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)...

So they are scummy and psychopath's ? This is part of the problem with the constant throw away name calling. The more wealthy pay their taxes just as everyone else does. Yes. There is tax avoidance and fraud but that isn’t exclusive to the super wealthy as we’ve seen in cases in the papers. The hate is pathetic

Exactly. They pay far more tax than we ever will. If they left we’d be in the shit.

Agree and I do wonder why people don’t get this very basic maths. The saying cutting their nose off to spite their face comes to mind.

Good to see someone bringing actual facts to a discussion

Back to the original question about listing…. Part of the problem is that the London markets are illiquid because there has been such a large capital outflow over the last 5-10 years. As such London valuations are lower than the equivalent on other exchanges. Even small caps are looking at moving to non U.K. exchanges like Euronext or the German Entry Standard. The solution is to deal with the harm that Brexit has done to the City, whether it is exchange cooperation, clearing, etc.

This problem has not been made by one year of Labour, it is the direct impact of reduced European (and hence global because many deals were EU wide and we left them and didn’t replace with our own) cooperation and integration in the financial markets.

And you don't think Tax Justice Network might have a vested interest in what they say?

Working in the IT industry, I know of three HNW individuals who have decided in the last year to leave the UK. Multimillion £ homes on the market. All have lived here happily since making their money in the 90s. Now they are off.

@mutinyonthetwix I didn't say otherwise?

I just chose the Tax Justice Network article as it was written clearly; I first saw it reported in Private Eye a while back.

I see no evidence that the UK population hates millionaires per se. On the contrary, many people seem to be in thrall to money and those who flaunt it. I doubt that any millionaire or billionaire gives any thought to what the ordinary man or woman in the street thinks of them, because they rarely meet them.

What is disliked is the access to politicians that the millionaires seem to have that other people don't have. Whether it is a fast-track for the well-connected to supply PPE (any sign yet of a resolution to the Baroness Bra affair and the millions "earned" on PPE alleged to be useless?) or the money donated to political parties or paid to lobbying firms in order to promote the interests of the wealthy, two-tier Britain clearly exists, and policies over the years have favoured those with money.

What is also disliked is that in a country where millions of people are on the poverty line, the millionaires use their influence to promote economic theories that have been proven to be false and directly detrimental to the population in general. Stealing vital utilities and infrastructure from the nation through privatisation and then loading them with debt has had appalling economic and enviromental consequences for the general public. Brexit promises were utterly false. The "Free Market" does not exist because the rich and powerful make sure that the market is rigged in their favour, and it only provides that which is profitable rather than what is actually needed. "Trickle-down" economics is nonsense - after someone has consumed all that they can, they don't continue to consume but instead look for opportunities to invest and grow their surplus money (or ways of hiding it from the taxman).

@jaws33 sorry you've lost me.

We’ve pandered to rich people in this country for the 40 years, at least. We were told it would “trickle down”. How has that worked out?

And I can tell you, from professional experience, that properly wealthy people absolutely do not pay their fair share of taxes. They employ very expensive professionals to avail themselves of every loophole imaginable.

Why the constant boot licking in this thread? Do you work for the Telegraph?

I worked for HMRC for over 30 years.

When it comes to taxation there is a "Goldilocks Zone" for the highest rates. Set it too high and wealth leaves the country so total tax taken drops, so raising tax rates can be completely counter productive.

apart from they don't tax due as much as the next person:

Stats are:

Top 1% (about 310,000 people, on £160k taxable min) pay 29% of all income UK taxes. This is about 80bn.

Top 10% pay 60%, which is 166bn.

About one third of working age population don't pay any tax at all.

If only 5% of those top tax payers change their behavior and quit / emigrate, the immediate loss is 4bn. Of income tax alone. But there's also VAT, NIC, most important - they are usually those who generate growth and improve productivity.

Comprehension must be most important subject taught in schools.

We're talking about individuals/businesses who make money and do pay taxes, but due to current UK climate and tax regime decide to emigrate means move their tax residency and pay their taxes elsewhere.

All that and some bloody optimism !!
We are not the only country suffering the entire world has been set back by a global pandemic , Russia ,oil and so on.

Let's be honest, AZ has become increasingly frustrated with Labour over the past 6 months, starting with their appalling bungling of the vaccine plant deal. The loss of AZ will be a huge blow to the UK and will damage the Labour party considerably.

Perhaps it’s just a mumsnet thing then. This and other similar threads spout a lot of hate.

just because it's written clearly? what about accuracy of info?

I think it's because MN typically represents those of the average middle who are like crabs in a bucket fighting each other.

Exactly. Yet again there is an OP making an attack on Labour, who have been in government for one year, but no mention of the mismanagement and incompetence of the government of the preceding 14 years.

Brexit, austerity, a lack of investment in vital services, a lack of oversight of privitised utilities, Conservative chancellors whose only quality is seemingly having the ability to spout convincing bollocks in a posh voice.

At least Reeves has a masters degree in Economics - which hopefully she can draw upon as she works to attract growth and prosperity to the UK while at the same time attempting to deal with the destruction and wasteland left behind by the Conservatives.

The loss of tax benefits for non-doms so only an issue because our taxes are so high. If we had more moderate rates if taxation then the difference wouldn’t be so stark. While losing rich people is bad for the British economy, I’ve always struggled to understand why a rich person from another country should get to live here fulltime while paying less tax than a hospital consultant, but if a similarly rich person from the U.K. wants to enjoy these low levels of taxation, they have to leave their homeland. JK Rowling has never complained about paying tax at the same rate as everyone else.

“Allow extremely large bonuses and executive remuneration as long as they are tied to…” I would finish that sentence by saying “the recipient being fully tax resident in the U.K. and paying full U.K. tax on it.”

Set against the above I would:

• reduce corporation tax to 16%
• reduce employer NI contributions
• require salaries to be recorded inclusive of employer NI and employer pension contributions, so people can see how much they really earn and where it all goes.

In what way will the loss of AstraZenica be a huge blow to the UK?

It is the listing that is being moved, not the manufacturing plants, research facilities etc. Why is Labour refusing to agree to the deal negotiated by Hunt (the "appalling bungling of the vaccine plant") a bad thing if the Treasury concluded that it did not represent good value for the taxpayer? A feature of the last Conservative government was the willingness to be held to ransom by big businesses who threatened to quit if they didn't get millions in investment from the taxpayer - just look at the steel industry, the water utilities, the rail industry, or HS2.

Sounds good op. Your last line is the issue.

At least Reeves has a masters degree in Economics - which hopefully she can draw upon as she works to attract growth and prosperity to the UK while at the same time attempting to deal with the destruction and wasteland left behind by the Conservatives.

😂😂😂Made my day, thank you

That’s a good one