asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer what was the total amount collected by value-added tax annually for each of the last five years and the cost of collection, and number of staff employed who collected it for each year.
Earlier this year Her Majesty's Customs and Excise adopted a revised and improved method of attributing staff effort and costs to their activities on the basis of the latest available functional analysis. The main feature of this method is that greater allowance is made for staff engaged on administrative support work. This method has been used to attribute staff to activities at 31st March 1977 and 1978. It is not practicable to apply the revised method of calculation retrospectively to the introduction of VAT, and the table below therefore estimates the staff effort and cost of administration on two different bases.Column A of the following table shows the net revenue from VAT, column B the estimated cost of administration and col-
| B | ||||||||
| Net revenue (£ million) | Estimated cost of administration (£ million) | Staff effort (in man years) | ||||||
| 1973–74 | … | … | … | … | … | 1,470·7 | 35 | 7,700 |
| 1974–75 | … | … | … | … | … | 2,509·5 | 50 | 10,500 |
| 1975–76 | … | … | … | … | … | 3,454·9 | 70 | 10,850 |
| On revised method of calculation | ||||||||
| 1976–77 | … | … | … | … | … | 3,769·5 | 80 | 12,213 |
| 1977–78 | … | … | … | … | … | 4,234·8 | 85 | 12,246 |