At the time of her first election to the Commons in 1987, Dawn Primarolo was a Bennite member of the hard left. She joined the Campaign Group and set about promoting a left-wing agenda with gusto. She opposed one-member-one-vote, campaigned against the Gulf War and refused to pay her poll tax. She was dubbed "Red Dawn" by the media. However, she became a frontbencher in 1992, speaking on health, and then joined Gordon Brown's Treasury team in 1994. When Labour came to power in 1997 she became financial secretary to the Treasury. She was promoted to paymaster general in 1999 and retained the post in the 2001 reshuffle. She has become a model member of the government and absolutely loyal to New Labour. She remains committed to feminist issues, especially the liberalisation of abortion law. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/uk_politics/2055944.stm ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' Dawn Primarolo was appointed Paymaster General on 4th January 1999. She has strategic oversight of taxation as a whole, including overall responsibility for the Finance Bill, closer working between Inland Revenue and Customs & Excise, and European and international tax issues. Member of Parliament for Bristol South since 1987, she was educated at Thomas Bennett Comprehensive in Crawley, Bristol Polytechnic and Bristol University. She has a BA (Hons) Social Science Degree. Before entering Parliament, she was a member of Avon County Council from 1985 to 1987. In Opposition, she was front bench spokesperson on health from 1992 to 1994, and Treasury and economic affairs between 1994 and 1997. She was appointed Financial Secretary to the Treasury on 4th May 1997. Born in 1954, she is married with one son. Her interests include gardening and opera. She is Patron of The Royal Chelsea Hospital, The Terrence Higgins Trust, Knowle West Against Drugs and Life Skills Project. --------------------------- About Dawn http://www.dawnprimarolo.labour.co.uk/ViewPage.cfm?Page=2021 Dawn Primarolo was born in London in 1954, spending most of her childhood in Crawley, Sussex, where she attended Thomas Bennett Comprehensive School. In 1973 she joined the Labour Party, while employed in an east London Law Centre. A year later Dawn married and moved to Bristol South, where she had a son and has lived ever since. When her son was three years old, Dawn decided to study for a social science degree at Bristol Polytechnic. By successfully managing the demands of being a mature student and a parent, Dawn gained a BA (Hons) degree and conducted PhD research into women and housing until her studies were interrupted by her election to Parliament. In addition to her academic studies and periods of work as bookkeeper, legal secretary and typesetter, Dawn also became heavily involved in her local community. She belonged to various women’s groups, was a founder member of Windmill Hill City Farm, a school governor, as well as being active in the local Labour Party. In 1985 she was elected to Avon County Council, where she acted as vice chair of the Equal Opportunities Committee. In 1987, Dawn was elected MP for Bristol South. She took her role as constituency MP very seriously, holding regular surgeries and keeping in close contact with local organisations – many of which were suffering greatly from the deep recession and massive spending cuts inflicted by the Tories. By highlighting the many ways in which the Tories’ policies were damaging Bristol South, Dawn was re-elected with an increased majority in 1992. Soon afterwards, she was promoted to Labour’s front bench team – firstly as Shadow Minister for Health and then as a member of the Opposition Treasury team. Labour’s election victory in 1997 earned Dawn a role in the new Labour Government, initially as Financial Secretary and then, in 1999, as Paymaster General. These Treasury posts are concerned with domestic, European and international taxation issues (click here for more information) and Dawn is particularly proud of the role she has been able to play in helping to introduce tax credits to give extra support to lower income families – especially as they have benefited thousands of her own constituents. In June 2002, Dawn’s long service was recognised with her appointment to the Privy Council – making her one of only a handful of women to have ever been given this role. Although Dawn’s Ministerial responsibilities place severe demands on her time, Dawn always tries to be an approachable constituency MP. She continues to be there for the many constituents who need her help or advice every week, and makes regular visits to local groups, businesses and schools. Dawn is also a patron of many local organisations, including ACAD, Bristol/Anne Frank Committee, Bristol Family Mediation, Home Start Bristol, Gingerbread, Kennet and Avon Canal Partnership, Judaica Trust, Knowle West Against Drugs, Lifeskills Project, Show of Strength Theatre Company, South Bristol Community Construction