Offshore Industry: Taxation
The question
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what estimate her Department has made of the potential impact of new UK oil and gas extraction on (a) GDP and (b) tax receipts in each of the next five years.
Answered by James Murray
It is a long-standing convention that the government does not discuss individual taxpayers, and so the government cannot discuss the amount of tax relief available to individual companies in relation to the oil and gas fields they may have a commercial interest in.
The Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) most recent forecast of tax revenues from the oil and gas sector was published at Autumn Budget 2024 in the Economic and Fiscal Outlook October 2024 (https://obr.uk/efo/economic-and-fiscal-outlook-october-2024/), which also includes other economic projections. The OBR’s tax revenue forecast does not give a breakdown by field or company to protect taxpayer confidentiality but takes into account the impact of relevant, available tax reliefs.
Where data is available, estimates of the cost of tax reliefs available to oil and gas companies are published on gov.uk (https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/tax-relief-statistics). This publication contains non-disclosive estimates of the number of claimants for each relief.
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