I will get straight to the point. Members will not be surprised to hear that many of my concerns have already been raised by the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman). Labour Members have expressed a number of concerns many times about the extension and scope of business investment relief, to no avail. We find it very concerning that in a context where the current Government have borrowed more than any Labour Government ever have, our Treasury is intentionally depriving itself of revenue. That might be acceptable if the deprivation served to boost our economy, but we have no evidence of any positive impact from business investment relief.
Government Members have stated that they know the raw figure for the amount that has been invested through this relief. That is correct. We kept calling for that, and finally, at the last minute before we started debating the Bill after the summer recess, we got some figures. They were rounded up to the nearest hundred, and when we are talking of only about 400 people, it is rather strange not to have more granularity.
That is just the figure for the overall amount of money that has gone through this relief. We have not been told which sectors the investment directed through this relief goes into. We have no clarity about whether, for example, funds invested through this relief might have contributed to the overheating of the British property market in high-cost areas, and we have not received any assurances that the funds going through this relief will help to promote the increase in business and human capital formation that we so desperately need, given Britain’s falling productivity.
The Government’s impact assessment published when this relief was brought in said that it would have a negligible impact on economic development. This is not a relief that has a proven beneficial impact. Until the Government accept our proposals and agree at least to review the operation of the relief, I will remain unpersuaded that its extension does anything other than offer yet another concession to non-doms and provide even greater scope for tax advisers to indicate how UK taxes can be avoided. That is why our new clauses call for a review.
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From the Opposition’s perspective, the changes form part of piece that, along with the other patchwork of measures in the Bill, could lead to pinching from sacked workers instead of root-and-branch reform of the non-dom system. They will fuel a race to the bottom on corporation tax, rather than boost skills, education and investment. The measures against tax avoidance are insipid and weak, not the decisive action we need to ensure a level playing field for small companies and the biggest multinationals and for British taxpayers and those who benefit from non-dom status.
Much has been said this afternoon about the size of the tax gap, and there has been some confusion over the figures. Members who have looked into the matter will know that the Government’s tax gap calculation contains a growing element of error, which is a concern given the forthcoming closure of HMRC offices. The figure does not cover tax avoidance resulting from profit shifting, on which the Opposition have a strong record.
To return to our previous discussion and the points made by the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean
(Mr Harper) and the hon. Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke), measures to deliver change on an international level have been blocked by the Government.