§ Mr. Nicholas Wintertonasked the Secretary of State for the Environment (1) whether his Department plans to check the information obtained from the building, civil engineering and allied industries register of business details against the value added tax returns of the businesses concerned;
(2) how many businesses have been asked to complete the building, civil engineering and allied industries register of business details;
(3) what is the cost of administering the building, civil engineering and allied industries register of business details;
(4) for what purposes his Department is asking builders to complete the building, civil engineering and allied industries register of business details;
(5) on what basis those asked to complete the building, civil engineering and allied industries register of business details were selected.
§ Mr. ArmstrongThe register provides the basis for statistical inquiries about the construction industry. All businesses which appear to have newly entered the industry are required to complete a form giving, for classification purposes, a trade description, number of employees, and approximate annual value of contracts for new work. Their names and addresses, trade and employment are passed to the Construction Industry Training Board to avoid duplication of inquiries. As a check against duplications or omissions of entries in the register, firms' VAT numbers, if any, are required.
Her Majesty's Customs and Excise provides names and address from new VAT registrations classified as construction firms. New registrations for 1977 and 1978 were provided to the Department last year and comprised almost all the 23,000 businesses which received forms in the year; in a normal year about half this number of forms would be despatched. As this work accounts for only part of the duties of the data collection staff, the costs cannot be readily separated.