Government Planning Online Sales Tax

fallen121

Just having a few thoughts about this. Many online retailers have physical stores as well. Let's say you do M&S click and collect and have to pay 2% tax because you ordered it online. That means the store is charging two different prices. At present you pay the same price regardless of how you order it. What happens if you then return the goods in store? Do you get the 2% back? Basically, it kills click and collect at a stroke. What about ordering takeaways. Everyone will just order over the phone. JustEat and Deliveroo will die. Uber? Forget that. Just go out in the street and hail a taxi. Booking cinema tickets online? No, just go to the cinema and queue up at the machine. Or download at home. Physically sick, disabled, live in the sticks with no public transport? Tough. Just pay a premium because you are unfortunate enough not to be able to get out of the house or have any decent shops within 50 miles. Booking a restaurant table? No-one answering the phone? Oh, just forget it and stay home. Oooh. Let's tax delivery services and well and put 20 times the number of cars on the road as the single delivery vehicle that delivered to 20 houses.  That's real environmentally friendly. And loads more self employed delivery drivers without a job and claiming benefits.  Selling your old crap online? Oh no - suddenly you are paying more in fees, taxes and Paypal costs that you're actually making on the item. So rather than recycling it to another user, just just dump it in landfill. Oh no - can't do that, because you can only book a trip to the dump online and they are only open one Thursday a month now. This is boosting the economy HOW, exactly?

Basically people will STOP ordering takeaways, STOP doing click and collect and STOP ordering crap they don't need. eBay and Amazon will see revenues fall. Basically loads more jobs gone at a stroke ....to raise a paltry 2 billion. A sum which, assuming you could raise the same amount every year, would take 220 YEARS to pay off the debt the Government accumulated giving us eat out to help out and wasting money on handouts to people who didn't need them or scammed the system. Not to mention all the overpriced faulty PPE.

Wouldn't it just be easier to raise VAT and be done with it?

oldbikebloke

this is not a debate board, it is a board for people to get help with their actual tax 

bermudianmark

I think the reason for the proposed tax is not so much to level the playing field between online and offlines its more to do with the fact that the large tech giants - Google, Facebook etc pay very low levels of corporation tax compared to UK retailers which then creates unfair competition.

Grumpy_chap

I understand the proposal is to equalise the impact of business rates imbalances.

Jeremy535897

Unfortunately it does none of these things. This from the Guardian:

"The new tax is not being levied on sales, which would also penalise online retailers such as Tesco and John Lewis, but on the service fees that companies such as Amazon and Google charge third parties.

With Amazon’s third-party sellers facing a 2% rise in the amount they pay, the US retailer is effectively getting a price advantage on competing goods it sells directly to consumers.

“This seems to me to be absolutely outrageous,” said Lord Leigh of Hurley, the Conservative peer and former party treasurer, in the House of Lords. “It is clear that the UK government is not taxing Amazon properly and is allowing it to avoid tax on its own sales through the marketplace.”

Last month, Google told its tens of thousands of advertising clients in the UK that from November it will charge an additional fee for ads served on Google and YouTube to cover the new 2% UK tax. The move is estimated to add about £120m annually on to marketers’ costs."

It is already with us (started 1 April 2020).