I am making this statement in advance of the release by the Cabinet Office of limited information about the award of my peerage and of the undertakings I gave at the time.
While I value my privacy, I do not want my affairs to distract from the general election campaign. I have therefore decided to release a copy of the letter which I wrote to William Hague, and to expand on what actually happened.
As the letter shows, the undertakings I gave were confirmed in a memorandum to William Hague dated 23rd March 2000. These were to “take up permanent residence in the UK again” by the end of that year. The other commitment in the memorandum was to resign as Belize’s permanent representative to the UN, which I did a week later.
In subsequent dialogue with the Government, it was officially confirmed that the interpretation in the first undertaking of the words “permanent residence” was to be that of “a long term resident” of the UK. I agreed to this and finally took up my seat in the House of Lords in October 2000. Throughout the last ten years, I have been declaring all my UK income to HM Revenue.
My precise tax status therefore is that of a “non-dom”. Two of Labour’s biggest donors – Lord Paul (recently made a privy councillor by the Prime Minister) and Sir Ronald Cohen, both long-term residents of the UK, are also “non-doms”.
As for the future, while the non-dom status will continue for many people in business or public life, David Cameron has said that anyone sitting in the legislature – Lords or Commons – must be treated as resident and domiciled in the UK for tax purposes. I agree with this change and expect to be sitting in the House of Lords for many years to come.
3 comments ↓
Is it me, or is this a pretty obfuscatory statement? A lot of waffling about “permanent residence” vs “long-term resident” vs “domicile” which only adds to the impression that Ashcroft has been running rings around the Cabinet Office (not to mention the Tory Party).
And the last paragraph is a bit opaque. He doesn’t actually say outright that he will relinquish his non-dom status, though this would seem to be the implication. But if that’s what he meant, why not say it outright rather than leaving people to infer it?
Also, note that he says only that those sitting in parliament must be treated as resident and domiciled in the UK. So no doubt following his death his estate will argue that he was actually domiciled in Belize, and only being treated as domiciled in the UK for lifetime tax purposes – pointing to evidence such as the statement on his website that “if home is where the heart is, then my home is Belize”.
And so?
The number of non-doms has trebled under Labour since 1997.
The number of non-doms is predicted to rise exponentially. By 2015, only 5% of the people in the UK will be paying tax here.
Leave a Comment