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)...

A banker friend of a friend left London to New York because of the tax changes and the non-dom stuff being scrapped. At some point you cannot just take take take take.

Amazon and Starbucks (amongst others) have been responsible for the decline of hundreds of thousands of small businesses in the UK. High Streets have been hollowed out as independent businesses have gone to the wall. Family-run cafes have been replaced by the likes of Starbucks and McDonalds.

As these small businesses have closed their staff have lost their jobs, as have the workers in the supply chain, so the revenues and employment generated by Amazon, Starbucks etc. is not without a cost elsewhere.

Would it be such a loss to the economy if businesses like Amazon and Starbucks exited the country? Would it really nuke the economy? There are still countries in Europe that are not in thrall to these companies. Countries where family-run or independent business thrive, where local businesses have upped their game and provide on-line shopping alongside their bricks-and-mortar locations - and most importantly, where the local businesses pay local taxes instead of using clever accounting to avoid paying tax.

I agree that taxing revenue is not the way to go, but there are other ways of making the playing field a bit more level. For example higher business rates on the warehouses of on-line retailers; limits to the size, number and location of certain businesses; the requirement for businesses to be licensed (and the staff qualified); tightening of the loopholes around transfer pricing and "creative" accounting and licensing.

Amazon because of it's size massive can invest a lot in R&D

Osbourne carried on with Austerity, when investing, at very low interest rates would have been the sensible thing, he didn't because the Tories wanted to destroy the public sector, they achieved that, whilst increasing the tax take.

You mention the Welfare state? that ballooned under the Tories, inc in work benefits.

Labour aren't responsible for any of that, thats down to the Cons only but it is Labour who have to deal with it.

so what? why is this relevant to the question of how to stop companies and investors leaving now?

It seems that a lot of people on this thread actually want them to leave

I was answering the OP and YOU who talked about Osbourne and him having no choice.

the state of the country is perhaps one reason why people, across all groups, have left the UK... the last 14 years of the Tories cannot be ignored, no matter how much you'd like to blame Labour for all our ills.

Taxes went to the highest pre war levels under the Tories, not Labour but apparently that was all ok, what now isn't OK is that Labour raise some taxes, thats now sacrilege.

Maybe just maybe that was due to COVID pandemic

You, the OP and others seem to conflate where a company has a stock exchange listing with where the company pays tax on its profits.

Companies do not necessarily pay tax where they are listed, nor where they do most of their business. Boots (the retail chemist) is part of Walgreen Boots Alliance and listed on Nasdaq in New York, but pays tax in Switzerland (and has done for 20 years).

Investors do not necessarily have to be located in the country where the company is listed or where it does most of its business - in fact, one of the major criticisms of the UK economy is that many companies are largely owned by overseas investors, which means that the dividends paid to investors represent money leaving the UK economy. For example, the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System owns almost one-third of Thames Water, so the water bills of 15 million consumers (one-quarter of England's population) are paying towards the pensions of half a million Canadian public sector workers rather than being recirculated or invested in the UK economy.

All those saying rejoin the EU are you deluded? Do you really think they would give us any good terms after leaving? We would get nothing from them

we made our bed, now we need to look globally

Much as many people, including me, would like the UK to rejoin the EU, you're correct when you say that this is unlikely to happen any day soon - and I don't think it will happen in the next 20 years if ever.

As for looking globally - remember, the other trading nations and blocs are also looking to trade globally. When the salespeople and politicians from the UK turn up in Africa, Asia or wherever looking to sell British products and services, they join the queue of other salespeople from the USA, Canada, China, the BRIC countries, the Pacific countries etc. all trying to sell the same thing - and assuming that there is already someone supplying that product, the newcomers also have to displace the incumbant supplier.

There is still no sign of the promised queue of countries lining up to do business with the UK - instead, it is the UK that has gone cap-in-hand around the globe signing deals such as Truss' appalling deal with Australia.

absolutely no confusion here, I'm completely aligned with what you're saying.

It's about investments and corporation tax though which is relevant to location

Lazy thinking i'm afraid....

Brexit, Liz Truss both had a bigger impact, gilts went from 1.8% to 4.5% that trebled our borrowing costs and it hasn't gone back down either.

Tories took borrowing from 65% in 2010 to 88% pre pandemic.

The country was hardly stella in 2020 was it?

All of this is relevant to why people leave/fail to invest.

