Asked by: Lloyd Hatton (Labour - South Dorset)
Question to the HM Treasury:
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in how many instances her Department has put mitigations for conflict of interest in place for (a) Ministers and (b) senior officials each year since 1 June 2024.
Answered by Lucy Rigby - Economic Secretary (HM Treasury)
There are established processes in place for the declaration and management of interests held by ministers and senior civil servants, which ensure that steps are taken to avoid a conflict of interest or manage the perception of a conflict.
a) Information about the ministers’ interests can be found in List of Ministers’ Interests, which is published quarterly.
b) In line with the guidance in the Government’s Financial Reporting Manual, details of the interests held by members of HM Treasury’s Executive Management board that may conflict with their management responsibilities are published in the department’s Annual Report and Accounts.
Data on the specific number of individual mitigation measures put in place across all senior officials is held within confidential records and localised systems. To extract and aggregate a precise historical count of individual mitigations since 1 June 2024 could only be achieved at disproportionate cost.
Asked by: Lloyd Hatton (Labour - South Dorset)
Question to the HM Treasury:
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, how many large business tax disputes have been submitted to international arbitration in the last 5 years.
Answered by Dan Tomlinson - Exchequer Secretary (Cabinet Office) (Jointly with HM Treasury)
The number of such disputes is fewer than five. HMRC are unable to disclosure the exact number as it could risk the identification of individual taxpayer(s).
Arbitration operates as a valuable mechanism under double taxation treaties, to ensure there is route to resolve double taxation where agreement cannot be reached between the relevant tax authorities, providing certainty and finality for taxpayers.
Often resolution can be reached outside of arbitration, which is why the number of arbitration cases are low. For context, for the latest year we have statistics, across 1 January 2023 to 31 December 2023, 348 cases were wholly dealt with under the procedure governing mutual agreement between tax authorities.
Asked by: Lloyd Hatton (Labour - South Dorset)
Question to the HM Treasury:
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what steps she is taking to help ensure the accuracy of information provided by tax advisers.
Answered by Lucy Rigby - Economic Secretary (HM Treasury)
HMRC’s standard for agents sets the minimum expectations for all tax advisers and is regularly reviewed by HMRC. While the vast majority of tax advisers support taxpayers to pay the right amount of tax, the government is legislating in this year’s Finance Bill to give HMRC the powers to better tackle tax advisers who facilitate non-compliance.
Asked by: Lloyd Hatton (Labour - South Dorset)
Question to the HM Treasury:
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to please provide staff turnover figures for the Wealthy Team in HMRC for each financial year 2017/18 to 2024/25.
Answered by Dan Tomlinson - Exchequer Secretary (Cabinet Office) (Jointly with HM Treasury)
The table below provides the turnover rate, based on average Full Time Equivalent (FTE), for each year from 2021/22. Staff data is retained only for as long as it is required to meet its intended business purpose, after which it is securely deleted in line with HMRC’s data retention policy. The number of leavers includes staff leaving HMRC, moves to other Customer Compliance Group (CCG) directorates, moves outside of CCG and leavers within Wealthy and Mid-sized Business Compliance (WMBC). Tax year 21/22 includes moves to COVID schemes, whilst 24/25 included moves to other teams in Wealthy and Mid-sized Business Compliance, working on wealthy related risk.
Tax Year | Total Leavers | Average FTE over year | Turnover rate |
2021/22 | 258 | 856 | 30% |
2022/23 | 156 | 951 | 16% |
2023/24 | 131 | 988 | 13% |
2024/25 | 166 | 898 | 18% |
Asked by: Lloyd Hatton (Labour - South Dorset)
Question to the HM Treasury:
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, how much and what proportion of the wealthy tax gap HMRC attributes to (a) Capital Gains Tax and (b) Inheritance Tax for each financial year from 2017-18 to 2024-25.
Answered by Dan Tomlinson - Exchequer Secretary (Cabinet Office) (Jointly with HM Treasury)
Wealthy tax gap estimates are published in Measuring the Tax Gap 2025 for 2005-06 to 2023-24. There are no estimates for 2024-25 at this time, these will be published in future tax gap publications.
We use Income Tax, Capital Gains Tax (CGT) and National Insurance Contributions (NICs) data in our estimate of the Self-Assessment (SA) wealthy tax gap. It is not possible to separately estimate the CGT share within this tax gap. We are therefore unable to provide the details for CGT.
The overall wealthy tax gap, detailed in Chapter 1 Figure 1.4 of MTG25 and Table 1.4 of the online tables, breaks down as follows:
(£ billion) | 2017/18 | 2018/19 | 2019/20 | 2020/21 | 2021/22 | 2022/23 | 2023/24 |
Self-Assessment | 1.43 | 1.35 | 1.34 | 1.23 | 1.67 | 1.78 | 1.95 |
Inheritance Tax | 0.20 | 0.19 | 0.19 | 0.10 | 0.20 | 0.12 | 0.15 |
Stamp Duties | 0.02 | 0.05 | 0.05 | 0.04 | 0.04 | 0.05 | 0.04 |
Net Gap | 1.65 | 1.59 | 1.58 | 1.37 | 1.92 | 1.95 | 2.13 |
Or as a percentage share of the overall wealthy tax gap:
(£ billion) | 2017/18 | 2018/19 | 2019/20 | 2020/21 | 2021/22 | 2022/23 | 2023/24 |
Self-Assessment | 86.7% | 85.0% | 84.7% | 90.0% | 87.2% | 91.6% | 91.3% |
Inheritance Tax | 11.9% | 12.1% | 12.1% | 7.1% | 10.5% | 6.0% | 6.9% |
Stamp Duties | 1.4% | 2.9% | 3.2% | 2.9% | 2.3% | 2.4% | 1.7% |
Asked by: Lloyd Hatton (Labour - South Dorset)
Question to the HM Treasury:
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what the total compliance yield generated by HMRC’s Wealthy Team was in each financial year between 2017-18 and 2024-25.
