Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2021-04-20
Topic: Macroeconomics
Catherine Elizabeth West (Labour, Centre-left): How delightful it is to see you in the Chair, Ms McDonagh. I am very pleased to speak to amendment 77 and new clause 29, and to have listened to the excellent speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (James Murray). I pay tribute to Members from across the parties who have stood up for those who have been so badly affected by the loan charge scandal, and I was particularly pleased to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury) speaking so eloquently on Radio 4 on Sunday evening. We are getting these important messages across. I also wanted to pay tribute to the important work that is being done by the all-party parliamentary group on anti-corruption and responsible tax, led by the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge), on simplifying things and making the basics better, for example by improving the Companies House regulations. I understand that some of that is coming forward shortly, but the general picture is that things are quite slow It was lovely to listen to the hon. Member for Burnley (Antony Higginbotham) speaking about the importance of taxation. Once upon a time, I am sure that would have been quite a tricky topic for certain Conservative Members to talk about, but there is a new wind blowing. It is great to hear President Biden talking about the global minimum corporate tax level and the importance of an online sales tax, and even to hear our own Government leading the charge across Europe on the importance of introducing a digital sales tax and simplifying things to bring in the important public funds that we all need to keep our society going The scale of tax offences is clear, with a recent TaxWatch report finding that between 2009 and 2019, the UK prosecuted 23 times as many people for benefits offences as for tax offences—that theme has been echoed in today’s speeches—despite the fact that the value of tax fraud is nine times higher than that of benefit fraud. We know that American research has shown that for every $1 the Internal Revenue Service invests, it gets back $10 of benefit for the public purse, and I wonder what the consultation the Treasury ran said about incentivising officers based in HMRC so that the more money brought back, the more colleagues come on board to help them in their important work We know that a lot of this work is about priorities, and we need to prioritise criminal prosecutions so that there is not a decrease in taxation, as there has been of 39% since 2015. We need to look at the balance of the DWP employing 3.5 times more staff in compliance than HMRC. We know that we have to improve that balance, because quite simply there is much more money to be found in illicit finance and among tax avoiders than from those eking out a living on universal credit or personal independence payments The Minister will I am sure make it clear in his remarks that the Bill is intended to tackle some of these issues and to amend that imbalance, and I look forward to hearing that. However, I make the case for quicker progress so that we can move forward as fast as possible, particularly given the fact that, as the hon. Member for Burnley mentioned, the furlough scheme and some of the other schemes are quite expensive, and therefore the need to find more in this way from tax evasion is ever more pressing I want briefly to mention the importance of the provisions on freeports and the corporation tax super deduction, which do not appear to come with sufficient tax avoidance and evasion safeguards. I hope that during the debate—perhaps not right at this instant, but over the course of today—we will get some reassurances on that matter. In March, the Financial Secretary was unable to say how many additional staff HMRC plans to recruit to deal with taxation, duty, excise and customs issues pertaining solely to freeports, but I hope that that information is forthcoming. Given the attention and focus the Government gave to these announcements, we would have expected them to get the basics right, but we still have some questions that are outstanding While the Government are bringing forward—perhaps deliberately, some of us would say—a weak set of measures in the Finance Bill, other tools that we need to tackle evasion and avoidance, such as the draft Register of Overseas Entities Bill, could well sit gathering dust, since they were initially announced quite some time ago. Will the Minister use today as an opportunity to outline his views on that particular Bill On the question of illicit money, do not forget that our own Intelligence and Security Committee called London a "laundromat" for illicit and dark finances, often coming from Russia. I would hope that the Minister will redouble his efforts to understand how to clamp down on the facilitation of those finances through the UK financial system. We would have expected such a description of our capital city to force action from the Government, but we are still waiting to see exactly who owns some of the foreign companies buying up British property. Can someone still walk in and purchase a £1 million property in cash, and does the Minister believe such a way of purchasing expensive properties in London is appropriate?