The chief executive of HM Revenue and Customs has told the public accounts committee that there are “no penalties for innocent errors” in an individual’s tax affairs.

https://committees.parliament.uk/event/17044/formal-meeting-oral-evidence-session/

www.theguardian.com 

Jim Harra has told MPs that officials would help “in any way we possibly can” with the inquiry by the prime minister’s ethics adviser into Nadhim Zahawi’s tax affairs.

Harra said that he could not comment on an individual’s tax affairs, but signalled that HMRC could offer a more public comment on a minister’s tax affairs under certain circumstances.

Being careful to point out that he was not discussing anyone in particular, Harra also said: “Carelessness is a concept in tax law. It can be relevant to how many back years that we can assess, can be relevant to whether someone is liable to a penalty and if so, what penalty they will be liable to for an error in their tax affairs.

“There are no penalties for innocent errors in your tax affairs. So if you take reasonable care, but nevertheless make a mistake, whilst you will be liable for the tax and for interest if it’s paid late, you would not be liable for a penalty.

“But if your error was as a result of carelessness, then legislation says that a penalty could apply in those circumstances.”

He pointed out, to laughter from MPs, that “innocent” was not the term used in legislation.

“If you have been careless in your tax affairs, and as a result of that carelessness have made a mistake, then you could be liable to penalty.”

Unemployed Exeter residents could find work in Cullompton if the town’s railway station is rebuilt, a local MP has claimed.

Ollie Heptinstall, local democracy reporter www.radioexe.co.uk

Liberal Democrat Richard Foord, whose Tiverton & Honiton constituency includes Cullompton, made the case for restoring the station during a debate in parliament on Tuesday [24 January].

Cullompton station closed in 1964, part of the now-infamous Beeching axe that slashed the rail network in Britain. However, work is now underway on bringing the station back to its former site by the M5 almost 60 years later.

The government awarded £5 million of business funding towards restoring Cullompton and Wellington stations in 2021. Following further work from local councils, the lead role for the project was handed over to Network Rail last year.

It is hoped the first passengers could board trains at Cullompton again in May 2025.

Nearby Okehampton station was the first beneficiary of the the government’s ‘restoring your railway fund’ – reopening in 2021 to great success. Mr Foord hopes Cullompton “will see the same railway renaissance as Okehampton has in the past couple of years.”

Outlining how there are “some parallels” between the two towns, he said: “Okehampton and Cullompton are both within commuting distance of Exeter and both have slightly more than 10,000 people currently living in and around each town.”

Mr Foord added: “It is a town with a tight labour market and currently has vacancies across a range of sectors, including retail, manufacturing and social care. In Cullompton, fewer than two in 100 people are unemployed, in contrast to the neighbouring city of Exeter, where unemployment is greater than three per cent.

“There are thousands of people in Exeter who are registered unemployed and looking for work who would be able to find jobs in Cullompton were they able to commute there.”

Cullompton is likely to see significant growth in the coming years, with plans afoot for a Culm Garden Village which Mr Foord says will expand the town “by more than 5,000 houses and perhaps an additional 12,000 residents.”

Stressing the importance of a new station, he explained: “We already have an air quality management area designation in the town of Cullompton; having a station in the heart of the town should serve to reduce traffic on the congested B3181.”

Railways minister Huw Merriman (Conservative) was then invited to visit the old Cullompton station site “to see how little work would be required to restore the station to its former glory and to transform a very friendly part of Devon into an environmentally friendly one.”

Mr Merriman responded by saying the Wellington and Cullompton project is “progressing to a full business case, and a decision will be made once that has been finalised.”

After many Cranbrook residents endured nearly a week of no heating while temperatures plummeted below zero last month, further misery and anger is being caused following claims that communal district heating provider E.ON has ‘ridiculously’ hiked up energy bills. One resident has reported that her heating bill for November/ December is £693.

Anita Merritt www.devonlive.com

Another claimed their latest bill has risen ‘ridiculously’ from £60 to £625 in a month. Noticeable differences have also been reported by those with meters.

A resident says a new meter was fitted in their property around six months ago and they used around 650 units in just under six months. During the time when some Cranbrook residents were experiencing problems with their heating and hot water supplies, the resident claims their meter ‘shot up to 1700 ish.’

