𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

No income tax. No VAT. No money back, no guarantee.  

Those might be lyrics to Only Fools and Horses or my hazy memory of Labour’s manifesto – but 18 months feels so long ago now.

While Westminster speculates about which taxes will rise, there’s a secret budget disaster that nobody seems to be talking about. Britain’s tax system is in a right old mess and it’s ordinary people paying the price.

We have one of the longest and most complex tax codes in the world. At 17,000 pages long, it’s twice the size of America’s and is riddled with exemptions, overlaps and ambiguity. The result? A paradise for tax dodgers and a booming tax avoidance industry.

Quite a bit of this mess is down to the sheer number of tax reliefs. Successive Chancellors announce these tax breaks with much fanfare to encourage certain investment. Very often they do just that, supporting vital industries for jobs and growth.

But when reliefs are poorly designed or misused, they become massive giveaways.

Take the Patent Box relief. Research by TaxWatch revealed that one company, GSK, claimed £3.4 billion worth of tax cuts since its introduction – despite cutting UK jobs and withholding drugs from our NHS.

That sounds to me like tax relief uptake depends more on the size of your finance team than your support for the British economy.

You would think the Treasury would want to keep an eye on such schemes – but they don’t.

Of the 1,200 tax reliefs on the books, only around 300 have ever been properly assessed. The National Audit Office (NAO) estimates they cost the Treasury around £200 billion a year in lost receipts – almost as big as the NHS budget.

Much of that may be a good investment by the state. But even if a fraction is going to waste, that’s a huge hit to the public finances. Let alone the drag the complicated paperwork is having on business.

That’s why I have presented to Parliament the Tax Reliefs Impact and Measurement (TRIM) Bill. It would force the Government to review reliefs for value for money and, ultimately, trim the tax book.

Ministers claim it’s too much work for HMRC. But I say if they spent less time chasing Del Boys, they might catch some of the real big tax avoiders – because right now, they are making us look right plonkers.