Finance (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Charlie Elphicke

Wednesday 25th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is exactly what people across the country will be concerned about. The Conservative party has form, about which I will go into in detail during my speech. History proves that what the Prime Minister said at Question Time today should not be believed, because it has all been said before and VAT has always gone up.

[Charlie Elphicke]

rose—

[Shabana Mahmood]

I give way to the rover from Dover.

[Charlie Elphicke]

Would the hon. Lady rule out a Labour Government keeping VAT at the same level, or would they reduce it? The hon. Lady ought to tell the Committee.

[Shabana Mahmood]

I will come on to what we announced yesterday, but we are not going to raise VAT. That is as clear as it gets, and the hon. Gentleman knows that.

I remind the Committee that VAT is the tax that hits everyone, with the same rate paid by the pensioner as by the millionaire. For many pensioners and those on the lowest incomes, it is the biggest tax that they pay. It is also the tax that hits people every single day, whether they are buying a cup of coffee or filling up the family car. Everybody does that every single day. The Government’s decision to raise the standard rate of VAT has, without doubt, hit the living standards of millions of people. According to the Treasury’s own figures, it has cost families an average of £1,800 over the past four years. That is no small trifling sum of money, even if it is averaged over four years.

As I heard from constituents across Birmingham when I was there with the shadow Chancellor yesterday, £1,800 has had a huge impact on their ability to make ends meet and to do the basic things in life—putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their families’ heads, desperately hoping they will not have to go to a food bank, even though they have a job, just to put food in the bellies of their children. That £1,800 is a significant sum of money and, coupled with the other facts of this Government’s record, such as wages being down by an average of £1,600 a year and the combined impact of tax and benefit changes, families are on average more than £1,000 a year worse off.

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[Charlie Elphicke]

Given that both parties have ruled out an increase in VAT and that the hon. Lady will not commit to a reduction in VAT, it is hard to understand Labour’s position. This debate is a theatre of the absurd.

[Shabana Mahmood]

I have a lot of time for the hon. Gentleman and we spend much time debating Finance Bills, but I must say to him as gently as I can that that was an absurd intervention. We have made a clear commitment to the British people on what will happen to VAT on our watch. It will not go up. We know that it will go up if his party wins the next general election. There are no two ways about it. It does not matter what the Prime Minister has said and it does not matter what the hon. Gentleman says now. We know that because of his party’s record and form on VAT. I shall give a lengthy exposition of that history and form very shortly.

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[Charlie Elphicke]

This debate seems to be based on a false premise. The Government have been clear that a rise in VAT is not necessary to balance the books because we do not have a hole in our plans for public finances. The Labour party does have a black hole and it cannot be trusted on anything it says about the jobs tax.

[Shabana Mahmood]

If the hon. Gentleman will allow me I will answer that by posing a simple question back to him, and then I will give way so that he can answer it. Where will the £12 billion of cuts to welfare come from? How will the £5 billion for tax avoidance be found? If he can answer those questions he will go further than those on his Front Bench have managed to do while making those promises. Perhaps he can shed some light on the issue for the British public.

[Charlie Elphicke]

The Government have been clear in setting out their plans in the Red Book, and they have been audited, considered and reviewed by the Office for Budget Responsibility. What are not clear are the plans of the Opposition, although it is increasingly clear that there is a black hole in those plans and that they consistently make it up as they go along. I suggest to the hon. Lady that Labour’s so-called pledge on the jobs tax cannot be believed at all.

[Shabana Mahmood]

That was not even a valiant attempt to try to answer my questions, but the hon. Gentleman is not on the Front Bench and I suppose I am being a little uncharitable in suggesting that he cannot answer a question that his own Chancellor is not prepared to answer either.

We have numbers of £12 billion, £13 billion and £5 billion from the Chancellor, yet with all the might of the Treasury behind him and lots of officials to do the numbers we have no detail on how those figures will be found. The Government spent a whole Parliament trying to talk up their record on tax avoidance and they are saying that they will get £5 billion in the next Parliament, yet there is no detail on how those amounts will be made up and no guarantee that they will be delivered. I am not surprised that the hon. Gentleman cannot answer those questions if those on the Government Front Bench will not either.

The Conservative party’s plans for what they would like to do if elected in a few weeks’ time are extreme and go much further than deficit reduction. They are trying to deliver a surplus of £7 billion. That had to be changed from the previous desire to get a surplus of £23 billion, because the Government got spooked by recognition across the country of what that would mean for the size of the state. They have now come down to £7 billion, which still means that they have to go further and faster in the early part of the next Parliament than they have in the previous five years.

