Child Poverty Bill

As the Minister knows all too well, avoidance is not to be found in the "informal", "black", "underground" or whatever economy; it involves trying to minimise your tax bill, usually using peculiar legal devices in Aruba, or somewhere else nice, to avoid paying tax. You certainly declare the money and the money is visible to the authorities. With evasion, the money is invisible to the authorities, and that is the money that we are worried about. The Minister talked about benefit fraud being one area of the informal economy. In practice, nowadays the tax credit system is probably the big area where informal processes are at work, as has been given away by the fact that the disregards for income in the tax credit system have been whipped up to £25,000—I think that that is the figure; I am speaking from memory—because the state has simply been unable to get a grip on this matter. Rather than accuse everyone receiving or having to reclaim tax credits of making overclaims or underclaims or whatever, they have had to whip up the disregard level to an astonishing figure.