Company, Terence Higgins Trust and Bristol Womankind. Away from her parliamentary responsibilities, Dawn enjoys gardening, cooking, cinema and opera. @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@' Letter to: Saturday, 11th October, 1997. Rt Hon Dawn Primarolo, MP for Bristol South and Financial Secretary at the Treasury, Treasury Chambers, Parliament Street, London SW1P 3AG, England. Dear Ms Primarolo, British citizens living in Denmark and the EU I write in response to your letter of 30th July 1997 to our colleague Elizabethann Burke Madsen concerning double taxation in respect of British citizens living in Denmark. We appreciate the depth of your reply, but must nevertheless remark that the extent to which it sweepingly fails to address the issues in our member's original communication leaves us breathless. In its reference to "the UK" and "Denmark" your letter reveals a looseness of thought which is thoroughly disconcerting when applied by a minister to EU-nationals who are resident in an EU-country other than the one on their passport. It is a mode of speaking, however, which is convenient for participants in parliamentary debates who wish to play down the interests of disenfranchised taxpayers. When you write that "...Denmark has been unhappy..." you clearly do not mean the geographical territory of Denmark, composed of earth, stones and fjords, nor the 5 million Danish citizens, most of whom have no reason to be either happy or unhappy about a double taxation agreement. You undoubtedly mean the specific Danish tax officials with whom you deal, even though these officials may very well not even have the support of the Danish parliamentary opposition, let alone the electorate at large. I have laboured this point because your reply seems totally to disregard the obvious fact that Art. 48 et seq. of the EU treaties makes double taxation agreements between EU member states totally inappropriate. Double taxation agreements are appropriate for pairs of countries which have trading links involving businessmen, but not between countries which have formal political links leading to significant mutual migration flows by ordinary voters. I will cite an example from my own family. My father earned most of his pension entitlement in Wales, and then retired to his family roots in East Anglia. It was a natural thing to do, and of course his pension is not subject to a double taxation agreement, since the member countries of the UK have formal political links and constitute a single labour market. Many of our members were influenced in their decision to settle in Denmark by the accession of the two countries to the then-EEC and the commitments implicit in Art. 48 to a single labour market. At that time, had you been a minister then, you might reasonably have replied as you did, but not now after 25 years of union. Art. 48 has not been changed by the Maastricht and the Amsterdam treaties, which are far from dusty or forgotten. Yet you appear not to grasp why our members are astonished that the respective governments are still treating those of us who have acted in the light of Art. 48 as if no such treaties existed. It must be clear from Elizabethann Burke-Madsen's letter to Gordon Brown that our Association takes issue with much more than just the question of double taxation. The Danish Constitution ensures that Danish politics (at least as regards national legislation) is restricted to those who have Danish citizenship. That is to say, nationals of other EU member states are excluded from voting and from standing. Nevertheless, the legislation so enacted, herewith also tax liability, is applied in almost all cases indiscriminately to both nationals and non-nationals, on the basis of geographical borders. So far as we know, the governments of the UK and of the other member states practice the same undemocratic dichotomy. It is unavoidable that the legislation so enacted is not calculated to protect the interests of disenfranchised non-nationals. If you can muster a defence of this undemocratic practice that is consistent with Art. 48, we would love to hear it. The substance and tone of your letter unmistakeably reveals an attitude of two governments whose mandates have been determined by domestic voters. We think that after 25 years of Art. 48, the member states of the EU should have sorted matters out so that EU citizens living in other member states than their own should either (1) have full voting rights in the state to whose laws they are subject, or (2) should be subject to the laws of the member state whose nationals they are (together with full voting rights there) plus exemption from the laws of the state where they are resident, or (3) have voting rights and corresponding legal status (herewith tax liability) under an EU-legislature expressly and exclusively set up for such citizens. Our Association's members consider that the extension of liability to Danish legislation to non-Danish nationals resident outside