L

Lord Livermore (Lab)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 5 March 2026

Debate

Small Businesses: VAT Threshold

Contribution

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his question. It is neither of the things that he set out. As I have said, the data cited by the noble Lord relates only to VAT-registered businesses and does not include unregistered businesses, so I do not think it shows what the noble Lord claims that it shows. If a business is already registered for VAT, it has no incentive to suppress turnover to avoid VAT, because it is already charging VAT and would need to continue to do so even below the threshold. Why would they do what the noble Lord suggested? That would not make any sense. If he looks at a longer time series of this data, he will clearly see that it moves around significantly, so the conclusions he is trying to draw are very difficult to sustain.

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