John McDonnell MP, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, commenting HMRC’s statement on aggressive tax avoidance, said:

“After six years of dragging their feet and failing to get a grip of tax avoidance, the Government has finally woken up to the fact that there is systematic tax avoidance in the UK. It was Labour that harried the Government over Google’s tax avoidance and they have been forced into action as a result of Labour pressure.

“In the wake of the Panama Papers scandal in April, I set out Labour’s Tax Transparency and Enforcement Plan, developed in consultation with leading tax specialists, to crack down on the scandal of tax avoidance and evasion. This includes stricter rules on accounting practices and giving the courts more power to ignore accounting tricks, which rob taxpayers of billions of pounds every year.

“At a time when we have a Government insisting on brutal spending cuts, it is a moral obscenity that major corporations and the super-rich should duck out of the obligations the rest of us fulfill. We can’t have one rule for the super-rich and one rule for the rest of us.”