Denmark's borders is doubly undemocratic. If you or Denmark's tax minister disagrees with this view, you should allow the matter to be settled democratically through the ballot box. My own opinion (not necessarily shared by other members of our Association) is that national legislation relieving personal pension contributions of tax, to be paid when the pensions ultimately are disbursed, is not compatible with Art. 48, unless all member states were to enact compatible tax legislation, or adopt a common budget, neither of which they seem in the least inclined to do. According to your letter, your Government has accepted the Danish claim to tax pension payments made from entitlements accumulated from tax-deductible contributions. By the same token, how about claiming a fee from the Danish government for the public expense (paid for by taxation) incurred in educating each British citizen who spends his career in Denmark (or indeed any other EU country)? I think you know very well that the British Treasury (and every other country's for that matter) has never accepted the claim that there is or ought to be a connection between the taxing of a citizen and the benefit which that citizen receives. So why accept it from the Danish government this time? Your letter's carefully considered failure to address the most important issues which were raised in Elizabethann Burke Madsen's original communication lends itself (so far as I can see) to two possible interpretations, both deeply disturbing. One possibility (the H.C.Andersen explanation, as expressed in "The emperor's new clothes") is that you and your colleagues really do not grasp the need for fundamental reform of national democratic institutions in the wake of circumstances resulting from accession to the EU (since your mandates arise almost exclusively from the domestic franchise). The other possibility (the Machiavelli explanation) is that people who live in another EU-country than the one for which they have citizenship can be safely ignored by EU governments, since we have naively and voluntarily renounced our right to influence their legislation, and that indeed all the other articles in the EU treaties are also largely illusory and included solely for their propaganda-effect on people not actually affected by them. Yours sincerely, Philip Hollingbery The British European Association (Denmark)''' http://www.userwebs.dk/zn7ccc0846/Treasury.htm @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Who's to blame for the Inland Revenue's tax fiasco? Commons report investigates the problems that led to payment delays. Computing staff, Computing 31-Jul-2003 09:24:00 ADVERTISEMENTMPs last week released a report on the disastrous failure of the Inland Revenue's tax credit system. The report, Inland Revenue Matters, describes how IT errors meant that 220,000 claims were left unresolved more than 10 months after they were submitted, and 400,000 claimants received their money late. The computer failures which disrupted the launch of tax credits came like "a bolt from the blue", according to the Treasury sub-committee's findings. As Computing first reported, supplier EDS now faces a hefty compensation claim. We look at the major players in the highest-profile government IT disaster this year. The Revenue chairman: Sir Nicholas Montagu Sir Nicholas Montagu's job is under threat following a damning report by MPs on a year of chaos in the department. His leadership was questioned by the House of Commons Treasury committee. It set out "a catalogue of administrative failures by the Revenue, which Treasury ministers must address as a matter of urgency". The MPs' report highlights "a growing list of failures of communications between ministers and officials", and condemns Montagu and Paymaster General Dawn Primarolo for failing to meet between late autumn 2002 and March. It has also raised serious questions about how the department has been led. Conducted by a special sub-committee of the all-party group chaired by former Tory minister Michael Fallon, the report demands that the 400,000 applicants for tax credit who received late payments be "compensated swiftly and in full". It condemns the failure of the helpline service to cope with demand, and said that the company responsible for the IT failures should be pursued vigorously for compensation. The minister: Paymaster General Dawn Primarolo David Ruffley, a Conservative member of the Treasury committee, said that Dawn Primarolo should quit, and the committee is tough on her failure to liase properly with Sir Nicholas Montagu. "The real thrust of our report is a failure of leadership by the chairman and minister," said Michael Fallon. There are serious managerial questions to answer. But Primarolo is blaming the IT systems. "The system has not been working as well as we expected, and there had been unscheduled downtime as a result," said Primarolo in response to a question in the House of Commons by Conservative MP David Lidington. "We