Meeting points

Broad support

The consensus was broadly supportive of the Making Tax Digital programme but there were concerns over how HMRC would make it work. Andrew Hubbard pointed out that ‘the tax system is creaking [and] technology has enabled all sorts of things to be done that never used to be such as buying books and renewing driving licences’ but he acknowledged the transition would not be smooth. However he said: ‘The history of all new changes in the tax system have been that … we have a period where there’s lots of teething problems and then we find the system works for us. We could go to sleep for five or ten years and wake up and think: this system is really good – how did we ever cope with the old system?’

His point was echoed...