TUC Congress votes to campaign for reforms to the UK tax system

Composite Motion C06, Tax Raising Measures and Fair Taxation, was moved by EIS (The Educational Institute of Scotland).

The motion noted that “Working people are facing unprecedented pressure on their household incomes as wages continue to lag behind inflation” but that “CEO pay is up 23% in the last year, bankers’ bonuses are at a record high since the financial crash and dividends are rising three times faster than wages.”

It said that “Who pays tax, and how much they contribute, are political choices. They have direct impacts for our essential public services and our wider infrastructure…The money you make from working hard shouldn’t be taxed at a higher rate than the money shareholders and property investors generate from their existing wealth.”

The motion called upon the TUC to develop proposals to enable the General Council to lead a debate on reform of our tax system in the UK to deliver fairer outcomes for working people, public services and public sector pay. It also calls upon the TUC to lobby the government and the Labour Party to introduce a fairer system of taxation.

Moving the motion for EIS, Allan Crosbie pointed out that the UK tax on company profits is lower than the G7, G20 and the OECD. He referred to a report by the Scottish TUC outlining a range of tax-raising measures that could raise an extra £3.3billion to fund a real-terms increase in public sector pay and investment in public services. He said similar measures in the rest of the UK could raise dozens if not hundreds of billions that could be spent on public services.

PCS support

Speaking in support of the motion for PCS, national executive committee member Kevin McHugh said: “Britain is broken…..successive governments have cut corners and cut costs and ordinary people are suffering. The different between those at the top and those at the bottom is more like a wealth chasm than a wealth gap.”

Kevin spoke of his own experiences of working at HMRC and said, “we haven’t got enough staff to actually collect the tax that we need. In customer services at HMRC they’re planning to cut 4000 jobs. We don’t want cuts, we want more jobs so we can go after the tax.”

“Each member of compliance at HMRC collects over £200,000 a year and they’re going to cut 4000 of those staff. What we demand is more staff, a change in HMRC rules so we can go after these people who are avoiding, evading and downright fiddling their taxes.”

The motion was carried.

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