Minutes:
For the amendment 35, against 19.
AMENDMENT CARRIED
The amendment was then put as the substantive motion and it was
RESOLVED – (35 for, 18 against) This Council Meeting notes
· That between 2010 and 2015 funding to Local Government from the DCLG will fall from £115.5bn down to £89.9bn, a cut of £25.6bn. Central Government support for Local Government will therefore have reduced by 29.6% by the end of this Parliament, a disproportionately high number when compared to the average cut across Government Departments, which will be 10.1% over the same period
· That the difference in the UK between the tax that is collected and the tax that should be collected, ‘the tax gap’, has been estimated by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) to be £32 billion per year, some 6.7% of the total tax due
· That tax evasion and avoidance together accounted for £9 billion of this gap, with £5 billion due to tax avoidance alone
· That tax evasion is when people or businesses deliberately do not pay the taxes that they owe and that this is illegal and can be prosecuted through the Criminal Courts
· That tax avoidance is defined as ‘using the tax law to get a tax advantage that Parliament never intended’ and that unlike tax evasion, which involves fraud or deliberate concealment, tax avoidance is not illegal
· The work of the Public Accounts Committee in highlighting the aggressive avoidance of tax by some of the biggest companies operating in the UK
· That developing countries lose three times more in unpaid taxation than they receive in aid, enough to give a basic education to an extra 57 million children worldwide
· The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s announcement of 16th September that all major economies should impose a new ‘country-by-country’ reporting regime on multinationals in order to increase corporate transparency and limit the shifting of profits offshore to avoid tax
This Council Meeting believes
· That the UK has a particular responsibility to end tax avoidance practices, as the British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies comprise around 1 in 5 of the world’s tax havens
· That as a Local Authority we have a responsibility to provide the best public services to the community we serve
· That our ability to provide quality local services would be significantly enhanced by increased revenues from the government tackling tax avoidance, were any of these to be passed on to Local Authorities in the future;
· That all who benefit from public spending should contribute their fair share
· That the UK should play a leading role in creating a fairer tax system across the world
This Council Meeting further notes
· That the Coalition Government has already done more on tax avoidance than any government before it and is fully committed to making sure everyone pays their fair share;
· The reinvestment of £1bn in HMRC, expected to bring in £9bn more each year than Labour managed in their last year in government;
· The investment of an additional £77m in HMRC to expand its anti-avoidance and evasion activity, specifically focusing on off-shore evasion and avoidance by wealthy individuals and multinationals, including the General Anti Abuse Rule which came into effect last year, all expected to raise an additional £2bn of tax that would otherwise have gone unpaid;
· That the Coalition Government have strengthened the penalties for offshore tax evasion, overturning the last Labour Government’s laissez-faire approach towards the very rich;
· Agreements made with tax havens to declare information about people hiding money offshore, including one with the Swiss government who have already paid £340m of an expected £5bn in additional tax revenue by 2018; and
·
The employment of 200 new criminal investigators to
pursue prosecutions against those breaking our tax laws.
This Council Meeting resolves
To invite all political Groups to lobby their respective local Members of Parliament to continue this focus on tackling tax avoidance and evasion and to support such measures in the future.