argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-18
Topic: Macroeconomics
Nigel John Mills (Conservative, Centre-right): I agree with the hon. Gentleman that we have to think about how to do the annual adjustments—they have to be made only once—if we move to a quarterly system. A lot of very small businesses are already on simplified accounting methods in any case, so perhaps those issues will not apply to that extent. The Minister reminded me that the Government have been trying to expand on those simplified accounting measures to make things easier for small businesses, and so I hope that some of those issues would not arise During the debate on my first Finance Bill as a Member of this House, one of my amendments sought to suggest that we move the corporation tax system much closer to the annual accounts that people submit, rather than having lots of different tax adjustments. Such an approach would be much clearer for business and would create big cost savings. With more of these things, perhaps I will eventually get to that dream I had nearly seven years ago, although I am not entirely optimistic about that. To be fair, we should welcome the fact that the Government have relaxed the timetable for businesses whose turnover is less than the VAT threshold. I welcome that and it has been largely welcomed by most small businesses in my constituency, which did have concerns about this As we are dealing with corporation tax and as I was talking about amendments I tabled to the first Finance Bill on which I served, let me say that one of my other amendments sought to allow groups to file one corporation tax return for their whole group, rather than having to file one for every individual entity and then making loads of complicated claims about how losses are moved around the group. This Bill contains restrictions on how many of the losses brought forward from previous years can be used, but we are allowing those losses now to be used right across the group, rather than just in the entity that originally made the loss. That is a welcome change. As we leave the EU and can finally lay to bed all the worries we had about whether we would have to include all EU companies in a group tax return, if we had one, because it would be discriminatory under EU law to include only UK companies, perhaps now is the time to look, as many other countries have, into allowing groups of companies to file one tax return that shows the profit for the whole group and does not have to track every individual transaction between all the companies. That would help us to tackle some tax avoidance schemes that have played on the different treatment of transactions between companies. It would make it easier to comply and help to tackle avoidance so, as we move through the Brexit process, I hope we can look at those issues that we have previously found difficult.
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-18
Topic: Macroeconomics
Sue-Ellen Cassiana Braverman (Conservative, Centre-right): Does my hon. Friend agree that the cut in corporation tax from 19% to 17% in 2020 is only going to be good for the economy—the previous cut produced an increase in revenue from corporation tax—and will set Britain out as a favourable place for business and investment as we enter the next phase of our history through Brexit?
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-18
Topic: Macroeconomics
Nigel John Mills (Conservative, Centre-right): I absolutely agree: it is important that we continue to send the signal that Britain is a great place to do business and to invest. We want as much international investment here as we can get, so it is absolutely right to have a headline corporation tax rate that is as low as we can have it. I welcome the fact that we are going to get it down to 17%. The previous Chancellor hinted that he might have used 15% to give a sense of direction; perhaps the Government will look into using that in the manifesto we are about to produce.
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-18
Topic: Macroeconomics
Nigel John Mills (Conservative, Centre-right): I think I would have had to attend several of the hon. Gentleman’s lectures to understand better how the German economy works, but that is not something I have ever studied. We could probably talk about euro rates and the history of investment in skills and so on, but I suspect it is not all down to corporation tax.
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-18
Topic: Macroeconomics
Nigel John Mills (Conservative, Centre-right): Yes, and Ireland has found that that corporation tax rate has been successful in helping to attract investment. I noticed that throughout all Ireland’s financial crises and its desperate need for tax revenue, that rate was one thing on which it was not prepared to move, which is a sign of how successful it thinks it has been.
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-18
Topic: Macroeconomics
Alan Mak (Conservative, Centre-right): I hope my hon. Friend will join me in sharing the sentiments of our hon. Friend the Member for Fareham (Suella Fernandes) and celebrate the fact that Britain will have the lowest rate of corporation tax in the G20. To come back to the point made by the hon. Member for East Lothian (George Kerevan) comparing Britain to the German economy, does my hon. Friend agree that although the British and German Governments spend a similar amount on research and development—around 28%—the big deficit is actually in private sector investment? If we are going to lead the fourth industrial revolution, which will be important to ensuring that our economy is strong, we need to get the private sector to invest. That is what the Bill will do.