Those choices have to be paid for. Given that some budgets are protected and that commitments to international development and aid spending will not change, and given the scale of what the Conservative party wants to achieve with the country’s finances, it is physically not possible to do such things without putting the NHS at risk of cuts or potentially of charging, or without raising VAT. That is the charge being made—it is not just about the history and the record. The hon. Gentleman could have resiled from the Conservative party’s record, but he chose not to do so. The combination of the Conservative party’s history on VAT and its figures for the next Parliament tells us that if it is elected a VAT rise is coming. There can be no doubt about it, given the combination of those two factors.

The hon. Gentleman attacked our plans and commitments, but for every commitment that involves raising revenue, we have highlighted where that revenue will come from and we have made the figures public. It was the Labour party that called for the OBR to conduct an independent audit of all parties’ manifesto commitments. We could have avoided this debate if we had allowed the OBR to do so. I was very happy to submit my party’s plans to an independent audit. I wonder why the Government chose not to do so. Perhaps they had something to hide. Perhaps they did not want to be robbed of the ability to have a “tax bombshell”-type poster. The needs of the Conservative party’s election marketing material should not have trumped the responsible thing to do: to allow the OBR independently to audit all parties’ manifesto commitments. I was very happy for that to happen.

The bankers bonus tax would pay for one policy and one policy alone: the compulsory youth jobs guarantee. [Interruption.] If the hon. Gentleman thinks the stubbornly high rate of youth unemployment is a laughing matter, he is mistaken. The Conservatives stole a few of our policies in last week’s Budget. Rather than laughing off the idea of the bankers bonus tax, I would have been happy for them to have stolen that policy, as it would have delivered jobs for the young people in my constituency who could find themselves on the jobs scrap-heap for many years to come. The Conservatives should have adopted it; it would have made a real and practical difference.

Tax Avoidance

Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Charlie Elphicke

Wednesday 11th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He and I have had a number of discussions on the airwaves about these issues, given that the Government have failed to field any Ministers to debate on those media channels. He has been doing a grand job of trying to defend the indefensible, but he is quite wrong. The central point in what we have discovered about HSBC this week is that the data with evidence of what had happened with tax avoidance and tax evasion were handed over by the French authorities to this Government in May 2010. That is the central point: that is the point at which we had evidence of wrongdoing that needed to be acted on, but that is not what happened.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

Is the hon. Lady’s case that Ministers should have direct and executive responsibility and decision-making powers over how and when Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs should prosecute and collect taxes in specific taxpayers’ cases? Yes or no?

[Shabana Mahmood]

The hon. Gentleman is completely missing the point about the debate we have been having this week about the HSBC affair. As I said in answer to the intervention from the hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier), we know that data with evidence of tax avoidance and tax evasion were handed over to the Government in May 2010. That raises serious questions about due diligence and the appointment of Lord Green, the man in charge of the bank at the time, as a Minister in this Government only eight months after the data were handed over. Nobody on the Government Benches has answered the point about why that happened, and I hope that the Minister might try to answer some of those questions today.

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[Shabana Mahmood]

I am going to make a little progress; then I shall give way again.

The famous Swiss deal between the UK and Swiss Governments in 2011 came into force on 1 January 2013. Ministers told us it would mean that British domiciles would start to be taxed on their banking deposits in Swiss institutions and raise £3.12 billion. We are now told that this has raised just a fraction of that amount—just £873 million, or a shortfall of £2.247 billion.

The Government have increased opportunities for tax avoidance. We know that the Office for Budget Responsibility has warned that the Government’s shares for rights scheme could open a tax avoidance loophole costing hundreds of millions of pounds. On page 52 of the policy costings section of the 2012 autumn statement, the OBR states:

“It is hard to predict how quickly the increased scope for tax planning will be exploited...this could be quantitatively significant as a quarter of the costing already arises from tax planning”.

I have to say to the Minister that it is one thing to have to close loopholes that have been an unforeseen consequence of legislative change, but quite another to make changes in the full knowledge that they will lead to a loss in the tax take.

[Charlie Elphicke]

Not so long ago, the Opposition opposed the Government measure on disguised remuneration, effectively a tax anti-avoidance measure taken by this Government in relation to hedge funds. Why did the Opposition do that?

