Treasury missing billions in taxes

Billions of pounds worth of tax revenue remains uncollected by the government, a minister has revealed. Skip related content

Speaking in the Lords on Thursday, financial services minister Lord Myners revealed that £27.7bn of taxes had not been paid as of March 31 2009.

And the value of benefit overpayments to be recovered was £1.8bn.

Lord James of Blackheath (Con) argued that this represented a very high proportion of the national debt.

"If is not paid the burden will continue to fall on the responsible taxpayers who do continue to discharge their debts," he told peers.

But Myners was keen to point out that, while a hefty sum, HMRC collects all but one per cent of tax due.

He said: "Of the one per cent that is not collected, 90 per cent is due to business insolvency. That is an extraordinarily good record of debt recovery, which most businesses would find hard to match."