I know, it’s been a while, sorry. Basically I took a break from bloggery during the pandemic, and then WordPress “improved” their site so much that I couldn’t fathom how to do any of the basics of posting. Bear with me. I have things to say: hopefully I can start again to say them.
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New publication
April 1, 2021You may have wondered where Tiintax has been for these past few months. You might have wondered if, like many other people in lockdown, I was simply sitting stupefied in front of daytime tv while eating my own weight in Fortnum’s coffee creams.
Au contraire, I can now reveal that I have, in fact, been working on a Secret Project for the Treasury. I was contacted this time last year and offered a major project which I could work on from home as a freelance consultant. I had the advice of several stakeholders in HMRC and HMT and, after suitable secrecy oaths were administered, from external stakeholders in the accountancy and legal professions, three Eng Lit PhD candidates and much of #TaxTwitter.
The project involved a complete rewrite of the Taxes Acts into a format which is much simpler and pleasant to read but also has the advantage of using rhythm and rhyme to make the concept and detail easily accessible and memorable to the lay reader. I can announce that the result of the project is the publication next week of the entire UK tax code re-written in Hiawatha metre.
This involved many practical and ethical decisions of course: the initial draft of the first line went
Pay your fucking taxes, people!
There were several editorial meetings about the use of obscenity and the edited version went
Everybody, pay your taxes!
In the end, however, I took the editorial decision to avoid the second person so the bulk of the text avoids referring to the taxpayer directly and in a more neutral, non-judgemental mode the final version of the first line now reads
Everyone must pay their taxes.
This took several months, but once the initial parameters were agreed and the first few hundred lines whipped into shape I was largely left alone to get on with the writing, turning it in via a super secure Treasury terminal which had to be air lifted to Yorkshire and installed at dead of night in a purpose-built shed at the bottom of my garden.
I confess to a rather mischievous desire to see what I could get away with at times – none of the clauses in my contract obliged me to make the tax code shorter, only simpler and more comprehensible. So for example I am particularly pleased with some of the language in the VAT stanzas (which, much against my better judgement, take up approximately seventeen million lines of verse in their current form). An example might help illustrate the shape of the problem:
Is a Jaffa cake a biscuit?
Leave it on the table, test it.
Cakes go hard but biscuits soften.
VAT is charged on cakes – no, biscuits –
No, on both, except for chocolate
Biscuits (what a silly system!)
The inclusion of the writer’s commentary may be startling to the professional reader in the first instance, but I am confident that, when the general public find themselves able to read and understand tax legislation in plain English and find helpful signposting to the dafter elements, there will be little political interest in further obfuscation of the intent, option appraisal and impact assessment of tax legislation. TIINs will be much clearer and more informative in future and indeed the second edition of The Lay of British Taxes may be several – perhaps many! – volumes shorter than the first.
All 437 volumes are available to purchase from next week, at a reasonable £38,500 for the complete set. (Disclaimer: I should reveal that I receive a royalty of approximately 1/42p per volume.) However a podcast of the entire work is available free of charge on the internet where various volumes are read by Benedict Cumberbatch, Stephen Fry, Helen Mirren, Lenny Henry, Rege-Jean Page and numerous other luminaries of stage and screen. The readings will also be broadcast as CBeebies bedtime stories for the next year and a half, in the hope of growing a new generation of informed and empowered citizen stakeholders.
Marking the government’s homework: the Brexit Impact Assessment
October 18, 2019Impact assessment – no, don’t fall asleep yet – is a boring technical discipline. I know: I used to be the impact assessment specialist for HMRC and for all Treasury tax measures. The point is to regulate how governments regulate – the IA process is actually designed to be a brake or anchor on introducing new legislation. Supposedly you think through the impacts as you design the policy, so that by the time you get to the stage of introducing legislation you’ve already worked out the costs and benefits, got your stakeholders on side, and checked that you aren’t proposing anything that damages small businesses or has equality implications or offends against any other government priority. Actually in civil service terms it’s a fun job if you don’t mind a bit of unpopularity – you get to tell MUCH more senior people that they can’t ride their hobby horse till they fill in this form, and you get to play “my boss is senior to your boss” sometimes all the way up to the Minister’s private office, at which point they tell you to go away and come back when you’ve worked it all out.
So does the Brexit agreement need an impact assessment? Well, does it have an impact on businesses? Yes it does. Is that impact more than £5 million a year? The last draft showed an impact in the billions, so, yes. Can you get out of it by saying Brexit is self-evidently a good thing so a further impact assessment isn’t required? Er, no, that’s not how it works.
(Side note: just a thought, but did they actually negotiate this new agreement without knowing what the costs and benefits of each change might be?)
What can anyone do about it? Judicial review – governments have said publicly (for example this government, here in this document) that they’ll do impact assessments and under what circumstances.
