It's time to be nice about the Budget.

The council tax surcharge is a good policy. Very compromised/imperfect, but still good policy.

This is why: It's just not right that council tax is a serious tax for someone renting a modest flat, but inconsequential to someone in a £5m penthouse.

Weird that the Budget is so "back-loaded", with very few tax rises next year, and then massive effects from the threshold freeze in 2030

Why? One answer is that this is a bit of an illusion. The chart shows the very large threshold freeze effect from this Budget, but no the almost-as-large threshold freezes from previous Budgets.

Still true to say the tax rises from this Budget are back-loaded. So this is no answer.

Bad news for anyone thinking of responding to the consultation on the new electric vehicle duty.

The consultation opens today, and closes last March.
Time-travel aside, the second hand car market will become *slightly* more complicated, as you'll need to take into account whether the car you're buying has a "surplus" or "deficit" of EV duty.

Budget thread.

Basically this is it: The "fiscal creep" we've seen in the last six years has probably been the greatest tax increase from a single policy in history.

Now we get more.

These reports the Government could revalue council tax bands F, G and H don't make sense to me. Here's what could actually be going on: Here are the English council tax bands.

To work out which band your home is in, you have to play a particularly boring game of "let's pretend" in which your house and everything around it flashes back in time to 1991, and it's that pretend house that you value.

The internet is full of tax calculators. They're boring.

Tomorrow we're launching our Budget tax calculator. Prettier and nerdier than all the rest put together. Entertain yourself by seeing how much more you'll pay in various fun scenarios.

This video is brilliant.

Seems a total slam dunk that owners of private jets should pay fuel duties.

Doesn't it?

The answer is annoying. In principle this is obvious: of course there should be duty on private jet fuel . Both as a revenue raiser and (more importantly) to deter an inefficient source of CO2 emissions ("properly price an externality"). But.

Shocking article in the Sheffield Tribune. A solicitor, Andrew Milne, buying up freeholds of houses and then making (false) threats to the leaseholders to bully them into buying the freehold at a huge premium. This goes way beyond a lawyer acting unethically. If Milne knows the statements he's making are false (and it seems likely he does) then it's fraud.

Douglas Barrowman and Michelle Mone made £65m selling faulty PPE to the Government.

HMRC now wants £39m in unpaid tax — and we think we know why: Barrowman and Mone may have avoided tax on their £65m profit. During the pandemic, Douglas Barrowman's company, PPE Medpro, sold £200 million of PPE to the Government. It made £65m profit, which went into trusts benefiting Barrowman and Mone's families.

What if there was a consensus on the tax reforms the UK needs?

What if it was backed by policy experts from think tanks across the political spectrum, from the Adam Smith Institute to the Resolution Foundation?

The consensus is real. The question is: will anyone act on it? Launching today is a series of proposals backed by the Adam Smith Institute, Bright Blue, CenTax, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Institute for Public Policy Research, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the New Economics Foundation, Resolution Foundation, Tax Policy Associates.

Carter-Ruck, the UK’s most notorious libel firm, used abusive litigation to silence criticism of a former Tory donor.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority is investigating - but Carter-Ruck just filed a judicial review. If successful, they'll have total impunity.

Thread: The donor is Mohamed Amersi.

Former Tory MP @CharlotteLeslie wrote a private note on Amersi's activities. As @DavidDavisMP said, Amersi then "used his wealth and influence to try to bully Charlotte Leslie into silence".

Lots of people say the Government should significantly cut spending. Hardly any spell out how that could be achieved.

So kudos to the Policy Exchange for a serious-minded report proposing spending cuts taking the size of the state down to where it was before the pandemic. Key proposals:

1. freeze state pensions for three years and end triple lock
2. freeze benefits for three years
3. £20 fee for seeing a GP

VAT on financial services = VAT on everyone’s mortgage payments.

Mr Polanski does know that. Doesn’t he?

https://twitter.com/_boldpolitics/status/1981070414026575997

h/t @ChristianJMay

I am being personally sued for more than £8m by a barrister, Setu Kamal. I believe this is one of the largest English libel claims ever made. Mr Kamal objects to a report we published back in February about a firm called Arka Wealth (which appears to have since gone out of business).

We will not be taking it down.

A "British ISA" was a terrible idea when the Conservatives were thinking about it, and it remains a terrible idea today. A really important insight of investment theory is to diversify across countries, and put no more than a small % in the UK.

It's not the role of Government to force people to invest badly.

(This is from a brilliant article by Vanguard ) vanguard.co.uk/professional/v…

Hello, internet. The definition of tax evasion is not "when people I don't like politically do it, it's tax evasion"
Lots of people pay the wrong amount of tax by accident. I've done it myself.

The result: you pay the tax, plus interest. If you were careless, you often pay penalties. It's not tax evasion. It's not illegal.

But ignorance is no defence - you have to pay the tax.

People often ask me "why can't tax avoidance be made illegal"?

It's a good question. I recently tried quite hard to make one of the worst kinds of tax avoidance illegal. I think I got it wrong.

Thread: Imagine it's 2010. I've just invented a tax avoidance scheme.

Sign here, pay me £10k, and I'll throw £100k in a big circle and you can claim you just made a £100k tax loss from films/real estate/R&D/whatever, which you can deduct against your income.

(THIS DOES NOT WORK)

This is so dumb

1. There are under 200 billionaires in the UK. If they all sell their houses, the impact on the property market will be *tiny*.

2. But why would they sell? They probably spend only a few months here now. If they become non-resident they’ll spend a bit less.

https://twitter.com/eddieburfi/status/1978923547725594980

Much media discussion of “will they leave?” badly misunderstands this.

Very wealthy people have multiple houses in multiple countries. “Leaving” would in most cases be a small lifestyle change.

They’re not selling their Mayfair townhouse.

The intellectual shallowness of wealth tax proponents is something to behold.

https://twitter.com/patmillsuk/status/1978829502923809247

The Wealth Tax Commission was a serious undertaking. They published a lengthy paper and *seven* background papers on valuation.

Valuation problems were one of the key reasons the Commission recommended *against* an annual wealth tax.

Big development on our July storyabout a dodgy tax relief claim by Dundee United and tax firm ZLX.

The club made a huge claim for R&D tax relief which said that 24% of the players' time, and 80% of the chef's time, was spent on "research and development".

Not credible. ZLX denied the document had been sent to HMRC (but then why was it prepared and signed?).

Dundee United's FD denied signing it. But his electronic signature was on it.

A report in the Courier has two big developments: thecourier.co.uk/fp/sport/footb…

Who benefits from the abolition of stamp duty land tax?

The first answer: people buying very expensive homes. Average saving for someone buying a £10m+ home is £1.7m. Average saving for someone buying a £250k-£500k home is £5k. The second, truer, answer: people who currently own very expensive homes.

The evidence is that stamp duty is economically paid by sellers - it reduces property prices.

(I went through the evidence for that here ) taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/06/09/sta…