Answered by Dan Tomlinson - Exchequer Secretary (Cabinet Office) (Jointly with HM Treasury)
The table below shows the compliance yield attributed to the wealthy customer group, which includes yield generated by HMRCs Wealthy Team. HMRC does not hold the figures for 2017-18. We have provided details from the earliest period available in the table below:-
Annual Report figures | 2018-19 | 2019-20 | 2020-21 | 2021-22 | 2022-23 | 2023-24 | 2024-25 |
Compliance Yield (£m) | 1,800 | 2,200 | 3,000 | 2,500 | 4,000 | 5,200 | 3,700 |
Compliance yield for the wealthy population can fluctuate year on year because it can be impacted by the nature of the work and risks being settled as well as the settlement of a small number of complex, high value cases and litigation outcomes. Complex cases can take time to work through which can lead to yearly fluctuations.
Asked by: Lloyd Hatton (Labour - South Dorset)
Question to the HM Treasury:
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, how many additional HMRC debt management staff she plans to recruit in each of the next five years.
Answered by Dan Tomlinson - Exchequer Secretary (Cabinet Office) (Jointly with HM Treasury)
The Government announced investment at the Budget in October 2024 and the Spring Statement in March 2025 to enable HMRC to recruit and retain 2,400 debt management officers in addition to growing by 5,500 compliance officers by 2029-30, with further funding for the former announced at the Budget in November 2025.
This funding means that HMRC will retain 1,200 current Debt Management staff, who would have moved onto other roles, to focus on debt collection activity until the end of 2029-30 and will grow its workforce by 1,200 more people over this period. The majority of new recruits are funded from 2026-27, and all additional staff will be in position by 2028-29.
HMRC is already well underway in recruiting 5,500 additional compliance officers who will join by the end of the decade. HMRC is welcoming around 2,000 total compliance officers each financial year, which includes baseline recruitment, an approximate 1,000 additional compliance officers funded by Government investment, and also accounts for anticipated attrition.
Since November 2024, over 1,500 additional compliance officers have joined HMRC’s Customer Compliance Group (CCG).
Asked by: Lloyd Hatton (Labour - South Dorset)
Question to the HM Treasury:
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what steps HMRC plans to take to increase the recruitment of compliance and debt management staff.
Answered by Dan Tomlinson - Exchequer Secretary (Cabinet Office) (Jointly with HM Treasury)
The Government announced investment at the Budget in October 2024 and the Spring Statement in March 2025 to enable HMRC to recruit and retain 2,400 debt management officers in addition to growing by 5,500 compliance officers by 2029-30, with further funding for the former announced at the Budget in November 2025.
This funding means that HMRC will retain 1,200 current Debt Management staff, who would have moved onto other roles, to focus on debt collection activity until the end of 2029-30 and will grow its workforce by 1,200 more people over this period. The majority of new recruits are funded from 2026-27, and all additional staff will be in position by 2028-29.
HMRC is already well underway in recruiting 5,500 additional compliance officers who will join by the end of the decade. HMRC is welcoming around 2,000 total compliance officers each financial year, which includes baseline recruitment, an approximate 1,000 additional compliance officers funded by Government investment, and also accounts for anticipated attrition.
Since November 2024, over 1,500 additional compliance officers have joined HMRC’s Customer Compliance Group (CCG).
Asked by: Lloyd Hatton (Labour - South Dorset)
Question to the HM Treasury:
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, whether the Treasury plans to introduce additional protections for individuals who face retaliation as a result of engaging with the HMRC whistleblowing reward scheme; and whether HMRC will be required to provide support to whistleblowers involved in employment disputes or SLAPP-type legal proceedings arising from their disclosures.
Answered by Dan Tomlinson - Exchequer Secretary (Cabinet Office) (Jointly with HM Treasury)
HMRC treats all informants with the highest levels of confidentiality and security in line with the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000 and the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (CHIS) Codes of Practice.
There is no legal obligation on HMRC to participate in an employment tribunal of an informant. However, if requested, HMRC can provide a disclosure to the informant or their legal representative to support any employment tribunal under Sec 18 (2)(c) Commissioners for Revenue and Customs Act 2005.
Asked by: Lloyd Hatton (Labour - South Dorset)
Question to the HM Treasury:
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what steps her Department will take to ensure transparency in the operation of HMRC's proposed whistleblowing reward scheme; and whether she plans to publish (a) eligibility criteria and award thresholds for applicants, and (b) data on the number and value of awards granted.
Answered by Dan Tomlinson - Exchequer Secretary (Cabinet Office) (Jointly with HM Treasury)
At Autumn Budget on 26 November 2025 the Government launched the Rewards for informants of high value tax fraud. This scheme is designed to target serious non-compliance involving large corporates, wealthy individuals, offshore and avoidance schemes. Informants can receive a reward of between 15 and 30% when they provide information which leads directly to HMRC collecting more than £1.5M tax. HMRC have published eligibility criteria for the scheme at https://www.gov.uk/guidance/reporting-serious-tax-avoidance-and-evasion.
HMRC has previously published data on the total amount of rewards paid annually through the standard informants reward scheme and will continue to do so. To protect the confidentiality of informants we do not publish the number of rewards or size of individual rewards.