SNEAKY government ministers faced accusations yesterday of creating dozens of new reliefs within Britain’s tax system.

MPs in the Commons public accounts committee said that despite promising to simplify the tax system, the coalition had created almost three times as many new reliefs as those it had abolished — adding to the complexity.

The coalition’s newly opened Office of Tax Simplification carried out a review of 155 reliefs in March 2011, recommending that 47 should be scrapped.