New Clause 7 — General anti-tax avoidance principle

Part of [1st Allocated Day] – in the House of Commons at 8:30 pm on 17 April 2013.

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Photo of Catherine McKinnell Catherine McKinnell Shadow Minister (Treasury) 8:30, 17 April 2013

Excellent. I am grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s intervention. We look forward to clarification of the Liberal Democrats’ position on the issue, and we hope it does not go the same way as their mansion tax vote went earlier, when they voted against their own policy for the second time in the House.

I call on all right hon. and hon. Members to support our amendment 8, which would monitor the impact of the GAAR and ensure that the Government take genuine action towards securing the tax transparency and fairness that the world needs in this 21st century. We also seek to test the will of the House by pressing our amendment 6 to a vote, to determine whether the House will commit to ensuring that we do all we can in our power to tackle tax avoidance that is damaging not just to the UK, but to developing countries.

I finish by reiterating briefly concerns that I have expressed on several occasions in the Chamber and elsewhere about the huge number of challenges facing HMRC, highlighted recently by yet another scathing report from the Public Accounts Committee. The very body on which the Government rely to tackle tax avoidance is being seriously undermined by devastating budget cuts of £2 billion over this Parliament and the loss of 10,000 staff. These cuts will be a false economy if they hamper HMRC’s ability to collect the billions of pounds in avoided tax, and all the tough talk, strategies and moral indignation in the world will not deal with the problem of tax avoidance if HMRC simply does not have the capacity and resources it requires to do the job.