[Shabana Mahmood]

I am surprised the hon. Gentleman has not done his homework. If he were to read the debate on that measure in the Finance Bill Committee, he would know that concerns were raised about the effectiveness of the initial draft legislation put forward by the Government. In fact, the Government had to table 100 amendments to their own legislation at the last moment on Report before the Bill became law. At the time, the concern was that nobody even understood what the impact of those 100 amendments would be. That is why the Opposition took that view at that time. If all the issues relating to the 100 amendments were remedied, of course we would support the thrust of that measure, but that was a technical issue discussed in Committee. The hon. Gentleman does himself no favours by not knowing the detail, given how much of an interest he takes in Finance Bill Committees and how much I have enjoyed debating with him in those Committees.

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[Shabana Mahmood]

There are real questions to be answered about how HMRC conducts its investigations and the rigour with which it pursues its different investigations. These take place, of course, within the context of legislation set by this Government, so ultimately these are matters for the Government. It is also the Government who decide on the amount of resources HMRC gets to do its job—an issue that I have discussed with the Minister on a number of occasions.

Fundamentally, the failure to act is symptomatic of the Government’s failure to tackle abuse within the tax system. That is why people are losing faith in it. Our motion sets out what we would do to restore that faith in the system. First, we have said that we will introduce penalties for those caught by the general anti-abuse rule, which is supposed to catch those who set up abusive schemes—the most egregious forms of abuse. However, there is currently no penalty scheme association with the so-called GAAR, which lacks teeth.

A Labour Government would introduce a tough penalty regime with fines of up to 100% of the value of the tax avoided. That will provide a tough and genuine deterrent to those who try to abuse the system and avoid paying their fair share of tax. [Interruption.] The Minister says from a sedentary position that the Government are now consulting on whether to have a penalties regime for the GAAR—but only after we announced our policy that we would have such a regime.

The truth is that when the GAAR was introduced, there was a huge amount of discussion and a review was carried out for the Government, with lots of academic work done on whether or not we should have a general anti-abuse rule in this country. The Government could and should have introduced penalties immediately. Where they have failed to act, we will act.

Secondly, the quoted eurobond exemption is used legitimately by many companies to raise finance on the international bond market, but it is also abused by some companies to shift profits out of the UK into tax havens, and so reduce the amount of corporation tax they pay. HMRC itself identified the problem, but the Government failed to act. Again, where they failed to act, we will act.

[Charlie Elphicke]

rose—

[Shabana Mahmood]

I will not give way; I want to make some progress. Thirdly, we have had much discussion relating to—

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[Shabana Mahmood]

At the risk of repeating our previous debate about the quoted eurobond exemption, I said at the time that I was fearful that the Minister was patronising me. He assured me then that he was not, and I take that point on board again. I have not taken the Minister up on his offer of a meeting and I have no intention of doing so. The HMRC’s proposal for closing down the exemption on which the Treasury consulted involved instances in which there was no regular or substantial trading of the bonds in question.

We all accept that there is limited liquidity for many legitimate eurobond issues, so such a criterion would be difficult to put into operation. However, we propose to explore the possibility of removing the exemption when bonds are issued to connected persons. We are making a substantially different offer with the aim of closing a loophole that everyone knows is being abused, and on which the Government have failed to act. I should be happy to meet the Minister and talk to him about how we propose to close down the eurobond exemption. I do not have access to the same officials as he does, but I do have another way of closing down that exemption.

[Charlie Elphicke]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Shabana Mahmood]

I will not, because I am going to make some more progress.

Thirdly, we have said that we will prevent hedge funds that are avoiding stamp duty on shares from being able to do so. Hedge funds currently avoid stamp duty by not buying the shares directly; instead, they get intermediaries to buy them on their behalf. Those intermediaries are investment banks, which benefit from tax relief on stamp duty. The hedge funds then enter into a contract for difference with the banks, which means that they benefit from changes in the share prices without holding the shares directly. That is an exploitation of intermediaries’ relief by hedge funds.

We have had a great deal of discussion about hedge funds in the past few days. I note, in particular, that during Prime Minister’s Question Time today, the Prime Minister did not address the point of the relief that is being abused. He wanted to get involved in a debate about who had introduced the relief, rather than about the fact that it is currently being abused by hedge funds. We have said that we will stop the practice, but we hear nothing from the Government about what they intend to do about an issue of which they too are fully aware.

