There’s a hung parliament. Things are moving quickly: in my head, I imagine someone taking on a new job, running “legislative affairs” like Josh Lyman in the West Wing. Someone whose job it is to ring round the new MPs to see if they will stand for this policy or that, as each new idea for the Queen’s Speech has to be fought through separately.
Leaving aside my fantasies about there being someone competent and grown up behind the scenes, let’s look for a moment at what a hung parliament means for taxes?
Three things. First of all, there’s unlikely to be any huge legislative change. It’s entirely possible that the proposals to make it compulsory for businesses to keep their records on an app or computer programme and update HMRC four (five?) times a year, MTD (“Making Tax Digital”) for short, will fall. Why would anyone back MTD when it is going to be as popular as a cup of cold sick with small businesses once they learn how it will affect them? Kick it down the road and make it Someone Else’s Problem, would be my instinct.
Second, the difficulty in making legislative change is unlikely to apply to actual tax rates: there are different rules. But then why would a “continuity” government want to change the rates they themselves introduced five minutes ago? They may have to give sweeties to their supporters (abolition of APD for Northern Ireland, would be my best guess from the weekend press).
But the third thing is that administratively, things will carry on much as before. The rule for the Civil Service is to carry on doing your job until someone tells you differently. So the idiotic decision to carry on with the “building our futures” plan and move HMRC into big lumps instead of a distributed network of local offices will probably carry on. There will be a new Minister, after all. (Jane Ellison lost her seat so there will be a new Financial Secretary to the Treasury but at the time of writing I can’t see an announcement of who replaces her) so there is no-one with a vested interest in saying “no” and the inertia of “keep calm and carry on” may let this go through.
I think that’s a shame: you may not. But what IS a shame is that there will be no will to change the way policy is made. When the coalition government came in there was a will to do things differently and the political space to think them through . No-one had a vested interest in continuity but in Getting Things Done. So we had Making Tax Policy Better and the invention of the TIIN. Sigh. Ah well, business as usual, at least for a while.
tiintax 