…and here’s the catch. You can bring a judicial review on the grounds of “legitimate expectation” – citizens can expect governments to follow their own rules, and the courts can force them to go back and do their homework properly under those circumstances. But parliament trumps courts: if a change is legislated, you have to assume that parliament understood they hadn’t got the impact assessment they were entitled to expect but decided to do it anyway.
In other words, my reading of the situation is that if someone wanted to bring a judicial review this afternoon they might plausibly argue that parliament couldn’t reasonably vote on the Brexit deal without an updated impact assessment showing the projected costs and benefits. But when the courts close today it’s too late – if the agreement passes on Saturday, then the presumption is that the parliament that passed it knew what they were doing…
The Palace of Westminster
May 8, 2019The government has published a “Government response to the report of the Joint Committee on the Draft Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renewal) Bill”
What’s this about? Well, essentially the Palace of Westminster – the building that houses the House of Lords, the House of Commons and various offices, chapels and halls – is falling down. It’s a fire risk, bits of it keep falling off and narrowly missing people, and it’s a warren of unsuitable spaces with rubbish access and facilities.
It’s also, apparently, a World Heritage Site (which seems bizarre to me as it was only built in the nineteenth century albeit on top of some medieval buildings and incorporating some remnants) but which means it can’t just be left to rot.
Have we really got between £3-6 BILLION to spend on a building, though, however historic?
Usually the government’s answer to anything expensive is to offload it. Why aren’t we preserving the building by flogging it off to someone else, in the way that the County Hall buildings opposite were preserved? Give it to a hotel group for a peppercorn and let them spend the money?
If you look at more modern parliament buildings like the Scottish Parliament or the EU Parliament they are arranged differently, usually in a semi circle to facilitate civilised discussion rather than the yah-boo-suckery of the two-sides-two-swords-lengths-apart Commons. They have microphones that work and electronic voting systems that don’t rely on parliamentarians being wheeled through the lobbies “sick bucket on lap and high on morphine”
So here’s a thought. There’s a perfectly adequate set of offices and chambers across the square, at the 100 Parliament Street building that houses the Treasury and other assorted Departments.
Move Parliamentarians into that.
There’s also a tragically underused circular car park at the heart of the building. Use that to build a twenty-first century debating chamber. Don’t faff about commissioning a new design. There’s an 800 seat theatre in the round sitting in the middle of the Royal Exchange building in Manchester, built in 1976 for a million quid. It’s a proven design using proven technology. A million quid in 1976 is about, what, seven hundred million now. Appoint an architect to oversee the project and give them a fixed seven hundred million budget and a firm closing date, and let them get on with it.
The Treasury? Move it into the Foreign Office building next door. Move the Foreign Office into the next building down Whitehall and so on, till the unlucky (lucky?) losers get to move into the Lord Moon of the Mall pub at the end of the road.
Till we have faces
March 13, 2019Brexit has sucked the life out of the last three years of government and here we are, nothing done, no energy for doing.
Here’s a thought. If a jury can’t reach a conclusion there’s no dishonour in a re-trial. This Parliament will never agree on the May deal, a no deal, a people’s vote or any other possible outcome.
So let’s stop. Don’t ask the EU for a postponement, which would need the unanimous agreement of the other EU members and which they have already said would come with conditions. No: let’s withdraw Article 50 and then do it right.
Set up a Royal Commission to look at what Brexit means: we want from it, how we will act during any transition period and after, the risks and rewards. What May should have done after the election, essentially, so there’s cross party agreement. The Royal Commission should also take advice from a Citizens’ Jury, as was done in Ireland on the abortion debate, an issue at least as toxic as Brexit.
The police investigation into any wrongdoings during the referendum should continue alongside the Commission and any prosecutions should go ahead independent of the Commission’s deliberations.
There would be another election in the usual course of events but campaigning would be on the issues – tax, spending, welfare, education, NHS, defence… and not on the slow grind of Brexit.
A new Parliament would look at the Royal Commission’s plan of action and then vote on whether to trigger Article 50 again, this time with a clear road map of agreed actions, or whether the new proposals should be put back to a new referendum.
One tiny snag, as I’m sure you have noticed… in order to withdraw Article 50, Parliament – this Parliament – would have to vote to do so…
Interlude
December 4, 2017Let’s take a break from the Budget TIINs for a moment and look at the open consultations here.
There are fourteen open consultations, most of them from last week.
How, exactly, does anyone envisage this is going to work, please? Are representative bodies really going to be able to consult with their members before Christmas? Or in January (tax return season, remember?)
Question for the group: is the quality of HMRC legislation improving, or deteriorating, do we think? And does adequate consultation tend to make the resulting legislation better, or worse?
Just a thought
Legislative v administrative
June 12, 2017There’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.
