Draft Double Taxation Relief and International Tax Enforcement (Guernsey) Order 2018 Draft Double Taxation Relief and International Tax Enforcement (Isle of Man) Order 2018 Draft Double Taxation Relief and International Tax Enforcement (Jersey) Order 2018

Mel Stride Excerpts

Tuesday 13th November 2018 General Committees

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Mel Stride)]

I beg to move,

That the Committee has considered the draft Double Taxation Relief and International Tax Enforcement (Guernsey) Order 2018.

[The Chair]

With this it will be convenient to consider the draft Double Taxation Relief and International Tax Enforcement (Isle of Man) Order 2018 and the draft Double Taxation Relief and International Tax Enforcement (Jersey) Order 2018.

[Mel Stride]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr McCabe, as always. As you have suggested, I will speak to all the orders.

The orders before the Committee give effect to replacement double taxation agreements with each Crown dependency. DTAs remove barriers to international trade and investment and provide a clear and fair framework for taxing businesses that trade across borders. By doing that, they benefit business and the economies of the jurisdictions concerned.

I will briefly say a few words about the agreements, which are identical in all material respects. Our current DTAs with the Crown dependencies date back to the 1950s. Although they have been updated on occasion, there was a need for a comprehensive update. The new DTAs extensively modernise the existing texts to reflect updates to the OECD model tax convention and changes to the tax laws and treaty preferences of all jurisdictions.

Like the UK, the Crown dependencies are signatories to the BEPS—base erosion and profit shifting—multilateral instrument, or MLI. However, we could not use the MLI to make changes to our existing DTAs with the Crown dependencies because they are not international law agreements. Instead, the new DTAs include all the provisions that would have been implemented by the MLI.

Instead, we have implemented the treaty-related minimum standards mandated by the BEPS project through the agreements. That means that we have included the new preamble, which clarifies that the purpose of an agreement is not to create opportunities for avoidance and sets out the principal purpose test, which is the mechanism by which benefits can be denied where the main purpose of a transaction or arrangement is to avoid tax.

In line with the OECD model, the new agreements are comprehensive in scope and cover all income and gains, including articles on interest and royalties for the first time. However, benefits in respect of interest and royalties are limited to persons who can demonstrate a close connection to Crown dependencies, which ensures that residents of third countries will not be able to exploit the provisions. The new agreements also provide for mandatory binding arbitration, which ensures that disputes are resolved and double taxation avoided.

The current agreements have been updated twice in the recent past to ensure that they could not be used to frustrate the intention of UK legislation on offshore property developers and leasing in the oil and gas sector. The amendments are incorporated in the new agreements, and this comprehensive update will avoid the need to make such changes in future. Finally, the new agreements also provide for mutual assistance in the collection of tax debts, which will enable the UK to ask the Crown dependencies to recover UK tax from their residents on our behalf.

In summary, these are agreements that the UK and the Crown dependencies can be happy with. They protect UK revenue and provide a stable framework in which trade and investment between the UK and the Crown dependencies can continue to flourish. I therefore commend the three orders to the Committee.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mel Stride]

I thank the hon. Members for Oxford East and for Aberdeen North for their contributions to this important debate. I always expect a rattle gun of deep and technical questions from the hon. Member for Oxford East, and I was not disappointed. I will endeavour to answer as many questions as I can, and on those I cannot answer, I am happy to write to her in due course.

The hon. Member for Oxford East raised a lack of engagement, as she termed it, with the treaties that we are scrutinising. I took that to refer both to matters of transparency, on which she elaborated at some length, and also the scrutiny of the treaty, which is an issue that she has raised in relation to other DTAs that we have debated in Committee. I hope that she therefore welcomes the fact that we have made improvements, for example to the information memorandum, which now points out the differences and changes between the 1950s and the later iterations of the treaties and, indeed, the treaty to which we have been asked to give our consent.

I shall make the general points that I usually make on scrutiny. International treaties are complicated negotiations and do not necessarily lend themselves, nor would it be appropriate for them to do so, to discussion and rumination, as the hon. Lady may be seeking. The treaty was published in July this year, so there has been plenty of time to review it. Of course, these international agreements go through the process that we are going through at the moment, giving this treaty scrutiny.