E.ON has insisted that there are no known issues with meters and that bills will have increased this time of year. However, East Devon MP Simon Jupp says that after hearing residents’ latest concerns, he is striving to get more information from the energy provider.

Cranbrook is part of a ‘district heating scheme’, meaning they are all heated by an energy centre, rather than a boiler, located half a mile away which can only be run by one supplier, which is currently E.on. All 2,000 homes are signed up to E.on under an agreement which is in place until 2090.

Mr Jupp said: “At a time when customers on E.ON’s heating network in Cranbrook and Tithebarn were facing outages with shambolic regularity and were sat in freezing cold homes, many people still saw their bills continue to go up. I am very concerned to hear reports from residents that they’ve been charged for heat and water they obviously weren’t able to use a lot of the time.

“I urgently raised this with E.ON who insist higher bills are because customers were using more heat and hot water during the colder weather. I have gone back to E.ON’s bosses with specific examples of unusually high billing so I can get clear answers for affected residents, who are quite simply fed up, and who can blame them?”

A closed meeting is said to be taking place between E.ON and its customers on January 25. Details have not been disclosed to DevonLive by E.On about why it has been called and the aim of the meeting.

Instead, an E.ON spokesperson said: “The details of the meeting have been shared with our customers. This is not an open event and all of our customers have been invited directly.”

Regarding the latest concerns raised over the hike in bill payments, the E.ON spokesperson said: “With the colder weather and darker evenings we have experienced over recent weeks, it is reasonable to expect that most customers will have been using more energy than in previous months to keep their homes warm and well-lit. Any customer who has a query regarding their bill should contact us directly to discuss this.

“We know these are incredibly difficult times and we continue to urge any customer who is struggling to get in touch as there are ways we can help.”

Last month, Mr Jupp intervened on behalf of Cranbrook residents when they were struggling without heating before Christmas. He expressed his concern at ‘E.ON’s ‘lack of pace’ to resolve the issue and slammed their response as “woefully inadequate”.

At the time, engineers believed the problems predominantly stemmed from an issue with valves situated within the heat interface inside some homes. Once supplies had been restored, E.ON said they would then assess what future actions need to be taken to prevent a repeat of this issue from reoccurring.

Last week, DevonLive reported the town had woken up to no hot water on January 16, after its communal heating supply was cut off. E.ON has said that the brief issue was an “isolated incident” caused by a fire alarm which cut off the energy centre.

It is likely that district and communal heat networks won’t be regulated by Ofgem until at least 2024, it has been announced recently. Householders who face issues of intermittent supply of their heating and hot water will remain at the mercy of their provider to find a solution, with no option to seek redress from a regulator.

Then there is the cost of providing “glossy brochures” in support of each submission in the “beauty contest” for funding under the various levelling up schemes, most of which fail. – Owl

Aubrey Allegretti www.theguardian.com 

Cash-strapped councils are estimated to have spent £12.5m compiling bids to launch low tax and regulation-lite “investment zones” that were binned by the government just weeks later, new figures suggest.

Labour, which compiled analysis about the waste suffered by local authorities, hit out at the “cost of Tory chaos” given the scheme was effectively ditched by the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, when he took over after Liz Truss’s short-lived premiership.

Initially billed as a major part of Truss’s growth agenda, the investment zones announcement saw a rush of interest – with 626 submitted from 90 councils across England.

But while many areas jumped at the chance to be granted slimmed down planning rules and have other regulations eased, as well as tax breaks to encourage investment, putting together the documents came at a cost.

Councils had to spend an average of £20,000 to £30,000 in each bid for central government funding, and sometimes lost staff hours while work was done preparing the submissions, according to the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives.

Taking the most conservative end of that estimate, the total cost to councils was calculated to have been £12.5m.

Using the same equation, Labour also said the 418 bids rejected last week out of 529 received for the second round of distribution from the levelling up fund amounted to a loss to councils of £8.4m.

The nature of the system that sees local authorities forced to bid for central government funding was criticised by Lisa Nandy, Labour’s shadow levelling up secretary.

She claimed struggling councils had been “forced to waste millions of pounds during a cost of living crisis on applications that now lie in a bin in Whitehall”.

