Loan Charge

Desmond Swayne Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

If, as Ministers insist, the law was clear in 2010, it would have been entirely unnecessary to have the 2017 legislation open up previous tax years, because my constituents who have been affected by this mis-selling scandal—for that is what it is—made their tax arrangements entirely clear in those years and were unchallenged by HMRC within the proper windows available. It was entirely unnecessary, and the reality is that the vendetta that HMRC is now pursuing, notwithstanding the obfuscation of the written answers to parliamentary questions, is exclusively against the victims of that mis-selling scandal.

Happy are those Members of this Parliament who were not here in 2017 and did not vote in favour of the Finance (No. 2) Bill of 2017, which contained the measure that is now torturing so many of our constituents. We are culpable for not having spotted, not having asked about and not having examined the consequences and implications of the measure that was brought before us. It is a measure that cries foul against every tenet of proper legislation with, first, its retrospective aspect, and secondly, its taking away from our constituents the right to appeal to a tribunal with an administrative or quasi-judicial process to have their case fairly considered. It made HMRC both judge and jury in their case—and what a judge and jury it turned out to be!

We now come to another of these debates in which we recount the latest injustices and enumerate the rising tally of suicides, and the Minister will in all probability make the same speech as his predecessor made the last time. I ask hon. Members: what is the point? The point, as I see it, is that it affords a recurring opportunity for hon. Members to recant what the House did when it created this injustice. Drip by drip and Member by Member, the tally will increase, and ultimately it will reach the public consciousness.

The right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Ed Davey) served on the all-party group, and we are indebted to him for his chairmanship when he was in the chair of the group. He has been hounded over the last few weeks and found himself in a very unfortunate position for being the postal affairs Minister at the height of the Horizon scandal, notwithstanding the fact that he was lied to on an industrial scale. Nevertheless, it has been very uncomfortable for him to have the charge that he did not ask the right questions, he did not pursue it enough and he did not spend time with the victims. Let that be an object lesson to us and to all those Ministers who stood at the Dispatch Box giving us flannel and peddling the fiction that the limited inquiry was in some way independent.

My advice to my hon. Friend the Minister today is this: set aside the brief that you have been given, and end this debate by just saying that you have sat here, you have heard what we have said and you are going to go away and ask the awkward questions and spend time with the victims. Because ultimately this will reach the public consciousness—we may even have our own TV drama; the reality is that there is plenty of scope for such a drama—and when it does reach the forefront of public consciousness, we will rue the day that we did not take the action when we could.