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-18
Topic: Macroeconomics
Nigel John Mills (Conservative, Centre-right): I agree with those sentiments. If we are going to get into a debate about the German economic model, though, I should probably step out of the middle of it because it is not an area I have ever looked at There is a clause in the Bill on the Northern Ireland corporation tax and how we will make the lower rate there work. This is probably my chance to sneak in a remark, Mr Deputy Speaker: I hope we can get an Executive formed in Northern Ireland so that they can take the decision to have a lower rate of corporation tax. I suspect we probably do not need to rush that clause through the wrap-up, given the current situation, although I guess it is not controversial in Northern Ireland.
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-18
Topic: Macroeconomics
Nigel John Mills (Conservative, Centre-right): I do agree: it is regrettable that the inability to form an Executive means that it looks like a power that was long campaigned for will not be used on the timetable it should be. We have seen how important it is for the Northern Ireland economy to have a rate that matches that of the Republic of Ireland so that it can compete on attracting investment. Many issues will get lost in the upcoming general election, but I hope that the need for Northern Ireland to find a way forward is not one that we take our attention off for the next six or seven weeks I think it was to last year’s Finance Bill that the Government accepted an amendment to introduce territory-by-territory reporting for all large corporates as part of their annual tax strategy. When the Minister sums up, will she update the House on the timetable? When might that power be turned on so that we can start to see those reports I welcome the measures in the Bill to encourage social investment by increasing tax relief but making sure that it is focused on the right things and is not subject to avoidance. I recently heard that a group of residents in Holbrook had managed to raise the funds to buy a local pub that faced being knocked down and turned into housing, by getting 250 or so people to buy shares in the new business. That is a real example of what a community can do to save a valued asset and I pay tribute to their success I wish to touch briefly on air passenger duty. I do not want to revisit the whole debate—I accept that we need it to raise revenue—but I just wonder whether, as we leave the European Union and some of the restrictions on how we can regionalise taxes drop away, the Government will be prepared to look at measures to encourage new routes into regional airports. That would help to tackle the congestion and air quality in London, and it would help the economy outside London by providing direct routes to the high-growth parts of the world. I wonder whether it is possible to produce a scheme in which we have either lower rates of APD on routes into regional airports, including East Midlands airport near my constituency, or lower APD for a new route for a certain time period—perhaps three or five years—to enable such a route to become viable. Such measures would not have the big revenue hit that they would have on all the London airports, and would target the money that we can spend on getting the vital regional growth that would help the regions of England outside London. As APD is a devolved tax, if Scotland chooses to have a lower APD rate in future, we may see some interesting tax competition if airports in the north of England feel the need to respond Overall, I welcome the Bill. It contains many important measures that will help to protect our tax base and tackle avoidance—which we all want—and help the economy to grow. It is an important Bill and I hope its provisions will survive the discussions over the next few days.
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-18
Topic: Macroeconomics
Nigel John Mills (Conservative, Centre-right): I was nearly finished, but the hon. Gentleman invites me into a debate on the tax gap. I do not have the numbers to hand, but it is important to understand what makes up the tax gap. Tax avoidance by large corporates is actually a relatively small part of it. From memory, the largest part is due to people who operate in the black market and do not pay VAT or declare their tax. Another large part is down to errors or mistakes by small businesses or individuals. It is right that the Government should bear down on all those aspects, but I do not think it is possible to get the tax gap down to zero—it would involve some kind of ridiculously heavy compliance burden. We could probably get there only by having zero tax rates or zero economic activity, so there will always be some level of tax that we cannot collect, but the measures that the Government have taken progressively over the past seven years to tackle aggressive tax avoidance have been the right ones. We have the general anti-abuse rule, which we are trying to tighten up in the Bill. When that gets to its five-year anniversary, I look forward to seeing whether we can change our strategy on targeted abuse rules, whether we might not need to have quite so many individual anti-avoidance rules, and whether we can rely on the general one Although we have discussed Making Tax Digital, a key part of reducing the tax gap is making businesses report and be more compliant on a more regular basis. We must press on with that and make it work, but we do not want to risk going too far. There are more measures that we could try to take to encourage people not to pay cash in hand to avoid paying VAT. It is very hard for an individual to know whether the person cutting their hedge or driving their taxi is tax registered. Perhaps we should have some kind of registration process so that a person can say, "I want to engage people who are fully tax compliant. If you can show me that you are, I will happily hire you. If you can’t, perhaps I will hire someone else."
