Rushanara Ali
Main Page: Rushanara Ali (Labour - Bethnal Green and Stepney)
Mr Davis
No, I am afraid not.
That is why we find not city slickers, bankers or finance specialists, but nurses, doctors, locums and careworkers caught up in this. All those people will never have the resources to pay back this money. It does not matter whether it is over two, five, seven or 10 years, they will just never have it.
Many witnesses said they had declared the schemes to HMRC. This really is the criminal aspect of this: someone declares a scheme, and then 20 years later or 10 years later, HMRC comes back and says, “Sorry, we haven’t closed your year, and you can pay now”. They are being asked to pay not a small amount, but £20,000 or £30,000 in the case of some my constituents.
What the Committee found is very important because, again, where does the blame lie? I think part of the blame lies with HMRC, but part of the blame lies with the employers. Many people have said that that is where HMRC should focus its effort, but the House of Lords Committee found
“little evidence of action taken against those who promote disguised remuneration schemes.”
It went on to say that
“HMRC appears to be prioritising recovery of tax revenue over justice”.
That point is central to today.
The Committee noted that the people involved were unusual subjects of this sort of recovery, because of the nature of their employment and so on. It said that of course these disguised remuneration schemes are “unacceptable tax avoidance”, but it also said:
“The loan charge is, however, retrospective in its effect.”
This House was formed in order to challenge the King, in his day, on the justice of the taxes he was demanding, and to put their own concerns back to the King to get them corrected before we paid the taxes. We should not forget the fundamental reason for this House’s existence, which is to look after our constituents in the face of demands from the state.
The Committee made a recommendation that HMRC should in future make clear public statements when it is looking at avoidance schemes. Because of the fact that so much of the burden of the decision falls on HMRC, it should make it clear to the public at large and anybody in those schemes when it is investigating them.
Mr Davis
No, I am afraid not. I have a couple of minutes left and I am going to come to an end in a second. That is the House of Lords’ view, and it was very critical. For a House of Lords report, it was an incredibly critical report.
Let me turn to the motion and the all-party group’s approach. As I say, it is incredibly reasonable: let us have a review—a judge-led review or whatever—and take some time to sort this out. I am afraid I think that that is altogether too reasonable in the light of the pressure that is being created by this policy. People who are under this policy now are suffering mental strain day in, day out. They are not people who are ever going to find £20,000, and to say to them that they have five years to pay if they are—as one of my constituents is—on a minimum pension, is meaningless. It just means his house or his car has to go, and his family is breaking up under the strain.
My view is very simple: this should not be retrospective at all before 2017—at all—because there is no reason for it whatsoever, given the behaviour of HMRC. If we do not get something like that—I say this to the Treasury, and they can add this into their accounting—I, and I suspect many others in this House, will start to pursue a right in law for every citizen that limits the extent to which the state, and particularly HMRC, can take any retroactive action whatsoever against persons, not companies such as the Vodafones, but against individuals, because it seems to me that we owe a duty to our constituents to have some certainty from the state in relation to the taxes they pay.
Sir Edward Davey
I agree with the hon. Gentleman. Let me take his point on retrospection into the substance of my speech.
Everybody has paid tribute to the Minister and I join in that, but I urge him to look at the retrospection issue. The all-party group has spoken to tax professionals and has read a lot of material. There is a debate about whether aspects of this are retrospective or not, and about where the retrospection lies. One group has been hit by the loan charge where the retrospective nature has been proven beyond doubt: taxpayers who have had their tax returned to the Treasury with DOTAS added—sometimes even without DOTAS added—and who have come clean on everything they have been doing. HMRC has accepted that and has not opened an inquiry. Their cases have been closed and time has passed. Under section 9 of the Taxes Management Act 1970, we have been giving taxpayers in that situation total protection from HMRC coming back to them. That has been true for decades. Indeed, we have signed international conventions to say that that is the way individuals should be treated. Yet here we are, going back on that. To be clear to the Minister, all the tax professionals we talked to believe that for closed cases, that was a transgression. Indeed, I asked them if they could find any example on the statute book ever of a Government passing a law to override taxpayer protections and they could not.
When the Government responded to that clause with a review, their argument against all the advice was that the charge was not retrospective because it was a charge on the loan as of now—the outstanding loan. That is interesting, because they had never before proven that loanable income. That was the whole point of this whole debacle. Moreover, the loans were taken out in the past. We might not call it retrospective and we might call it retroactive, but frankly it is the same thing for the ordinary person. The reply to the amendment to the Finance (No. 3) Bill was therefore simply not good enough; it was wrong. This is a breach in the rule of law, particularly for those people with closed tax years. At the very, very least, the Government should not apply the loan charge to those people; that is the recommendation of the all-party group.
We then come to people with open tax years. Sometimes there has been an inquiry years before—15 or 20 years ago. For many taxpayers, it was not really clear what that was. There was a little form. They were not told what their rights were or what they should do in response. They just sat there, and some of them did not even know there was an open inquiry. Those open inquiries have lasted for years, with, as the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) said, HMRC doing nothing. Surely that is HMRC incompetence, not mistakes by taxpayers. They are now paying because HMRC could not administer the tax system over that period, and tried and failed to get the law right. I am sorry, but HMRC cannot penalise our constituents with tax bills of tens of thousands of pounds because it could not do its job properly. That is not acceptable.
Rushanara Ali
As the right hon. Gentleman rightly points out, HMRC has been looking at disguised remuneration since the late ’90s and opened hundreds of thousands of cases. Mary Aiston, at the Treasury Committee, said that
“at that time our strategy meant that we weren’t telling taxpayers enough about what we were doing on their case—so they would have had an open inquiry or assessment…We recognise that at the time our strategy meant we weren’t communicating regularly enough to keep them in the picture.”
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that if that was done people could have dealt with those cases and paid up immediately, and not had tens of thousands—or, in cases in my constituency, hundreds of thousands—of pounds to pay back?
Sir Edward Davey
The hon. Lady is precisely right. That is what I think has offended people. Technically for people with open tax years it is not retrospection, but in practice—and, frankly, morally—it is. One thing that I will pursue after this experience is the use of open tax inquiries by HMRC. It goes against the whole spirit of the 1970 Act and of the way the rule of law should operate. I believe that in all parts of the House we stand to defend the rule of law. When we see an abuse of it we should get angry, we should get passionate and we should pledge to do something about it. I hope we will.
How should the Government respond? I think they should call a halt and delay. That would send a clear message to people who are suffering mentally and socially with their families and their homes. Announcing that today from the Dispatch Box would give them some relief. We have been telling them that their tax bills are not due until 31 January 2020. Nevertheless, according to the guidelines, if they do not talk to HMRC by this Friday they could suffer severe penalties. A delay would therefore help.
A judge-led inquiry is the only way we will bring people back together. Such an inquiry could look at all aspects. However—to speak to the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden—I do not want to leave it there. The policy should change now for people with closed tax years. There should be no debate about that. That is retrospection and an abuse of the rule of law. For those with open tax years, as the all-party group’s report says, a number of measures should be taken to reduce the pain and to ensure that they can get their tax affairs in order. This House is against abuse of the tax system. That is wrong and it should be stopped. But this House is also in favour of parliamentary sovereignty—the Government listening, upholding the rule of law and upholding long-standing taxpayer protections.