New ideas in UK tax
Tax policy affects incentives. Incentives induce actions. Actions determine outcomes.
While modern life has objectively improved in countless ways, we face two urgent, compounding crises:
- A natural environment under severe stress
- Deepening economic inequality and social division
Tax policy is a powerful lever that can induce better outcomes, or (as is the case at present) perpetuate worse outcomes. Minor adjustments won't work - we need a complete reboot.
Problems to solve
1. Labour is expensive. Produce is cheap.
It should be the other way round.
This disparity isn't just an inevitable result of relatively high labour productivity in the UK, or global supply chains and cheap overseas inputs - we have explicitly engineered our tax system to widen the gap.
By placing heavy taxes on human labour while leaving physical extraction and raw material usage relatively unburdened, the tax code actively penalises care, repair, and craftsmanship. It makes throwing away a physical product and importing a new one cheaper than paying a human being to fix it.
2. The tax code is absurdly complex
The UK has one of the longest and most convoluted tax codes in the world. In prior centuries, relentless political tinkering has created a system that rewards tax planning over actual productivity.
Businesses waste millions of accounting hours restructuring operations simply to jump over tax cliffs or harvest niche reliefs. Meanwhile, ordinary taxpayers can rarely be certain they are compliant (they almost certainly aren't).
3. Over-centralised local funding
Westminster tightly dictates how local authorities can raise revenue and caps their spending power.
This undermines local democracy at its core. How can local councils be held accountable when their budgets, revenue structures, and financial levers are almost entirely shackled by central government?
Key ideas
1. Consumption tax on physical goods, not labour
The tax burden must be removed from human work and placed on consumption of raw, physical matter. Restructuring indirect taxes (such as VAT) so that the labour component of production is exempt or refunded, dramatically lowers the cost of employing people while penalising resource depletion and waste.
This simple shift changes behavior at its core. It makes care, repair, craftsmanship, and service economically superior to building throwaway goods out of cheap, virgin materials. It uses market dynamics rather than state mandates to foster a high-employment, low-resource economy.
2. All income treated equally
Income is income, regardless of how it is labeled. The current system creates artificial boundaries between earned wages, capital gains, corporate dividends, rental yields, etc.
Collapsing these artificial categories into a unified income framework eliminates the primary driver of tax avoidance. A simple, progressive rate applied to all net income ensures transparency, neutralises tax-driven accounting tricks, and restores trust in the system.
3. Land-based local taxes
Local authorities need predictable revenue to cover public services, not a volatile income stream tied to shifting property markets. Local funding should be anchored by the one asset that cannot be hidden or moved offshore: local land footprint.
Replacing complex council taxes, business rates, and central grants with a straightforward Land Occupancy Tax gives communities true fiscal autonomy. Land should be taxed by its broad designation (residential, commercial, agricultural) and defined value zones without anyone ever needing to conduct complex, often subjective, land valuations.
Under this model, high-density development is naturally rewarded. An owner of a flat in a high-rise pays a fraction of the tax of a sprawling single-family house in the same zone.
4. Elimination of nuisance taxes
The UK tax code contains hundreds of micro-taxes, niche levies, stamp duties, and special exemptions that have negligible fiscal effects. They exist primarily to give politicians visible levers to pull rather than to run a functioning state.
Abolishing dozens of nuisance taxes drastically cuts compliance costs, frees up government auditing resources, and simplifies life for all citizens.
5. Personal investment vehicles
To build long-term financial security citizens need simple ways to save and invest without constantly running into tax traps. The current maze of overlapping allowances, accounts, and complex rules must be replaced by a single, streamlined personal investment vehicle.
This framework would allow individuals to grow capital, invest in domestic businesses, and prepare for retirement with complete transparency, prioritising genuine long-term wealth accumulation over tax planning. In addition, in the long run it will divert government spending away from supporting an ever-growing population of pensioners.