Your Friday moment of zen…
May 6, 2016I’m sorry to do this to you, but I have a terrible ear worm:
Panamana (tune: “Ma na ma na”, the Muppets)
Panamana
Mossack Fonsecka
Panamana
Dave Cameron…
Panamana
And then George Osborne, the expats, the non-doms, big business and the multi nation als
Wealth doesn’t trickle down, it just gets stashed
Just gets stashed
Just gets stashed….
Panamanorama
April 5, 2016Day. A plane takes off. Our reporter looks manfully into the camera. “Tax haven,” he says. He walks down a sunlit beach towards a generic office building. “Look,” he says, “why would a lawyer have an office in a tax haven?”
Night. A plane is landing, silhouetted against a London skyline. Our reporter is seen in profile, sitting in his car, looking manfully at a pile of documents in a folder on the seat beside him. “Hundreds of thousands of documents,” he says.
Day. Our reporter is walking alongside another white man, on a path through a field. “But did you?” he says. “Look,” the other man says, “I have already emailed you the answers to your questions and I’m not going to give an interview. Now can you go away please?” “Yes, but DID YOU???” asks the reporter. “Go away,” the man says, going through a gate into a garden. The reporter stands outside the gate and looks mournfully into the camera. “Well, did he?” he asks. “We may never know.”
Spending review
November 25, 2015It fascinates me that there are people and organisations that don’t take twitter seriously. Although often it’s just a bit of fun (and occasionally a screaming pit of insanity), it’s also the place where you can see the first draft of politics – which is itself the first draft of history – being hashed out.
For example are you on the #spendingreview or #SR15 hashtag? The BBC and most of the people I follow on twitter seem to be using #spendingreview which is comprehensible but longer and takes a chunk out of your 140 characters, whereas the Treasury and the George Osborne twitter feeds are using #SR15 which is short but muggle-exclusionary. If that’s a thing. (Well it is now). More follows. Probably.
(By the way I’m live blogging this, and it’s the first time I’ve done so. If you’ve subscribed to the feed and find it’s sending you multiple emails, you might want to unsubscribe for a bit or at least ignore anything that comes to you from tiintax before the end of the spending review speech)
12.30 Here we go.
All I’m getting from the first few minutes is security, security, security – sounds a bit…. no, Godwin’s law. And a notable lack of verbs. I wish governments would start employing speech writers who would write actual speeches and not bullet point lists.
12.46 a giant sneer at Labour over borrowing £8bn less than forecast so “mending the roof while the sun shines”. Where did this idiotic roof metaphor come from? What metaphorical sun is shining on the country at present?
Next the tax credits. I can’t pretend to understand the detail from the speech alone, but what I think I heard was, we’re not going ahead with the changes to tax credits because they’ll all be washed out by the introduction of the universal credit.
“HMRC is making efficiencies of 18% of its own budget” Good grief, are we taking the putative savings from closing down the network offices *before* the putative improvements in digital service that will allow the savings to be made???
Fighting tax evasion… seems to mean some kind of action on disguised employment. Which will be interesting. And there was some kind of commitment to make CGT payable within 30 days of the disposal of residential property. The detail of that will be interesting – main residence relief means most residential property doesn’t incur CGT surely? And if we’re talking about property development, why only residential and not offices etc?
13.00 Social care: two billion more, but it comes from Local Authorities sticking a hypothecated 2% onto council tax. So the government won’t be unpopular about it, just the local authorities, so that’s all right, yes??
13.05ish Osborne sneers at Scotland, or more specifically at what a Scottish spending review would have looked like (given the fall in oil prices) if there had been a different result in the referendum. Have weird deja vu, till I realise he’s saying exactly what Cameron said towards the end of PMQs. they’re plagiarising each other’s speeches now? Or do they learn the insults and sneers in the same bullet-pointed list they take their talking points from?
All right, why is hypothecating the tampon tax a problem? Because tampons are not “luxury items” and the EU needs to get its act together to recategorise them into the nil rate band for VAT. But Osborne crowing that he’s going to donate the VAT raised to women’s charities is – as I said on twitter – patronising bollocks (and, yes, I use the gendered language deliberately). Because why do women have to pay the bill for violence against women? Why is violence against women only a cause of concern for women? He’s conflating different issues and trying to make himself look good. Must check later to see if the Macho Fund (for guide dogs for servicemen and something to do with Winston Churchill? My womb was wandering too much to take in the detail) is bigger than the Gurlydosh.
Extra stamp duty on buy to lets. Interesting. “We will consult on the details” is code for “we haven’t worked out how to do it yet” you understand.
Now some infantile gamesmanship on the police. Suggest you’ll be making huge cuts to the police. When Labour suggest cuts should be no more than 10%, recast it as “we have had representations” from the other side to cut the police by 10% – we’re cutting to zero. Childish and insulting. And followed by hideous baying sounds from the government benches. Sometimes I’m ashamed we let these people represent us.
I’m going to take a walk and cool off a bit. See you soon.
tiintax 