George Osborne

Waiting for Dave

Waiting for David Cameron’s speech, which is going to be a great end to a great conference. General buzz here amongst those who were at Labour’s Conference last week is that contrast has been striking: their Conference was all very hollow, lots of election speculation covering up the lack of no real substance; while ours has been full of new, exciting ideas. The Party has been really united and determined. We are up for the fight!

On my brief there’s a story that is quite interesting – which the Mail and Guardian covered this morning. It concerns Labour’s misleading use of Treasury figures to attack our tax proposals. Yesterday lunchtime I wrote to the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury as follows: 

On 30th April 2007, the then Economic Secretary, Ed Balls MP told the House of Commons, “Information is not held on overseas income and gains that do not give rise to a tax liability in the UK.”

As the then Paymaster General, Dawn Primarolo MP told the House on 8th March 2007, this is because non-doms are not required to disclose this information: “In general, individuals do not have to inform HMRC of their foreign income or gains unless this is relevant to their UK tax liability.”

Last night, the Labour Party distributed a press release which stated: “The Treasury’s initial estimate, on best information available, is that just 15,000 current non-domicile residents have foreign income in excess of £62,000.”
I am writing to ask you to explain why it is the case that information which the Treasury refused to give to Parliament appears to have been given to the Labour Party.

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