New Clause 7 — General anti-tax avoidance principle

Part of [1st Allocated Day] – in the House of Commons at 8:00 pm on 17 April 2013.

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Photo of Catherine McKinnell Catherine McKinnell Shadow Minister (Treasury) 8:00, 17 April 2013

That is clearly untrue. The Labour Government had a proud record of tackling tax avoidance at every level. We introduced endless targeted measures that brought in an additional £16 billion of revenue. We introduced the disclosure scheme, which, as the Minister will say, has been highly successful, which this Government are building on and which brought in an additional £12 billion of revenue. I shall take no lessons from those on the Government Benches about tackling tax avoidance, because although the Government talk tough the action is yet to be seen on the ground.

Clearly it is unfair and wrong that companies can avoid tax on profits that have been generated from economic activity in the UK. I am sure that we can all agree on that. The profits have been generated by hard-working UK tax-paying consumers and businesses with what appears to be one rule for those at the top and another for everybody else.

There will sometimes be good reasons for companies to pay little or less tax. Some firms invest large sums in research and development, assets and infrastructure. That must be celebrated and acknowledged, but people are rightly entitled to ask what is going wrong when a company can make sales of £1.2 billion and describe itself to investors as profitable yet report no profit in the UK. It totally undermines the concept of a level playing field when good British companies pay their fair share on profits generated in this country whereas others seem to get away with not doing so.

As we all know from our constituency postbags, people are angry about the devastating consequences of tax avoidance not just on the UK and our public services but on developing countries, with multinational giants using tax havens and artificial corporate structures to shift profits offshore and away from the places where they were generated.

We have heard much tough talk from the Government about their apparent determination to tackle tax avoidance. Before us today we have the coalition’s flagship policy on this issue, the general anti-abuse rule. Announced in the 2012 Budget and building on the 2011 report by Graham Aaronson, QC, the GAAR will apply to income tax, national insurance contributions, corporation tax, capital gains tax, inheritance tax, petroleum revenue tax, stamp duty land tax and the new annual tax on enveloped dwellings. I welcome the statement on page 4 of the guidance that was finally published, which suggests that the GAAR

“rejects the approach taken by the Courts in a number of old cases to the effect that taxpayers are free to use their ingenuity to reduce their tax bills by any lawful means, however contrived those means might be and however far the tax consequences might diverge from the real economic position.”

That is a significant advance on the current situation, but, in the Treasury’s words, the GAAR is intended to address

“artificial and abusive avoidance schemes but without creating uncertainty for business investment” and will attack

“only those schemes that are the intended target and not a broader spread of business arrangements.”

The Budget 2013 policy costings documents suggested that the GAAR

“would be highly targeted on abusive avoidance that has abnormal features” and goes on to suggest that the people affected are likely to be those involved in “highly contrived tax avoidance”. Mr Aaronson believes that the GAAR is

“clearly intended to apply only to egregious, or very aggressive, tax avoidance schemes”.

Indeed, clause 204(2)(b) refers to the use of “contrived or abnormal steps” to obtain a tax advantage. Those are definitions that I would say—many would agree with me—are highly subjective and require greater clarity in the final guidance. As the Chartered Institute of Taxation pointed out before the guidance was published, how does one interpret “abnormal” and to what extend does the term “contrived” cover what many tax experts would think—rightly or even wrongly, in many people’s view—is simply tax planning? Page 23 of the final guidance, published on Monday, simply states:

“The words “contrived” and “abnormal” are not defined, and therefore will be applied in their normal sense.”

What deterrent effect is the narrowly defined GAAR expected to have? As the Government’s flagship policy for tackling tax avoidance, what dent will it make in the tax gap—that is, the difference between the tax collected and the tax that would be collected if everybody complied with the letter and the spirit of the law? Table 2.1 of the Budget 2013 and HMRC’s recently updated impact note on the GAAR estimate that it will result in additional revenue of £60 million in 2014-15, rising to £85 million in 2017-18. Those are without doubt notable sums of money, but let us remind ourselves of the tax gap. HMRC’s most recent estimate for the period 2010-11, considered by some to be relatively conservative, stands at £32.2 billion. HMRC believes that about 14% of that can be accounted for by tax avoidance activity, which means £4.5 billion to £5 billion a year.