£1.5bn would go a long way
The Tax Justice Network has revealed today that Google has avoided paying £1.5bn in corporation tax.
What could the government have done with this money?
Employed 60,000 nurses for a year
This is the comparison the Mirror and the Sun went with. £1.5bn divided by 60,000 is £25,000.
Carried out 300,000 hip operations
A hip operation costs £5,000 to £6,000.
Bought 1,675 MRI scanners
They cost about £895,000 each.
Resettled 17,600 Syrian refugees
The government allocated £1.7bn recently to re-housing 20,000 Syrian refugees – providing them with accomodation for four years. For context, there’s about 5,000,000 Syrian refugees – the vast majority of them living in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon.
Doubled all government departments’ spending on Brexit preparations
The Treasury has allocated £1.5bn to departments for Brexit preparations.
Run the entire English NHS for over four days
Total government health spending in England was estimated to be £125bn in 2019. £1.5bn is 1.8% of this. 1.8% of a year is just over four days.
Easily covered everyone in England’s diabetes prescriptions for a year
The value of diabetes prescriptions is around £1bn a year.
Given every full-time carer more than £1,000 each
There are 1.3m in the UK who claim ‘carers allowance’ – which is for those spending more than 35 hours a week caring for someone who themselves claims certain benefits. ‘Carers allowance’ is a measly £66.15 a week. So a one-off £1,000 bonus would be nice.
Joe Lo is a freelance journalist and a reporter for Left Foot Forward.
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7 Responses to “8 things Google’s unpaid tax could have been spent on”
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