have temporary measures in place, while we are making the system more robust, where people can go to their local Revenue enquiry centre and get a giro." Resignations are unlikely, but the government has seemed reluctant to accept the role of managerial issues in the breakdown of projects. The supplier: EDS The report criticises Inland Revenue evasiveness over the extent to which supplier EDS will be asked to pay for the cost of the IT, which caused delays paying tax credit to some of the UK's poorest families. The government is demanding compensation from EDS. The supplier has remained silent, but the pressure is mounting. MPs want to know how tough talk is going to translate into an appropriate punishment that will act as a warning to others. Montagu promised only that there would be talks with the Revenue's IT partner over the cost of compensation, and the administrative costs of 200,000 interim payments. Revenue deputy chairman David Hartnett suggested that the IT problem was one of data flow in a component-based application involving several different computer systems. Hartnett compared the problem to "a sort of arterial sclerosis" constricting the flow, which was "something like a clot". He told MPs in evidence: "There is something which triggers this that cannot be replicated in testing, and was not picked up in testing. It triggers in live running and what our IT partners have been able to do, crudely, is work around it for the minute, so that we can get everyone into payment. "It is working out what is constricting the flow and has caused queues in the past, and what causes the clot to appear and really build queues. That is the key issue in relation to this IT." There were daily consultations with senior EDS technicians and its board in the US to find out what was going wrong and how it could be put right. Hartnett revealed that EDS had not realised the scope of the failures because extensive testing had failed to reveal the slow running that had built up. "It was only as we were processing more and more claims that the difficulties we had experienced over the last weeks began to emerge," he said. "It was only by pressing our IT partners really hard that we received more information from them. I do not think that initially they fully understood everything about the difficulties." Additional reporting by Accountancy Age. http://www.vnunet.com/analysis/1142715 @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ 11-09-2003 False dawn? Dawn Primarolo, the Paymaster General, has hailed the "huge success" of the new Child and Working Tax Credits, citing the 5.8 million families that are now receiving the new benefits as evidence of the Government's achievement. Despite the delays and technical glitches that marred their launch, Ms Primarolo said the tax credits were reaching over 95% of those expected to benefit. But some people contest Ms Primarolo's claims. "The system is a mess and I've waited five months for my child tax credits," says Sharon Lee, a single mother from Catford in south London. "No one seems to know the rules and it'd have been a lot easier if they'd adjusted my tax code rather than getting me to claim the benefit." http://www.yourmoney.com/tax/false_dawn/ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@'''' Treasury minister should quit in tax blunder Treasury Minister Dawn Primarolo should pay the price for the tax blunders committed by the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise, Michael Howard has demanded. The Shadow Chancellor called the Paymaster General to account after the Treasury ordered a sweeping review of the two agencies following publication of a damning Parliamentary report into the blunders, which included the five year failure to remind workers to boost their National Insurance contributions or risk losing their pension rights, the fiasco over child tax credit, and collapsed trials. The review, which will investigate whether closer co-operation and organisational changes could lead to improvements, could result in the merging of the two departments. Mr Howard lambasted the "appalling state of affairs", pointed to the way the Labour chairman of the Commons Treasury Select Committee had described the Paymaster General as someone who has "ministerial responsibility but not ministerial knowledge", and stressed the importance of the British people being able to maintain faith and trust in the Government's two tax collecting agencies. And commenting on the scandal, the Shadow Chancellor told conservatives.com: "This review is an admission that the Inland Revenue and the Customs and Excise are in chaos. It is clear that the ultimate blame for bringing the tax agencies into such disrepute must lie with the Chancellor, Gordon Brown. It is also clear that Dawn Primarolo no longer has any credibility as a minister. She should go." 03/07/2003 http://www.conservatives.com/news/article.cfm?obj_id=65857&speeches=1 @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@