Speeches by Lowe.

“Let’s not get into a political debate about how much of it is wasted.”

“If you could put it in writing, that would be fantastic—I really would appreciate that.”

“I am talking about large businesses. If you look at this chart, either they are making errors because it is so complicated or their legal interpretation does not agree with what HMRC’s rulebook is saying. There is your issue. That is a burden on our businesses. It is a massive burden, Clive—massive. They have to engage…”

“Quarterly, not annually. That is what you are asking for.”

“I think that that is only fair for the businesses, because some of them are up against it anyway. We will go on to talk about other burdens that you put on businesses, which—in terms of my point from the John Marshall quote—are arguably holding back a lot of British enterprises, because they are spending their time col…”

“Are you going to improve that? Is it a priority?”

“But you don’t slim it down, do you, Jonathan? I do not think it gets slimmed down.”

“I know I am going to use all my allotted time—a bit like in the Senate in America—so I would like to push on now because I have a couple of other things to ask you.”

“Now we are moving on to another cost on businesses, which, again, all my businesses are having to suffer: Making Tax Digital. That is another cost that, by your own admission, is going to cost businesses an awful lot of money, so it is a burden.”

“I am not straying far from these charts on page 19. I think they are highly illuminating.”

“But 51% were not entirely convinced it was—put as much spin on that as you like.”

“Thank you, Chairman. In preparing for today’s meeting, I came across a very good quote that I would like to remind you all of from the very eminent US Chief Justice in the 19th century, John Marshall, who said that the power to tax is the power to destroy. I think that is a very powerful quote that you can perhaps take…”

“I have done it myself. Sometimes I give up, as do a lot of people. They waste a lot of time, and that costs money.”

“They are expensive for people to gather. In my experience of HMRC—again, I asked some parliamentary questions on this—it takes you 26 and a half minutes to answer your telephones, or it did in 2024-25, whereas it took the DWP eight minutes to answer theirs. That says a lot about the people paying the tax compared to th…”

“We are slightly getting into the weeds, because on working from home, you are not entirely clear what your own rules are, so you picked a bad example. I am interested in whether you think that part of the issue you have with these big businesses is that they cannot work out the rulebook. What is more interesting is tha…”

“Eighty thousand pages. Doesn’t that need slimming down?”

“Do you know how long the Hong Kong tax code is?”

“Five hundred pages. We have 22,000 pages. If you take anything away, I think you could make life a lot easier for you and for our businesses if you made your tax manuals much simpler.”

“We are not. We are talking about the burden on businesses, Clive. This is a further burden—they gift wrap it and send it to you.”

“In the end, these burdens are damaging the wealth of Britain and damaging the amount of extra tax you could collect.”