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-18
Topic: Macroeconomics
Alan Mak (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend is making a very good speech about the changing nature of the economy, particularly in relation to the rise of the gig economy. Will he join me in welcoming the review by Matthew Taylor about how we can tax both the individuals and the companies operating in the gig economy to make sure that we strike that fair balance between taxation and innovation in our economy and our employment market?
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-18
Topic: Macroeconomics
Nigel John Mills (Conservative, Centre-right): Yes, I happily welcome that review. That has become an emerging issue that we need to tackle. It will probably blow up in the national insurance debate. I welcome the measures in this Bill, which propose that where the public sector engages with individuals who try to incorporate themselves, those individuals will not get the tax advantages. That has to be right. We need to find a way of doing that for very high paid individuals outside the public sector who try to do that. We need to ensure that they are taxed on that income in a way that the tax system intends, and not allow them to get an advantage through the corporation tax system. I accept that the reduction in the dividend relief that was announced in the Budget was the right thing to do. As we see our employment market changing, we need to ensure that the tax system is not encouraging unscrupulous employers to try to pretend that their employees are self-employed in order to get a tax advantage for themselves, leaving those individuals in a far worse situation without the security of being employed and without the rights to welfare, holiday, sick and maternity pay to which they are entitled. That review will be very important in enabling us to strike the right balance and to encourage people who are genuinely self-employed and taking risks. I accept that we should have a lower tax rate for people who do that. How we get our tax rules to match the changing way that people work will be extremely important, and that review will have an essential role to play I will wrap up my contribution by saying that I welcome this Bill and that, whatever passage it has, I wish it well.
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-18
Topic: Macroeconomics
Rebecca Faye Clark (Pow) (Conservative, Centre-right): I just want to point out that, under the Scotland Act 2016, we are devolving benefits worth £2.8 billion to the Scottish Parliament. That is almost a fifth of Scottish spending. It would be really interesting to hear what the hon. Gentleman thinks about that. Indeed, he could even welcome the fact that this Government have created such a strong economy that Scotland is able to have that much money gifted to it.
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-18
Topic: International Affairs
Jacob William Rees-Mogg (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Gentleman quotes the OBR, which was one of the few forecasters that was responsible enough a year ago not to make wild assumptions about what Brexit would mean. Most of the other forecasters thought they knew what would happen and got it comprehensively wrong. It shows prudence, caution and common sense not to try to forecast that which is essentially unknowable.
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-18
Topic: Macroeconomics
Jacob William Rees-Mogg (Conservative, Centre-right): The point I was trying to make was that we have had incredibly wrong forecasts from all these illustrious bodies. The hon. Gentleman was only wrong on the OBR. I criticised lots and lots of bodies; the OBR was the one I singled out for not being so foolish as to make erroneous forecasts. The Treasury, the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of England all said that the day we left there would be Armageddon and we would have a punishment Budget. This turned out to be nonsense, and it is much wiser of the current Chancellor to avoid foolish speculation.
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-18
Topic: Agriculture
Rishi Sunak (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend makes an excellent point about the freedom for better labelling after we leave the European Union. Does he agree that one sector that could benefit from that is the dairy sector and dairy farming? Those products could have better country of origin labelling, which would help British shoppers to choose British dairy products and support British farmers.
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-18
Topic: Macroeconomics
Matthew Robert Warman (Conservative, Centre-right): Does my hon. Friend agree that this is an example of measuring success in terms not of the revenue raised but the behaviour that we change, and that the evidence that he talks about will not only change behaviour but genuinely change people’s lives in all our constituencies?
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-18
Topic: Agriculture
Jane Ellison (Conservative, Centre-right): I am happy to comment on a couple of things. First, the provision is designed slightly differently from the Mexican initiative and others around the world. It is deliberately a producer levy, to drive reformulation of product. Secondly, to recap what I said in my opening speech, it is not happening in isolation. I entirely agree that it would not be enough in isolation, but it sits alongside a very ambitious body of work, not least in relation to reformulation across a range of different food groups, particularly those focused on children’s diets, on which Public Health England will lead over the next few years, working closely with manufacturers.
