Nobody likes paying tax, but we all want our services, such as the NHS, to be there when we need them. Above all, we want fairness. We have an expectation that we should all pay our taxes, wherever we are. We want the same standards to be applied to all. It is damaging for honest businesses to face competition from corporations that are not paying the tax that they owe. Horrifying revelations about HSBC have been made this week. Instead of its clients being encouraged to pay the tax that they owed, they were being issued with credit cards to enable them to spend the money without it being identified. That is utterly shameful behaviour on the part of the individuals and the banks, and how many more are there like them?
Cheating the Inland Revenue is never acceptable, but it is particularly galling when councillors up and down the country are agonising over how to manage their severely reduced budgets, and having to decide whether to cut help for special needs children or help for the elderly, for example. My own indignation at the offshoring of the public money being used to pay private finance initiative debts led me to introduce a private Member’s Bill on the issue. In it, I tried to clamp down on that activity so that our money would not go offshore through those contracts. Furthermore, as my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Anas Sarwar) said, the amount of money that is lost to developing countries through companies offshoring accounts and therefore not paying their tax in those countries is three times the global aid budget.
I am very concerned by the Government’s record to date. The amount of tax that is owed and has not been collected has risen from £31 billion to £34 billion in the past three years. The Government were told about HSBC back in 2010, but nearly five years later only one of the 1,100 people involved in the tax irregularities has been prosecuted. The Prime Minister promised that he would lead on transparency in tax havens, but to date not one overseas territory or Crown dependency has produced a publicly accessible central register. The
Government’s Swiss tax deal has raised less than a third of what the Chancellor said it would raise. In the 2012 autumn statement, he said that it would raise £3.12 billion, but the latest HMRC figures show that it has raised only £873 million.
On the record, Labour has been praised in the Financial Times for our measures against tax avoidance. During the 13 years of the Labour Government, we produced 10 times the income that the four years of this coalition Government have produced. We have a good record on this, but we can never be complacent. That is why we are making it clear that we would do a lot more to tackle tax avoidance. We would make tax avoidance and tax evasion a priority.