This week's opinion: 7 March 2019

I have always enjoyed Sir Humphrey’s comments in Yes Minister on the publication of a paper on open government – a concept he was wholly opposed to. He said: ‘Always dispose of the difficulty in the title. It does less harm there than in the text.’ I was reminded of this when I read HMRC’s consultative document on changing the order of priority in insolvency (tinyurl.com/hmrccreditor). The title is ‘protecting your taxes in insolvency’.

The phrase ‘your taxes’ gives a particular slant to the proposals – it emphasises that we are dealing with public money and the priority should be ensuring taxes are collected. This is a valid point of view – but there are other ways of looking at it. A document which was headed ‘ensuring that hard working local businesses don’t suffer if a customer goes bust’ might lead to a different conclusion. People could conclude that it was more important to ensure that local suppliers were paid in an insolvency than it was to put more money in the hands of the state.

There is no right answer here and it is fitting that there should be a proper debate over relative priorities in an insolvency. Crown preference was deliberately abolished in the Enterprise Act 2002 because it was seen by some as a barrier to allowing companies to restructure their finances through a period of financial difficulty. I have no problem with the issue being looked at again, but I wonder whether the language HMRC has used in the consultative document has already closed down sensible debate over what future policy should be. Words are seldom neutral.

If you do one thing…

Read the latest HMRC guidance on reporting and paying the loan charge (tinyurl.com/govlcfeb). Taxation will include an article on the mechanics of operating PAYE on the loan charge later this month.

Andrew Hubbard