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Finance Bill amendments include video games tax relief

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Labour MPs have tabled five new clauses to the current Finance Bill, including provision for:

  • tax relief for the production of video games;
  • an independent review of the implications of independent taxation of married couples on methods of determining eligibility for child benefit and other benefits; and
  • a Treasury report, to be published before Budget 2011, on the level of taxation on banking and financial services.

The current Bill is expected to complete its remaining House of Commons stages on Monday. Amendments given up to and including 4 November are available on the Parliament website.

TIGA, the trade association representing the UK video games industry, has called on the Prime Minister to back a ‘games tax relief’ and enhanced R&D tax credits to help high technology firms.

There was a 9% fall in the number of people employed in the UK games development sector between July 2008 and September 2010, TIGA said, while the global industry’s software sales grew by 16% between 2008 and 2010.

George Osborne said in his June 2010 Budget that the Government would not go ahead with what he called ‘the poorly-targeted tax relief’ for the computer games industry that had been proposed by his predecessor in March.

David Cameron defended the decision at Prime Minister’s Questions earlier this week. 'The steps we took … were to look at the tax system and try to simplify the corporation tax regime so that we could bring about one of the lowest rates of corporation tax in the developed world,' he said.

‘That is what we have done-with cuts in corporation tax this year, next year and the year after to bring it down to 24%. That is what we are doing and we are paying for it by removing a number of allowances.’

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