Crack down on tax havens

If we are to improve our schools, hospitals and social services, money has to be found to pay for them. We have two choices; either we buy them as private customers or we have to raise more taxes to fund them for the collective good.

Not a day passes without news of the crisis facing the NHS. Patients with delayed operations and others even dying on trolleys in hospital corridors.

Patients needing treatment in east Kent face even greater problems because of staffing problems and inadequate, outdated facilities.

The reason why many voted Leave in the EU referendum was because politicians promised an additional £350 million a week for the NHS if we quit Europe.

Demands on health and social care will increase with the ageing population over the next 20 years. The problem is that we do not like paying taxes to pay for better services. So what is the solution?

One is to improve productivity in the provision of healthcare and medical treatment. Here technology offers a solution. The application of genetic technologies that allows for the more precise and accurate diagnosis of cancers and other life-threatening diseases.

Screening of populations, such as today with breast and bowel cancers, should be extended to younger age groups instead of simply the over-50s or over-60s.

Modern technology allows for a far greater level of selfmonitoring of health condition. Microchips are being developed that can be implanted in the body to measure blood pressure and other conditions that are likely to be associated with the trigger of strokes and heart attacks.

As in Denmark, tax regimes should be further extended as drivers of health policies, encouraging sensible diets. It is disturbing that life expectancy is predicted to decline in the UK over the next 20 years and health conditions to deteriorate. This is almost entirely due to individual choices in diet that leads to obesity, illness and poor health.

But even with these measures there will continue to be an under-funding of health and other public services.

The only viable solution is to broaden the tax base. Not increase taxes, but to broaden it to bring in those not paying their fair share of taxes.

Employees, working for companies, have no choice but to pay their taxes. But there is a growing problem of people and corporations avoiding paying taxes, or at least at a reduced amount, because of tax havens.

I have been looking at the so-called Paradise Papers. In November 2017, a group of investigative journalists researched into individuals and companies that had “parked” their finances in various tax havens.

Their research revealed thousands across the whole of the UK, including 128 resident in Kent. 73 of them are registered in Bermuda. What they are doing is entirely legal.

Estimates of the scale of the problem range from the official HMRC figure of £34 billion (2015) to £150 billion as calculated by experts including Professor Taylor-gooby of the University of Kent. This money could buy a lot of hospitals and healthcare.

The £350 million a week promised by the Leavers in the 2016 referendum is a pittance compared to the cash that could be available if there was a clampdown on the use of tax havens across the world.

We often read of scroungers taking advantage of the welfare state. Isn’t it time more attention was given by politicians to those corporations and individuals that do not pay their fair share of taxes? Perhaps we would then have a better funded health service with no need for elderly people to be parked on trolleys in hospital corridors.