Church agencies say Budget fails the poorest

Church agencies have expressed their disappointment at today's Budget, which they say will hurt the most vulnerable people in the UK and overseas. Helen O'Brien, Chief Executive of Caritas Social Action Network (CSAN) which represents 41 Catholic charities in England and Wales, said: "whilst the increased funds Church agencies for children's mental health services and support for small charities through Gift Aid regulations are welcome, significant further cuts for welfare and public spending in this year's Budget Statement will fail to stop the squeeze on the most vulnerable.

"If you look beyond the headlines, recent tax and welfare changes - changes CSAN has questioned for some time - have hit the poorest households hard. For the CSAN member charities working on the ground, the impact of these changes on the people they support has been very real and very damaging. We hoped this Budget would be focussed on helping the poorest people who have found it increasingly difficult to make ends meet."

Christian Aid said it sees little in the UK Chancellor's Budget Speech, or the European Commission's new plan on tax transparency, to make a difference to the tax dodging which drains billions from developing countries every year. The Chancellor has announced a string of measures on tax avoidance and evasion but Christian Aid believes that to really close the net on big companies avoiding their fair share of tax, the UK should introduce a comprehensive Tax Dodging Bill.

"We are pleased to see politicians trying to tackle rampant tax dodging," said Joseph Stead, Christian Aid's Senior Economic Justice Adviser. "However, at all the points at which both UK and EU could have decided to help developing countries, they flunked it. In relation to tax dodging, the UK and EU appear to believe that we are not all in it together - developing countries are on their own."

On the Government's plans to introduce country-by-country reporting requirements for multinational companies, firms should have publicly to report the information. Failure to do this means few developing countries will benefit from the information being given to the UK's tax authority.

"Keeping this crucial information hidden from public eyes means that developing countries are never going to get the information they need to tackle tax dodging," warned Mr Stead. However, Christian Aid is hopeful that further UK Government plans, to introduce a new criminal offence of helping others to evade tax, could make a difference for people living in poverty in developing countries.

"We urge the Government to consider how to make such a new law work for the world's poorest people, who also suffer grave harm at the hands of tax evaders and their professional advisers," added Mr Stead.

"The new offence could easily be made to apply wherever in the world the crime happens, in the same way as the UK Bribery Act already does." Commenting on the European Commission's new plans for greater tax transparency in Europe, he added: "For the sake of developing countries and the trust of taxpayers all over Europe, the EU needs to improve its tax transparency. "Today's announcement is only tiptoeing in the right direction. With the President of the Commission narrowly avoiding censure for overseeing decades of dodgy tax deals, Europe needs to do a lot more in the coming year to show it is serious about tax transparency."

Source: CSAN/Christian Aid