Perhaps but there is the option of a CU, even some sort of SM membership... then there is EFTA, an organisation the UK helped to form.

But atm no one is looking at any of these

The tax burden increasing a lot was due to the mass spending in the pandemic. Of course they needed to realise taxes.

I didn't like Liz Truss at all and always preferred Rishi Sunak.

Accept that you can't stop everyone leaving.

A lot of people leaving will be back, they are people who move around regularly and don't feel attached to any particular country.

The very top hardly pay any tax as it doesn't matter where they live, their tax affairs are offshore in a tax haven.

I'd work on harmonising tax rates across the world, increasing financial controls and making financial systems transparent so that it is much harder to hide money or where you got it from.

I'd invest hugely in infrastructure and follow through on that investment, rather than as the last government did, making policy by announcement and never follow through on it.

I'd invest heavily in skills and education and mental health - particularly further education and skills in the age 14 to 25 age group and early years and give a lot more help to parents - early invention targeted at those needing it.

Basically be like a Nordic country and not the US.

Well most move because they get given handouts or can employ really cheap labour - so pay them seems to be the only option

You do realise the US economy was booming from January 2017 to December 2019

So was the German economy in the late 1930s. It's not all about economic growth at all cost.

The US poverty rate fell as well. The middle class improved

@Havanananana

Lots of small shops and other businesses went to the wall two or three decades ago with the advent of out of town retail and huge supermarkets that sell everything. The ones that the likes of Amazon have killed off were only hanging by a thread anyway.

Likewise pubs that have seen drastic reductions in turnover now that people buy their booze in bulk at supermarkets.

So I think you can go back to the 80s and 90s to see where the rot started for smaller businesses, like shops, cafes, pubs, etc.

Amazon is actually "helping" a lot of small businesses to survive and grow because they can use the "fulfilled by Amazon" service where Amazon hold their stock and deal with deliveries/returns, etc, thus saving the business in rent and staff and the costs of their own websites. I've got a fair number of small businesses using "fulfilled by Amazon" as their main sales channel that wouldn't survive if they relied on their "shop front" or other sales channels.

@spoonbillstretford

I'd work on harmonising tax rates across the world, increasing financial controls and making financial systems transparent so that it is much harder to hide money or where you got it from.

Good luck trying to persuade the Cayman Islands, Isle of Man, Panama, etc to give up their tax haven status and start charging the same tax as other countries! They're not going to give it up as it's their main source of wealth. You'd have to massively incentivise them (i.e. grants. subsidies, brown envelopes etc) to comply or invade/nuke them!!

Change the government. Not sure who to as they are all bastards, but Labour are awful and disincentivise any business or individual from making money. Rich people are openly despised by this government so if I were AZ, yes I’d bugger off abroad.

The EU were closing a lot of tax loopholes. That's why Farage and his multi millionaire cronies want to break it up.

https://paragraph.com/@hagaetc/norway-shrugged

Recently, my story as a Norwegian entrepreneur facing an unrealized gains wealth tax bill many times higher than my net income went viral, amassing over 100 million views on X. A few years ago I publicly called out that this tax is both impossible-to-pay and nonsensical, but no politician would listen. So I made the difficult decision to leave my home country. I still don’t know how I was supposed to pay the tax, but I recently found myself plastered on the "Wall of Shame" at the Socialist Left Party's offices.

My perspective would be very biased based on my experience. I've worked in software development for many well known tech firms for 25+ years. My DH has a small business (medical and SW) that has has been running for almost 20 years.

There is no quick fix, but there are a few glaring weakness and areas in which we could do better, and I believe there would be huge payback in the medium term.

1. Encourage studies in STEM area. Make is MUCH cheaper for students to get degrees in these areas. Look to countries like Germany, Ireland, etc. I worked for 12 years in Ireland. There was an abundance of well educated hard working engineers (our top Uni produce some better students, but not enough of them), both Irish and non-Irish coming through the education system there.

2. We also need a better system for trades people (electrical, plumbing, mechnics, etc.) They should be more of them, better trained and it should an attractive career choice, as in Germany and Switzerland.

3. More consideration for regional development. Everything is so biased towards the south east (where I now live and work). I won't go in to the challenges of DH experience, but outside south east it is much more difficult.

Brexit, but that goes without saying, and will be reversed in time if that is what the public wants. We can, and hopefully will, do much better. It starts with education and training our people.