To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer what estimate he has made of the tax gap in stamp duty land tax in each of the last five years. (317241)

In March 2008 HMRC published details of analysis from 2005 that attempted to derive broad-brush estimates of the direct tax gap at the start of the decade. This publication contained a net tax gap estimate for stamp duty land tax of £0.5 billion, within a range of £0.2 billion to £1 billion and can be found at:

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/research/direct-tax-gaps.pdf

and

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/research/measuring-tax-gap.pdf

The most up-to-date information is found in “Measuring Tax Gaps 2009”, published at PBR 2009, which contains an illustrative indicator of the tax gap for all stamp duties, available at:

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/stats/measuring-tax-gaps.pdf