No information about taxation
Last October Gordon Brown said he had conducted a series of reviews into the taxation of the non-domiciled when Chancellor and all the information should be made available to the public.
This was at a time when the issue was at the top of the political agenda. It was the week after George Osborne's Tory conference speech, with its dramatic and important of a cut in inheritance tax to be funded by charging non-doms in return for their tax breaks.
Brown his monthly prime ministerial press conference 'The non-domicile taxation, when I was Chancellor we carried out a series of reviews ... I have investigated this in the past. There will no doubt be reviews in the future. I think all the information should be made available to people.'
So, as the prime minister was indicating that all the information on the government's unpublished series of reviews over several years of a major policy controversy would be made available, I naturally thought I'd ask for it. I put freedom of information requests to the Treasury and to Revenue and Customs.
Most of the time since has been taken up by various procedural wrangles and bureaucratic bungles on the part of these two departments. Doubtless you'd like to know the full details, but they're too tedious even for me to recount.
However, here are some of them: The Treasury completely ignored my request for an internal review, until I copied them in on a complaint I made to the Information Commissioner. At this point I received a Treasury email saying 'I need to apologise to you on this 'review', we had missed it in the email box and no-one was allocated it'.
Still their record was not quite as bad as that of Revenue and Customs, who (again after I involved the Commissioner's office) justified their total failure to respond by stating bizarrely that they never received my original request. This is despite the fact that I received a series of acknowledgments from their staff promising to act on it.
HMRC has now sent me some links to publicly available material, while the Treasury has eventually decided it is not in the public interest to reveal submissions made to Ministers on this topic. Both departments seem to fall well short of the prime minister's assurance that all the information would be made available. (Perhaps some people may see this as evidence that his authority is waning?)
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