We have had a short but useful debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Chris White) on securing it and thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting it.
Rightly, this issue has received much greater scrutiny in recent months. The public anger is understandable and not surprising, given that difficult decisions are being made on the public finances and the vast majority of people pay the taxes they owe, and the perception is that some companies are not contributing their fair share or complying with the law.
We should say at the outset, and the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) was right to say, that there can be occasions where it is entirely legitimate for a company not to be paying corporation tax if it is making use of reliefs or capital allowances in the way that Parliament intended. It is also the case—there can be confusion about this—that corporation tax is a tax on profits, not a tax on sales. It is also worth remembering that we do collect significant sums of corporation tax from large businesses. But where the public’s concerns are justified, where there is avoidance, by which I mean contrived and artificial behaviour contrary to Parliament’s intention, that is a very serious matter and it is right that we take action.
There is an issue of administration. The point has been raised about HMRC’s effectiveness in dealing with tax avoidance by large businesses. I should explain that HMRC works, with regard to large businesses, by putting in place CRMs—customer relationship managers. Their role is essentially to man-mark the most complex and high-risk taxpayers. In recent years that approach has proved to be effective in getting money in. HMRC secured £8 billion of additional compliance yield from large businesses in 2012-13, and more than £23 billion in the past three years. It is an approach that has been endorsed by the OECD. One of the difficulties that HMRC has is that it is bound by taxpayer confidentiality. It cannot give a running commentary to this House on the action that it takes, but the numbers demonstrate that HMRC is effective in getting money in.