Fourthly, we will take forward proposals that we were developing in government to deem construction workers to be employed for tax purposes if they meet criteria that most people would regard as obvious signs of employment. That would reverse the Government’s decision to abandon these measures, thereby dealing with a major cause of avoidance in the construction sector.

Finally, we would scrap the Government’s shares for rights scheme, which allows individuals to trade key employment rights for shares in a company. The policy has received widespread criticism. Writing in the Financial Times, Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said:

“just as concern over tax avoidance is at its highest in living memory, just as government ministers are falling over themselves to condemn such behaviour, that same government is trumpeting a new tax policy that looks like it will foster a whole new avoidance industry. Its own fiscal watchdog seems to suggest that the policy could cost a staggering £1 billion a year, and that a large portion of that could arise from ‘tax planning’.”

Labour will scrap the shares for rights scheme and redeploy HMRC resources to other areas where they are greatly needed.

Finance Bill

Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Charlie Elphicke

Tuesday 1st July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

In relation to eurobonds, I read a report that the shadow Chancellor has suggested that there is £500 million at stake. Will the hon. Lady confirm her understanding of the costings?

[Shabana Mahmood]

I will turn at length to costings of the abuse of the quoted eurobonds exemption, but it is certainly true that many of the estimates of how much it might be costing the Exchequer have placed the figure at around £500 million.

Let me start with the context and explain the thinking behind our new clause. Public concern about tax avoidance is high, and this is a problem not only for the Government but for parties across the House. The setting of tax rates, decisions about tax reliefs, and the collection of tax are among the most important functions of government. If the system is not working as well as it could be, that needs to be addressed. Over the past couple of years, there have been a number of high-profile media stories focused on the tax arrangements of particular companies and individuals, as a result of which, it is fair to say, public trust in the tax system has been eroded.

The deficit, as we know, is high and will not now be cleared by 2015, as the Government promised when they came to office in 2010. It will not, in fact, be eliminated until well into the next Parliament.

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[Shabana Mahmood]

I will take further interventions later, but I want to make some progress.

What else has been happening on this Government’s watch? The Government have raised expectations in respect of some aspects of their tax avoidance policy, but they have not been met. In particular—we have put this point to the Minister on many occasions—the Swiss deal, which was supposed to bring in £3.12 billion, a sum that would have gone some way towards making a dent in the tax gap, has in fact brought in only £818 million. I know the Minister will say that the figures were okayed by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility when the costings were put in the Red Book, but that does not mean that the Minister can simply get away with it. At the end of the day, there is an unexplained and substantial difference between what was meant to happen as a result of that deal and what did in fact happen, raising questions about the substance of the deal.

Another feature of public debate as the issue of tax avoidance has shot up the public agenda relates to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. If we are to close the tax gap, we need HMRC to be as effective as possible. Last year’s Public Accounts Committee report “Tax avoidance: tackling marketed avoidance schemes” found that HMRC did not know how much it spent on its anti-avoidance work and had not evaluated the effectiveness of its efforts. It calls for HMRC to improve its recording and monitoring of the cost of its anti-avoidance work and to set out clearly how it will evaluate its anti-avoidance strategy. This is a substantial gap in knowledge; again, it has a direct impact on the Government’s ability to tackle tax avoidance effectively and thereby close the tax gap.

[Charlie Elphicke]

It is worth noting that last year tax inspectors collected a record £23.9 billion, about £4 billion of which was from criminals and tax avoiders, so HMRC has been quite effective in collecting that record amount.

[Shabana Mahmood]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but as I just said, the tax gap has widened: despite those efforts, it has gone up by £1 billion or more.

The Public Accounts Committee also raised concerns about the monitoring of tax relief at HMRC and the Treasury. In 2013, there were 1,128 tax reliefs in the UK taxation system—a number that continues to grow. Tax reliefs can range from fundamental components of the tax system, such as the level of the personal allowance, to tax expenditures with more specific objectives to change behaviour, such as film tax relief. They play an important role in the tax system, but can be abused. Indeed, even in this Finance Bill the Government have had to take steps to close down the abuse of tax reliefs. It is therefore very worrying that the Public Accounts Committee has concluded:

“There is a lack of transparency and accountability for tax reliefs and no adequate system of control, following their introduction. HMRC and HM Treasury share responsibility for tax reliefs, but there is no accounting officer with responsibility for the stewardship of tax reliefs, as there would be for”

other elements of

“public spending. In 2010, HM Treasury committed to developing a framework for the introduction of new reliefs”.

