, the Treasury will happily engage with them to advise.”––[Official Report, Finance Public Bill Committee, 17 September 2015; c. 24.]

It is not the Scottish Government who need to reconsider their position, but the UK Government. Although we are talking significant sums for Police Scotland and the Scottish fire and rescue service—in total, in excess of £30 million per annum—it is a mere pittance compared with the overall UK budget. There is no economic rationale for continuing to deny VAT exemption. The Government seem simply to lack the decency to care about policing and fire and rescue services in Scotland. So much for the party of law and order. So much for the respect agenda. Its attitude has about it the stench of duplicity and blind prejudice.

--- Later in debate ---

[Roger Mullin]

In a style becoming familiar to this House, let me say that Barbara from Kirkcaldy says:

“This Finance Bill is a disgrace to hard-working people”,

and I always agree with my wife! It is a deliberate slight on the people of Scotland, and it deserves and will get no support from SNP Members. The Government have once again denied the rightful exemption of VAT for our emergency services. Once again, they are harming the environment, and once again they are favouring the rich. We oppose this Bill.

[Mr Speaker]

Thank you, Mr Mullin. There are 12 seconds remaining, but no hon. Member is getting to his or her feet. Time is running out, the moment is arriving—and I do believe that we are going to have the vote.