Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what recent estimate his Department has made of the amount of income tax that was lost due to tax fraud by builders in the repair, maintenance and improvement sector in the last 12 months.

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) estimates the tax gap, which will encompass fraud, for all taxes including VAT, Corporation Tax and Income Tax. However, HMRC does not make a separate estimate of the amount of fraud within the tax gap nor is it not possible to subdivide these tax gap estimates into fraud by builders in the repair, maintenance and improvement sector in the last 12 months.

Tax gap estimates for VAT, Income Tax and Corporation Tax for tax year 2021-2022 are available in chapters 2, 4 and 5, respectively, of HMRC’s publication Measuring tax gaps 2023 edition. An illustrative breakdown of the tax gap by customer behaviour is available in chapter 7. This report is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/measuring-tax-gaps.