Cameron Responds to Tax Relief Questions, Says It Was “Not Particularly Successful or Targeted”

The UK’s Prime Minister David Cameron has been questioned as to why videogame industry tax relief was dropped from the Emergency Budget set out by Chancellor George Osborne.

Labour MP Luciana Berger raised the topic in the Commons and said: “Before the election all three parties pledged to introduce a videogames tax relief to compete internationally on a level playing-field. Why has the government reneged on that promise?”

Cameron responded with the usual line of needing to make “difficult decisions on tax relief”, which led to groans from Labour MPs. ”Well, the Opposition members groan,” Cameron said, “can we think of one thing they’re actually going to support to get the deficit down? I can’t think of a single thing.”

“So we have got to take difficult decisions and I think that tax break relief, which was not particularly successful or targeted, had to go. Those are the difficult decisions we have to take,” he continued.

I probably don’t need to note that before the election the Conservatives didn’t officially support the idea of tax breaks, despite (as Develop points out) that Culture Minister Ed Viazey said that the Tories “emphatically, 100 per cent in support for game tax breaks. No ifs, no buts” and quite strongly attacked Develop for publishing a story saying Conservatives had “abandoned” tax relief.

In my opinion (and this is just my opinion), the Tories are too concerned with an ideological drive to shrink the state to support an industry most Tory back-benchers haven’t even heard of or assume is just for violent psychopaths. (The Lib Dems aren’t to be let off either, they spoke about support of tax relief, too.)

Tax dodging by large, multinational companies results in billions of lost income every year (Vodafone, for example, are facing protests over an alleged £6 billion tax dodge, although it’s unclear if that’s a realistic figure), yet it’s not there that we see phrases like “we’re all in this together”. Tax relief for the videogame industry would be estimated to cost around £190 million according to industry group TIGA, but would in return bring in an estimated tax receipt of over £400 million.

We’ve already seen an example of companies not wanting to settle in the UK because of the lack of government support and as the Cameron’s policy of slash and burn continues, tax relief will get pushed back and back (rightly so, people not having houses is more important) as the battlecry of “we must cut the deficit!” continues for another five years.