Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask His Majesty's Government how many instances of late payment interest were charged by HMRC in each of the past five financial years, broken down by tax head; and what the year-on-year change in the number of such instances was for each tax head.

HM Revenue and Customs does not hold a central dataset that identifies how many instances of Late Payment Interest (LPI) have been charged for all tax heads.

For some tax heads, such as Income Tax Self Assessment, it would be possible to produce such figures, but due to the disproportionate cost to the taxpayer, it is not possible to answer this question. This cost represents the time it would take an analyst to extract, combine, analyse and quality assure the data.

For other tax heads, even with additional time and resource, it would not be possible to isolate how many instances of LPI have been charged, due to the way that data is stored for those tax heads.