I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman is so depressed that his Government’s policy has failed, but that is not a matter for me.
We will seek reassurance from the Government and test the Bill’s provisions to ensure that the new scheme does not suffer from the problems associated with the previous scheme. In particular, we will scrutinise its administration. The national insurance holiday was too complicated and the employment allowance should not suffer from the same problems. One problem affecting take-up of the previous scheme, in addition to its complexity, was the lack of publicity. Many businesses simply did not know what was available. This problem must not be repeated. This is particularly important when it comes to publicising the scheme to charities and amateur sports clubs, to which it now also applies. They are more likely to be unaware of what is available, and the Government should have a clear publicity strategy, subject to review, if take-up is, for whatever reason, lower than expected.
Clauses 9 and 10 apply the general anti-abuse rule to national insurance contributions, and enable the Treasury to ensure that the GAAR, as it applies to national insurance and to tax, is kept in line.
We support the application of the GAR to national insurance, but we remain unconvinced that the current version is up to the job. It is the Government’s flagship policy for tackling tax avoidance, and their figures show that it will result in annual revenue of £60 million in 2014-15, which they expect to rise to £85 million by 2017-18, but that compares with a tax gap that was estimated, when the GAR was introduced, to be £32.2 billion but which has now risen to £35 billion. Have the Government thought about reassessing their figures in the light of the slightly over-enthusiastic estimates made for the UK-Swiss tax agreement? Anyway, a dent of £85 million in a tax gap of £35 billion is nothing to write home about.
The House will recall that two months ago, a member of the GAR independent advisory panel, which decides whether people have broken the rule, was forced to resign, shortly after the GAR came into operation, having been caught advising people at a tax-planning conference how to keep their money
“out of the Chancellor’s grubby mitts”.
This was someone who was hand-picked to advise Ministers on the avoidance schemes the GAR should catch. We remain concerned, therefore, that the GAR is far too narrow, that there is no specific penalty regime, that no arrangements are in place to monitor its effectiveness and that, as a result, it has little credibility. We will continue to press these arguments when the Bill reaches Committee.
We welcome the introduction of a certification scheme for offshore employers of oil and gas workers. The extent of this problem is significant, with at least 100,000 individuals having been found to be employed through an intermediary company with no presence, residence or place of business in the UK. I note that this is the first of three measures aimed at tackling this issue. We await the introduction of the other two by way of secondary legislation and provisions to be included in the Finance Bill. We know from analysis published alongside the Bill, that the changes, as a whole, are expected to result in Exchequer savings of £80 million to £100 million a year, and we will wish to review the effectiveness of these provisions as and when they come into force.