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-18
Topic: Macroeconomics
Jacob William Rees-Mogg (Conservative, Centre-right): Absolutely. That is an important part of the reforms, but there has perhaps been a tone—more from the previous Chancellor than from the current Chancellor—that the non-doms were using the system. A lot of them could actually go anywhere in the world, but they come here because of the great virtues of investing in the UK: we have clear rights of property; we have an effective rule of law; and we have had simple regulations that have allowed them to be here. However, we have now increased the charges on them and increased their eligibility for certain taxes, and I think we should be very cautious about that because one never knows, with these sorts of things, where the tipping point will come. It may be that the annual charges applied to non-doms seem quite small compared with their wealth, but when we consider that they have families—the charges have to be multiplied for the wife, the number of children and grandparents, or whoever—we may find that the charges become quite high. The people bringing such wealth into the country have enormous mobility: they can go elsewhere. I know that standing up for non-doms six weeks before an election is not necessarily going to be a great rallying call for North East Somerset, but ultimately I think good economics leads to good politics rather than the other way around. A lot of what was done with regard to non-doms was much more about politics and perception than the contribution non-doms make to this country. In the context of Brexit, we want to show that we are genuinely open to the rest of the world. We want people to come here to invest and to spend their money, because that is so important to our long-term economic prosperity There is a broad challenge with this Finance Bill, as there will be with its successor which will no doubt come. I have a feeling that this will be one of those happy years where we get more than one Finance Bill. Finance Bill debates are particularly enjoyable parliamentary occasions because they have no time limit. The hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) said that we might go right through the night and not be able to have our debate tomorrow. I look forward to that happening at some point in the future, but I have a feeling it is not going to happen today. Finance Bill debates are the best debates because of their fluidity and flexibility When we get to the second Finance Bill, a fundamental choice will still have to be made. This relates to the answer we had from the hon. Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd) on the Opposition Front Bench. There is an absolutely key point at the heart of this Finance Bill, as there will be at the heart of any new Finance Bill. When I intervened on him and said that the tax rate as a percentage of GDP was at its highest since the days of Harold Wilson, his answer to me was that under Labour it would be even higher.
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-18
Topic: Macroeconomics
Jacob William Rees-Mogg (Conservative, Centre-right): I look forward to reading the characteristically accurate transcript Hansard will have for us tomorrow. The great thing about Hansard is that it allows us to correct our grammar—indeed, it often corrects it for us—but it does not allow us to correct the sense, so we will see what was said precisely That is the choice. If the hon. Gentleman now wishes to move away from that choice I think that is telling: with an election approaching Labour Members are nervous about it, but the Labour party—the socialists—remains the party of high taxation. The Conservative Government have had to increase taxation because of the enormous deficit left by the spendthrifts of the last Labour Government who almost bankrupted the country. We would probably have gone to the International Monetary Fund at the time if it had had any money left, but it was bailing out Greece and everywhere else so it did not have much for us by the time the Conservatives came in. Through hard work, control of expenditure and, I am sorry to say, some tax rises, the deficit has been brought under control. That is the fundamental achievement of this Government As we go into an election, it is the really big picture that matters. It will give such a clear and forthright choice to the British people. Do they want to continue to be governed by people who recognise that it is their money—the money of the individual taxpayer—of which the Government must take as little as possible to finance that which they are required to do? Or are we going to go back to the days of socialist tax and spend, with a huge increase in the deficit to finance spending programmes and tax increases that are even higher than those in the days of Harold Wilson? It was, of course, Denis Healey who said that he would squeeze the rich until the pips squeaked. That was his approach to taxation. Do we, by dutiful, sensible and prudent management of the economy, get things back under control where, with proper reforms, we can lower the tax burden?
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-18
Topic: Macroeconomics
Jacob William Rees-Mogg (Conservative, Centre-right): I would explain the national debt of approaching £2 trillion because of the place where we started. It is very interesting that when the previous Chancellor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne), started reducing the deficit he was told by Opposition Members, "Too far, too fast!" They chanted it like a mantra as he stood at the Dispatch Box nobly defending his policies. In fact, he went at the right pace to ensure that the Budget deficit came under control, while at the same time the economy was not unduly affected by the reductions in expenditure and increases in taxes that had to be made. It was a first-class balancing act by my right hon. Friend and that is why the deficit is at £2 trillion.
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-18
Topic: Macroeconomics
Jacob William Rees-Mogg (Conservative, Centre-right): It has succeeded. We have the fastest growing economy in the G7. For all the stuff we heard a year ago, the economy has carried on motoring ahead. The economy has done pretty well every year now since 2010. That is the success of the economic strategy that the Government followed. The deficit is about a third of what it was in nominal terms, but as a percentage of GDP it is now within the normal bounds of deficits.