Rachel Reeves appeared to suggest that taxing the rich will not be a priority for a Labour administration should they win the next general election.
The shadow chancellor has been forced to outline how she plans to boost the public purse after Jeremy Hunt used his Budget to adopt some of Labour’s revenue-raising policies to fund his pre-election cut in national insurance.
Desperate pleas to fund public services are also high on the agenda after 14 years of underinvestment.
But quizzed on whether she will hike taxes for the well-off, Reeves said it wasn’t a priority for Labour.
She did, however, outline plans to crack down on tax dodgers and raise £2.6 billion over the next parliament by closing “loopholes” in the Government’s plans to abolish exemptions for “non-doms”.
Labour said it would invest up to £555 million a year in boosting the number of compliance officers at HMRC.
It will also consider requiring more tax schemes to be registered with HMRC to make sure they are legitimate, and plans a focus on offshore tax compliance.
Reeves told BBC Breakfast she could “ramp up” the number of HMRC staff “pretty quickly” if Labour won the election.
“At the start you might need to bring in extra resource but then you need to train people up within the government to do this work.
“This isn’t rocket science – previous governments have managed to close that tax gap, as it’s called.”
She added: “The Government’s plans that they announced in March about non-doms, they said they were taking our policy; well, it turns out they’ve taken it but left a load of loopholes in it.
“And so if you are a non-dom you can still get out of paying inheritance tax: in the first year of their policy there’s a 50 per cent discount, we don’t get 50 per cent discounts on our taxes.
“People who go out and work today – teachers, plumbers, doctors – they don’t get a 50 per cent discount. Why should some of the wealthiest people in the country get that discount? We would abolish that and we would put that money into frontline public services, where it belongs.”
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