Digital Politics – The Tom Watson Interview

The Need For Games Tax Relief

Bit-tech: Many sections of the UK games industry are calling for proper games tax relief, rather than tax credits. Do you think the UK games industry will get tax relief?

Tom Watson: TIGA has made what I think is an insurmountable argument about why tax relief is important. The games industry is massive, but it's still young and the potential for growth is huge. Essentially, the Canadians are taking the strategic economic decision to be the global centre of gaming in the world, and they have a tax regime that's massively encouraging to developers and publishers around the world. We need to respond to that, and we've failed to do so. We've already lost good companies with high-quality, high-skilled jobs, directly to Canada, and if we allow that to continue, it will destroy the UK games industry. It's as simple as that.


I've actually tabled an amendment to the finance bill to try to bring it back on the order paper in parliament. I don't think the government are going to let it go through, but I want to make these points in the chamber.

BT: We've covered games tax relief in the past, and the reaction is often unsympathetic. Why do you think that the games industry specifically deserves tax relief when so many jobs in other industries are also threatened?

TW: It's a strategically important industry to the UK, and it deserves a level playing field in competition, and it currently hasn't got that because of what Canada is doing. This is about giving the UK games industry a fair crack of the whip in a big global market. I can understand why gamers facing an uncertain future in their own jobs think it looks like a big industry out there, but there are very small developers who feed into the big games publishers that are facing a really difficult future. I just think it would be a tragedy if Britain, which led the field of innovative, left-field thinking in games, especially with the smaller stuff we did in the 80s and 90s, failed to capture that innovation. It would just be such a tragedy.

BT: Finally, what influence can one MP such as yourself have on big political decision regarding the digital world? Have you ever managed to intervene on a bad piece of digital policy and actually get something changed?


TW: Believe it or not, I have. It obviously helps when you're a minister, as you can head things off at the pass, but when I was a minister we managed to do some quite good things regarding open data. In parliament, if you make an issue yours, you can get the attention of the people making the decisions. I'm pretty certain the current DCMS team that are informing Jeremy Hunt and Ed Vaizey feel that I'm an irritant, but they take what I say to them seriously. There are also many other people who care about digital rights that are saying the same sort of thing.

BT: Could you give any examples of policies that you've personally influenced?

TW: Yeah, I was the minister that made sure that we have data.gov.uk, which now means there are hundreds, if not thousands, of public data sets that can be used freely by people who want to go and make business models. When in government, I was also quite influential when deciding which classification system we were going to use for games. There was going to be quite a restrictive classification system, and with other colleagues I argued that we should actually go with the industry standard – the PEGI system. Okay, so they're not headline-grabbing issues, but they do generally make the digital world a better place.