Tulip Siddiq
Main Page: Tulip Siddiq (Labour - Hampstead and Highgate)Department Debates - View all Tulip Siddiq's debates with the HM Treasury
(1 year, 7 months ago)
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Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)
Last week, the Public Accounts Committee revealed that our country lost £9 billion-worth of tax revenue during the pandemic because HMRC redeployed 4,000 staff members whose jobs were to chase down tax avoiders. The Prime Minister was Chancellor at the time and presumably signed off that decision. Can the Minister tell me whether the Prime Minister did that as a deliberate act to give the green light to tax avoiders, or is it just another example of Tory incompetence?
John Glen
I think that is a ridiculous suggestion, to be honest. HMRC received £863 million to modernise the tax system, and that included £136 million invested over the spending period to deliver improvements in terms of a single customer record and account. On what happened over covid, I have already set out the investment we made, including the £100 million in the taxpayer protection taskforce. We take fraud very seriously. Now it is about HMRC looking at financial records of excessive trading to come to terms with those businesses that used some of those schemes fraudulently. We will continue to work on that.