Tax Avoidance

Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Richard Graham

Wednesday 11th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. I entirely agree with him, and it is something I shall come to later.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

I am grateful to the shadow Minister for giving way; she has been generous in taking interventions.

I think that everyone in the House agrees that every company should pay the tax it owes. The hon. Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) is right that it is not encouraging for companies that pay the right amount of tax when others do not, but Labour first talked about introducing a general anti-abuse rule in 1997. It has taken 16 years and this Government to introduce one. Does she not agree that it is this Government who are implementing steps to prevent serious avoidance?

[Shabana Mahmood]

I shall deal with the substantive thrust of that intervention when I come to the general anti-abuse rule later.

In the context of what has been happening on the Government’s watch in revelations to tax avoidance, we have now had the shocking revelations about HSBC. We now learn that the Government were handed information about malpractice at HSBC, and that one of their first acts was to make the then boss of the bank, Stephen Green, a lord and then a trade Minister. Richard Brooks, a former HMRC tax inspector and BBC reporter, has said that the Treasury and HMRC

“knew that there was a mass of evidence of tax evasion at the heart of HSBC”

in 2011, but that they

“simply washed their hands of it”—

a damning indictment, if ever there was one.

The consequences are clear. More than 1,100 individuals were identified as allegedly guilty of tax avoidance or evasion, but we are led to believe that in only one case was there sufficient evidence to prosecute. In November 2012, a senior HMRC official told The Times that the Government had adopted “a selective prosecution policy” towards cases related to HSBC. Later that month, HMRC told the Public Accounts Committee that another dozen criminal prosecutions were to follow. However, there have been none since. It seems that HMRC adopted a deliberate strategy to minimise the number of prosecutions, rather than pursue them, which explains why just £135 million has been recouped, which contrasts unfavourably with France, for example, which has prosecuted more cases and raised more money on the basis of fewer account files being handed over.