Diana Johnson – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the HM Treasury
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Diana Johnson on 2015-11-09.
To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, pursuant to the Answer of 3 November 2015 to Question 14136, what work the Government has undertaken to implement the commitments made in paragraphs (a) 1, (b) 2, (c) 3, (d) 8 and (e) 10 of the 2013 Lough Erne G8 Leaders’ Communiqué since January 2014; and what assessment he has made of the level of progress against those commitments.
Mr David Gauke
Since January 2014 the Prime Minister has updated the house on 11 June 2014 and 10 June 2015 following the G7 Summits. The UK presidency focused on 3 Ts: tax, transparency and trade.
On tax there has been significant progress on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) the major international agreement to realign taxation with economic activities and value creation. In October 2015 the OECD issued the final BEPS outputs, which were endorsed by G20 Finance Ministers. The UK has made significant progress including: consulting on implementing rules to address hybrid mismatches arrangements and issuing draft secondary legislation to implement Country-by-Country (CbC) reporting, a template for multinational companies to report profit and tax information to tax authorities, in the UK in line with the internationally agreed timetable. In addition, in February 2014 G20 Finance Ministers endorsed the OECD’s new global standard for Automatic Exchange of Information of tax. All G20 Finance Ministers committed to first exchange by end-2018 in September, with 10 G20 countries including the UK committing to begin exchange in 2017.
With regards to transparency, in March 2015 the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act received Royal Assent, establishing a public registry of company beneficial ownership that will show who ultimately owns and controls in-scope UK companies. The register will be operational from June 2016 and the UK is undertaking a wider review of corporate transparency.
On trade, the Government has furthered international free trade agreements (FTA), with negotiations on an EU-Canada FTA finalised in August 2014. The EU and Japan held a constructive round of Free Trade Agreements negotiations in October 2015. The EU-US FTA 11th Round of negotiations took place in Miami 19-23 October 2015.
