to ask how you would stop companies and investors leaving the UK?

[LargeDeviation]

AstraZeneca (the UK's most valuable company) has said they are thinking of delisting from the London Stock Exchange with a view to list in America. Other companies like Invidia, TUI, have also delisted. ARM is of course another one that got away.

At the same time, billionaires and centimillionaires are leaving the UK at the greatest rate ever.

Each delisting leads to redundancies or lower future growth. Each billionaire lost needs the equivalent of thousands of median income taxpayers to make up the tax lost.

What would you do to stop the rot? My solutions:

1. Incentivise listings: Allow extremely large bonuses and executive remuneration as long as they are tied to long-term performance. Remove stamp duty on shares. Bring back reduced oversight for AIM etc so small companies can easily list. Actively invest government funds in high-tech incubator companies (as long as it's done by the likes of the Vaccine Taskforce, not by idiot civil servants whose idea of good governance was to try to obstruct the OneWeb investment).

2. Incentivise share ownership in UK companies. Reduce dividend taxes. Revive the idea of the British ISA from Jeremy Hunt. Introduce low long-term capital gains tax rates (as many other countries have) to encourage long-term investing. Simply cutting Cash ISA allowances won't help.

3. Encourage entrepreneurs and the rich to come to Britian rather than leave. Reverse the non-dom changes. Large increases in IHT allowances, cut the top rate of income tax. These tax cuts can be conditional on providing a large number of jobs to British workers to make them politically palatable.

4. Cut corporation tax back to 20%. Sunak made a huge error in increasing corporation tax.

5. Ditch the Rayner changes which makes Britain even more uncompetitive.

Of course Labour won't do any of the above (or even acknowledge that companies/investors leaving the UK is a problem)...

How can it be on a party that hasn't been in power for 14 years?

Fair point. Depends if the exodus happened before or after July 2024

They have a starting pay of £38k that's lovely. And once they hit consultant. They make oodles.

Exodus???

..and pay tax on that, takes many many years to reach consultant.

You can always re train as a Dr if its such a good number.....

Jealous?

Exodus: a mass departure of people

Quite, a tiny minority have left the UK, not an Exodus, tabloid language.

Numbers based on a report by an agency who are not "independent" either.

Everyone pays tax on their earnings. And yes it takes years to get to consultant. DH also had to work many years to get to get to £100k.

And they get a decent pay bump each year.

Does he save lives? treats dying children, attends the scenes of horrendous accidents and disasters?
Has to tell patients they will die?

Gets attacked? both physically and verbally?

Doctors in the UK earn less in international comparisons and have horrendous debt.

We can never have a decent health service if we continue to treat them like shit.

If they really did have a decent bump each year, they wouldn't be 20% behind in their pay....

No. But that's in the doctor's job description.

The reason doctors earn less here is because we have the NHS system. There's absolutely no competition whatsoever.

Then that goes to show they should be earning a lot more than many other professions.

There is plenty of competition, we have a huge private health set up here and they can easily go abroad, i cycle with a few HCP's who now work in the private sector... Physio's OTs & Doctors.

They earn less because of Austerity, a political choice, this is across all healthcare workers.

Same with Care workers, thats solely privatised, loads of competition, yet earn SFA... so leave.

I don’t think getting verbally and/or physically attacked is in anyone’s job description. This kind of casual disregard for the critical role doctors play in society is one of the reasons morale is so low.

Getting attacked etc is very upsetting but it should be for the security staff to handle.

The best way to improve UK medical pay is if we had more private care and opened it up to competition.

We already have competition in pay, hence so many Dr's and other HCPs leave the NHS.

We don't want to pay the taxes for extra pay and when pay is given, we get cries of "Labour hand over money to their union pay masters.." or in your case "they already get a decent bump..."

To illustrate. The U.K. had had a net outflow of HNWI since 2016, at one of the highest rates in the world. That this is very much a problem has been recognized by Labour (hence the four year tax break for foreign investors in the U.K.).

But still a tiny minority, as you illustrate. Liquid millionaires in UK number 2.85million.
Not an Exodus...

Brexit caused a great many to leave, Tories don't seem to want to talk about that....

Link please? because it's about 600-700,000 of liquid millionaires in the UK.
Millionaire Tracker — Adam Smith Institute

There is about 3m of millionaires, but this includes granny on state pension who bought her house in London 50 years ago and it's not valued £££

No, because the ‘exodus’ refers to those who are liquid millionaires and HNWI. That total number of millionaires touted by TaxJustice includes those that have benefited from such things as rising property prices, who are distinct from the aforementioned.

It also only references the amount that have left in a single year, when the number has been rising yearly from 2016. The U.K. is the only country in the G10 that has experienced negative millionaire growth in the past decade, and is expected to lose £66 billion in 2025 alone.

Apparently Rachel is now concerned:

Reeves to open ‘front door’ for investors in UK with concierge service

The Labour Party have done nothing for growth despite all the cheerleading. In fact, it’s the opposite - they’re taxing the high earners and business owners more than ever. 99% of businesses are small businesses by number.

If high earners (100-500k) are worried about their increasing tax bills and inability to pass on some wealth to their children, they leave the country.

Without growth, you can’t afford to reform policing or hire more teachers.

That’s on Labour (who I voted for, incidentally).

This is so stupid I laughed. Maybe we don’t care about billionaires here on MN but the Times made it clear that more have left the UK than any other country.

For the high earners whose tax affairs aren’t big news, we will know in March ‘26 and March ‘27 when tax receipts are down. If I left today, I’d still show (lower) income this tax year. It’s not until ‘27 that my zero income tax return would show up.

So why would anyone choose to move here, concierge or not?

I'm irritated by the constant comparison with Scandi countries. They are much much smaller countries. I think Denmark has something like 6million, Sweden is the largest and only 10million or so. Norway is also only 6 or 7 million and sits on vast natural resources. They're completely different and face completely different challenges. They're also either in the EU or EEA.

Agree.

I’ll just leave this here.

www.theguardian.com/business/live/2025/jul/15/ftse-100-index-9000-point-record-thames-water-loss-mps-business-live-news-updates

Ironically, a large part of this is the result of recent pro business reforms that make it cheaper to invest in the U.K (the newly announced Leeds reforms, and the four year tax relief for new tax residents on foreign assets and gains).

Now they just need to focus on making the U.K. attractive as a place of residence for HNWI so they can actually be subject to CGT and tax on dividends.