I appreciate that the transparency debate is a hook on which one could add the whole issue of the public registers of beneficial ownership, about which we have had various parliamentary debates. The hon. Lady knows the Government’s position in that respect. It is important to stress that we have a common reporting standard between Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and the tax authorities of the three other jurisdictions in question, so we do have an exchange of information relevant to tax affairs between our two authorities, which is an important tool in clamping down on avoidance, evasion and non-compliance.

The hon. Lady asked specifically why we did not insist on the treaties containing a provision that public registers be set up. I think the answer to that is that these matters are outside the general context of these treaties. In addition, the treaties are entered into by bilateral agreement, and I think if we had insisted on that—indeed, had it been our desire to insist on that at this moment—it is unlikely that we would have had the improved version of the treaties that we are discussing today.

[Anneliese Dodds]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way, but surely these treaties contain provisions that make it less likely that such a public register, which the Government committed to, will be set up, because they include the commitment to keeping information secret. It is just that these treaties do not include reference to public registers, which one would have expected if the Government were working on this, as they committed to do, to the Opposition; it is also the fact that they include a commitment to keeping information secret, which goes against what the Government said in this House that they would do.

[Mel Stride]

I do not think that these treaties require further secrecy than the appropriate confidentiality, as some might term it, of information that is, after all, highly sensitive; it involves the tax affairs of individuals and businesses between our various jurisdictions. It would only be right that confidentiality is respected in those circumstances.

[Anneliese Dodds]

I am grateful to the Minister for that clarification. However, we were just talking about having a register that is similar to the UK register, which is public, and surely any concerns about confidentiality have already been dealt with in our own jurisdiction.

[Mel Stride]

I had understood the hon. Lady in her earlier intervention to be suggesting that the treaties would make a move to public registers of beneficial ownership less likely. To the extent that I do not think they impose any additional confidentiality on the exchange of information over and above what was there before, I do not think that argument holds water, with respect to her.

On the information exchange issue that the hon. Lady raised, the agreement contains a new “assistance of collection of debt” provision, compared with the agreements that it supersedes. I hope that she would welcome the information requirements around that, and the fact that we can now actively seek the assistance of those jurisdictions to collect tax debt, for example.

On the general issue of anti-avoidance, as all Committee members will know—because they follow these affairs in intricate detail, as they have done during this debate—we have very much been in the vanguard of BEPS programme in the OECD. Members may see the footprints of that in these treaties through the main purpose test, to ensure that we do not have companies or individuals exploiting the tax advantages around these treaties for no other reason than to avoid or reduce their tax liability. Of course, in respect at least of the interest on royalty payments, as distinct from dividend payments, there are different categories of entity, and various tests accordingly that will be required to trigger the reliefs in that respect.

The hon. Lady mentioned the blacklisting process that is going on at the moment and the UK Government’s involvement. We have been actively involved in discussions with our overseas territories to ensure that we encourage them not to be blacklisted—to ensure that they comply with the EU code group’s provisions.

[Alex Cunningham]

Having anticipated what the Minister said, I should be interested to learn what new areas the Minister is working on to encourage greater transparency within the territories.

[Mel Stride]

One of the principal areas is that of economic substance when it comes to the activities of those businesses that purport to be operating from those low or no-tax jurisdictions, which is the main thrust of the EU’s move here—that we have genuine businesses involved in those jurisdictions, rather than their just being used as a conduit for the purposes of avoiding or paying extremely low levels of tax.

The hon. Member for Oxford East mentioned eurobond exemptions and restricted connected parties. These treaties do not impinge on that matter, which is dealt with in UK domestic tax law, so it is quite distinct from what we are debating today. The hon. Member for Aberdeen North asked if we could come back with a report on information sharing and how effective it had been. I do not think that, in this instance, there is a need for a specific report. The tools for scrutinising that, whether by way of debates or parliamentary questions, are here in this Parliament. On that note, I shall conclude my remarks.

Question put.