Helen Miller.
DT, March 2025
The think tank has long taken pride in its purported impartiality, delighting in being described as “independent” by broadcasters when others are labelled “free-market” or “Right-wing”.
But there is seemingly nothing objective about the stance of the IFS’s new director, Helen Miller, who will replace Paul Johnson in July after he held the role of the media’s go-to economic expert for 14 years.
Curiously, this week’s press release announcing Miller’s promotion from deputy director of the IFS, where she has worked since 2007, fails to mention that she has in the past supported the sorts of high tax policies currently being pursued by Labour.
Not only does she back the Chancellor’s death tax on farmers, writing that inheritance tax should “apply equally across all types of assets”, she said it does not go far enough: arguing that the change only “reduce[s]” the relief’s supposedly unfair effects, rather than eliminating them.
Miller is an advocate of subjecting pensions to inheritance tax. She has even mooted the idea of charging capital gains tax on second homes and businesses when people die in addition to inheritance tax, arguing last September: “It is a bad tax relief and I would love it if the Government scrapped it.”
She believes people with larger pensions should have the 25 per cent tax-free component removed altogether. Similar to many Labour MPs, Miller is also in favour of a wealth tax, describing it in 2021 as “an efficient way to raise revenue and ... address existing wealth inequality”.
She supports the idea of raising capital gains towards income tax rates and told a podcast in 2023 that some income was too “lightly taxed.” The tax burden is set to reach post-war highs by the end of this decade. The aim should be “redistribution”, she has repeatedly argued, though many economists argue that a larger welfare state funded through higher taxes stifles growth and discourages employment. In the past she has advised the Left-wing campaign group Tax Justice UK, alongside such luminaries as fox-killing activist Jolyon Maugham.
So much for objectivity.