Rebecca Long Bailey – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the HM Treasury

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Rebecca Long Bailey on 2016-04-19.

To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, what assessment he has made of the businesses and sectors which have failed to sign up to the Alcohol Wholesaler Registration Scheme; what steps his Department is taking to ensure that such businesses sign up to that scheme; and what steps his Department is taking to exclude from the market those businesses suspected to be trading fraudulently and which did not register by the 31 March 2016 deadline.

Damian Hinds

From April 2017, HMRC will be making publicly available details of alcohol wholesalers who are approved. From then, retailers who buy from unapproved wholesalers will be liable to a fine.

HMRC is now assessing the applications it has received against the scheme’s approval criteria. The number of applications received are lower than HMRCs initial estimate of 21,000 businesses that could be wholesaling alcohol. There could be a number of reasons for this, and HMRC is currently comparing the applications received with original expectations and encouraging businesses that have not applied to do so, to mitigate penalties and the likelihood of enforcement action.

Where businesses have been purposefully fraudulently trading, HMRC will take action. It is too early to report outcomes of any investigations into illicit trading that HMRC are undertaking since the introduction of the scheme.