Nandy said: “Many councils were rightly sceptical about investment zones but felt they had to engage with what seemed to be the only game in town. A huge amount of time and money has been wasted because of the Conservatives bouncing from one half-baked idea to the next with no serious plan for growth.”

She vowed that Labour would end the “Hunger Games-style approach to levelling up, which forces communities to go cap-in-hand to Whitehall”, and said the party had “set out a proper long-term strategy to grow the economy, create good jobs and shift power of out Westminster”.

The levelling up department was contacted for comment.

Previously, the Guardian revealed that all expressions of interest from councils in becoming investment zones were not being pursued by the government.

A drastically slimmed down and refocused version of the scheme is still being discussed between the levelling up department, Treasury and No 10 that will probably see the zones focussing on boosting research and development hubs at universities.

Sources have indicated Sunak wants to use the move as a sop to Truss and her allies to fend off criticism about a lack of commitment to her vision of growth.

The levelling up secretary, Michael Gove, will probably express his commitment to a reincarnation of the scheme in a speech to the Convention of the North on Wednesday, but an announcement about the future of the project is still thought to be some way off.

Paul Arnott www.midweekherald.co.uk

Throughout the two main years of the Covid-19 crisis, 2020 and 2021, our officers at East Devon (EDDC) gladly took on the extra burden of assessing and then distributing government funds to local businesses, as well as delivering extra help to individuals really struggling to cope.

One of the central boasts of 45 years of Conservative rule at EDDC until 2019 was the artificial suppression of council tax rises. This went hand in hand with not bothering to review car park charges, maintain assets such as the Exmouth Pavilion theatre, or do anything about our public loos.It also led to a “pared-to-the-bone” approach to Human Resources.

Yet despite this, in the middle of the pandemic, our officers were obliged to take part in “Levelling-Up” bids to government for “oven-ready” projects, with just weeks to get the paperwork in. Yet this was always a classic, all mouth no trousers, Boris Johnson approach to the serious matter of funding regional infrastructure. Nevertheless, our terrific officers burned the midnight oil to submit bids.

Devon County Council (DCC) is the highways authority and so (using much work by EDDC) submitted a bid for new works in the approach to Exmouth around the station. We were pleased with this, as it had the potential to fit in with out own Placemaking work in Exmouth of the last two years, soon to bear the essential fruit of well-consulted concepts, so that progress can be made with as much local support as possible.

DCC also included completing the Dinan Way road extension in the north of Exmouth, a piece of transport infrastructure first promised half a century ago as the exponential growth of housing in that area really took off. Ordinarily the funds for this might have come from the Highways Agency, but DCC saw an opportunity, won the signature of local MP Simon Jupp, and got the thumbs up last week at last. The Democratic Alliance administration will continue to work together with all parties to improve Exmouth.

However, the other scheme submitted – for works in Axminster and Seaton – lost its key signatory in the very week it was handed in. Neil Parish, the former MP, left office at a crucial time, having personally promised me (the day before he resigned) that he’d do all he could to get these projects approved too.

His replacement, Richard Foord MP (Lib Dem), moved like greased lightning the minute he was voted in to sign off in support himself. He also – quite rightly – backed the Cullompton relief road, a seriously overdue and desperately needed scheme in Mid-Devon.

Last week, it was announced that Axminster, Cullompton and Seaton were all unsuccessful. I offer no further comment.

However, to the people of Axminster and Seaton I would wish to assure them that we’ll be resubmitting bids at the next possible opportunity – there is meant to be a Round Three of Levelling Up. And we will read the feedback from government with genuine respect and in a spirit of seriousness.

On another front I’d like to thank the many friends and colleagues who went across to Dartmoor at the weekend to protest about the loss of the ability to wild camp. This seems to me about the difference between landowners who are genuine stewards of the land which they have the good fortune to own, and those who do not understand such obligations.

All of my four children took part in DofE or Ten Tors expeditions, as did most of their friends. The officers of the Dartmoor National Park authority will, I am sure, strive to negotiate with the landowners for maximum public access.

The protesters behaved immaculately. Now, following their example, it would be a good gesture for the Totnes Conservative Association to return the £5,000 donated to them by the landowner.