Oral Answers to Questions

Stewart Hosie Excerpts

Tuesday 11th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

Yes, I agree that that is of course the best approach, but in the tax code of a western democracy there will inevitably be opportunities for abuse and avoidance, which we need to deal with. When it comes to retrospection, I say to my hon. Friend, the Chair of the Treasury Committee, that I think the House of Commons should sanction retrospective taxation only when it is very clear that the explicit wishes of Parliament have been abused and avoided. For example, in the case of a particular UK bank that his Committee and I have corresponded about, we acted retrospectively because there was a clear breach of what Parliament had expressed, and I am very pleased to note that the bank’s new chief executive has today said that the bank will be scaling down its tax structuring activities.

[Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)]

A year ago the Chief Secretary to the Treasury made a speech in which he said he would employ 2,000 more tax inspectors, but in March this year it transpired that there were almost 1,300 fewer people in compliance than there had been when the Government came to power. Can the Chancellor tell us when we will see any of those 2,000 new inspectors, or are we to take it that that was simply a conference flourish speech and that there is no real determination to clamp down on tax avoidance as the Chancellor has said?

[Mr Osborne]

The number of specialist tax people at HMRC dealing with compliance is going up over this Parliament. We are also committing an extra £900 million to the organisation specifically for that activity. As I have just explained to the House, we are collecting £3 billion more in tax as a result of compliance over this Parliament and, as we will confirm later this week, we are collecting £500 million more from high net worth individuals because of the high net worth unit and its better than expected performance over the past two years.