Clause 12
6:45 pm
Ian Pearson (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Economic and Business), Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform; Dudley South, Labour)
The situation as I understand it is that the Bill will give to the Treasury a power to make regulations to recover any overpayments made. Where an overpayment has been made, HMRC would consider the facts and circumstances of a particular case, to assess whether it was appropriate to recover any overpayments made. We are clear that we are dealing with people on low incomes and that we are talking about relatively small sums of money, and I would hope—indeed, expect—that HMRC would be extremely sensitive to such circumstances as we are talking about. What we are doing in subsection (2) is simply applying the normal collection and recovery powers. I know my hon. Friend has issues about how they might be applied in other areas, but it is right for us to have the powers. He correctly asks us to make sure that those powers are used in a sensible and proportionate way, which is what we would want to do.