Member

Governments are told that there will be mitigation by courts, but there never is mitigation. No one came to argue for mitigation—not the Redundancy Payments Service, which had to pay the money, and certainly not the insolvency practitioner; it was not their concern. HMRC, via the Redundancy Payments Service, was therefore out by £600,000, which meant that, in the end, the taxpayer was out £600,000. Under Clause 27 of the Bill, this taxpayer-funded amount would rise to £1.2 million. We should note that this is on top of the £600,000 that the employees received in redundancy money. That is the only occasion this would happen, because no employer would be so stupid as to incur these fines—only in a redundancy, where it is necessary to go against the law, as I have explained.