I start by telling the House of the sad death of my predecessor, Frank Doran, who was the MP for Aberdeen North and other Aberdeen seats during a career of about 30 years in Parliament. Mr Doran was incredibly well respected across the House. People who worked with him will remember him and will have respected his work. He was a principled man. He helped a lot of people who are now my constituents, and they often talk fondly about him. In particular, he worked incredibly hard in the aftermath of the Piper Alpha tragedy; he did a huge amount of work on that. Our thoughts are with his wife Joan, his family, and his friends and colleagues from across the House. I pass on the Scottish National party’s condolences to his family.
I do not want to talk at length about offshore trusts. The SNP has consistently been critical of the situation around non-domiciled individuals and offshore trusts, and of the complicated nature of the UK tax code. It is regularly said that the tax code used to be a book but now you would need a van to cart it around. The problem with that is the potential for loopholes. In addition, the more complicated it is, the more difficult it is for people to comply and for Government agencies to ensure compliance. We have raised those issues.
The right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) talked about not conflating tax dodging with non-doms. I am not attempting to do that, but the more complicated the tax code is, the greater the likelihood of loopholes that people can exploit. We have concerns about that; we raised them last year in the context of the Criminal Finances Act 2017 and we will continue to raise our concerns around non-domicileds and offshore trusts more generally.
There are occasional suggestions from Conservative Back Benchers that we move the UK towards being some sort of tax haven, post Brexit. We completely reject that, as do some in the Conservative party.