Tax experts assess Budget 2011
3 May 2011
The Treasury committee has presented MPs debating the Finance Bill today with detailed assessments of the tax changes announced in the Budget - put together by the country's leading accountancy experts.
- Report: Finance (No 3) Bill
- Bills Before Parliament: Finance(No 3) Bill 2010-11
- Watch live: Finance (No. 3) Bill (Clauses 4, 7, 10, 19, 35 and 72) (from around 4pm)
- Treasury Select Committee
- Inquiry: Budget 2011
The publication of the report is intended to improve scrutiny of the Finance Bill by Parliament and builds on work initiated by the committee earlier this year.
On March 15 the Committee published a report identifying six Principles of Tax Policy by which future Budgets should be judged:
- Basic fairness
- Supporting growth and encouraging competition
- Certainty, including simplicity
- Stability
- Practicality
- Coherence
The committee subsequently asked the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), the Chartered Institute of Taxation and the ICAEW Tax Faculty to examine the Budget against these principles.
Chairman of the Committee, Andrew Tyrie MP, said:
"On many areas of tax reform the experts conclude that the Government has taken a step in the right direction; on others they are more critical.
Britain has to have a better tax system: providing more certainty, simplicity, stability and coherence – as well as being fair.
These assessments can help us judge whether the Chancellor’s measures will make things better or worse both for the taxpayer and for the British economy as a whole.
The work the committee is doing on this is just a start. We will monitor carefully tax changes in successive budgets in close collaboration with the experts."