However, no measures have been implemented so far.

In December 2013—this is relevant to what the hon. Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) said a moment ago—there were just four full-time officers in the fugitive unit, trying to catch 124 HMRC fugitives. The Government launched a “most wanted” campaign in August 2012, but earlier this year it was found that just four fugitives had been caught since the publication of the list. Moreover, it was admitted that of the 32 “most wanted”, 11 could not be located. If the Government are to support their claim that they are succeeding in the fight against tax avoidance and evasion, they must be able to demonstrate that they will catch those who break and abuse the rules, and will prosecute them to the full extent of the law.

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[Shabana Mahmood]

That may be the hon. Gentleman’s view, but I am simply pointing out that in order to fall foul of the GAAR someone has to have engaged in the most egregious form of abuse. It seems odd to me that falling foul of the GAAR will not therefore attract any additional penalty on top of the tax that is in dispute.

[Charlie Elphicke]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Shabana Mahmood]

No, I am going to make some more progress.

Tax avoidance and how to tackle it effectively and thereby close the tax gap remains a real problem for this Government, hence our new clause. We need more action from this Government, and where they fail the next Labour Government will step in. We are pushing the Government for greater action in three specific areas. Let me take each in turn.

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[Shabana Mahmood]

I may yet take the Minister up on it. But it would be a mistake for him to think that our proposal has been made without consulting experts who are very much engaged on the issue of eurobonds. I am confident that the information we have put out as a result of our business taxation paper, launched yesterday, is accurate and that we have considered the different legal and other ramifications of limiting the abuse of the exemption as it currently stands.

[Charlie Elphicke]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Shabana Mahmood]

I am going to make a bit more progress.

Let us say for the sake of argument that the figure is close to the £200 million or so set out in the original HMRC consultation. I was surprised that the Minister did not think that sum would merit action. The tone of his comments to me suggested that he considered that to be a small sum and so it was not worth going ahead with the attempt to close down the abuse of the exemption. I am afraid that, as an argument, that is not something that I am prepared to buy. Why? Well, in this year’s Finance Bill Committee, we have debated and supported a measure in clause 61 on business premises renovation allowances.

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[Shabana Mahmood]

I am grateful to the Minister for that intervention. I was talking about the overall yield. On the difference between the Government and the Opposition in relation to the technical way in which to seek to close down the exemption, the Government consultation looked at situations in which the bonds are not being actively traded. We agreed that that was not an appropriate way in which to close the exemption but, as I have said, we would explore removing the exemption where the bonds are issued to connected persons and, in doing so, we would look at mechanisms to simplify rebate claims under the double taxation treaties and consider, in consultation with industry, streamlining the withholding tax rebate process.

[Charlie Elphicke]

On these particular provisions, the hon. Lady said that she consulted experts. Will she confirm which particular experts she consulted?

[Shabana Mahmood]

I would be happy to have a long conversation with the hon. Gentleman about all the different experts, but let me just say that our experts were drawn from across the business and legal worlds. They gave advice and assisted us in thinking through many of the issues related to the abuse of the quoted eurobonds exemption. I will not take this opportunity to put that advice on the record, because I have not sought the permission of those experts to make public some of the assistance and advice that they have given to us. However, our paper is thorough on the issue of how we would seek to close down abuse of the exemption. That tells the House that we have considered these issues deeply, and have thought through all of the problems that might arise from the different attempts to close down the exemption.

I was talking about yield, and how far a potential yield should dictate the Government’s policy in deciding whether to close down an abuse of the system. I referred to the business premises renovation allowance in clause 61. The Government have taken action to close down some of the abuse associated with that allowance, but the impact on the Exchequer was, we were told, negligible. So we see the Government proactively closing down a loophole in which the Exchequer impact is expected to be minimal, but where a loophole exists that is estimated to cost the Exchequer upwards of £200 million a year, they do nothing. How can they justify their decision not to take action to prevent the abusive use of the eurobonds exemption when there are hundreds of millions of pounds at stake?

The potential complexity of the change that would be required is no justification for the failure to act. It has not stopped this Government on other measures, including on the business premises renovation allowance. There seems to be no reason—not money, complexity or anything else—that could stop the Government from acting other than intense lobbying from the affected parties seeking to protect their own interests.

The Government have failed to act, but our new clause gives them the opportunity to do so. If they do not act, the next Labour Government will.