Tax Planning

I was on a train recently and opposite me were two old ladies bemoaning the State Pension (or the state of their pensions). One of them said: ‘I paid in for years and now it is just paying me back.’ It took every fibre of my being not to point out that her contributions paid […]

In 1904, an American woman named Elizabeth Magie patented a board game. She was a follower of the economist Henry George, who believed that the value of land, as opposed to the buildings and work on top of it, ought to be taxed above almost everything else. Magie built her game to prove his point.

Last week I was at an evening function catered by a brilliant local independent café and restaurant. Exactly the kind of place we all love to see on the high street, and quietly mourn when it’s gone. The food was wonderful. One of the speakers said so, to warm applause, and then gave a plug

In 1696, short of money and fresh from a war with France, William III went looking for something to tax. He settled on windows. The logic was almost charming. You couldn’t decently inspect a man’s income (asking was thought a gross intrusion on his liberty), but you could stand in the street and count his

The most striking case we’ve seen in twenty five + years of advising clients was someone who had a protected tax-free cash entitlement of 76%. Seventy-six percent. Of the entire pension. Tax-free. For context, the standard tax-free cash allowance on a UK pension is 25%. So this person was sitting on something genuinely unusual, baked

Capital Gains Tax was born in 1965 at a flat 30%. Since then, every Chancellor who’s held the job long enough to redecorate the flat above Number 11 has had a go at it. Geoffrey Howe bolted on indexation in 1982, so you only paid tax on real gains rather than the bit inflation had

It is very rare to see anyone online calling for tax rises (with the noble exception of Patriotic Millionaires UK), it is much more common to see people calling for tax cuts. Of course, it is easy to call for tax cuts, opposition politicians have been doing it for decades. What is harder is to explain

Well we sat through the 2025 Budget so you didn’t have to. The event itself was a damp squib in the end anyway, as the Office for Budget Responsibility accidentally leaked the contents before Rachel Reeves addressed Parliament. That was an extraordinary error and you must assume that the unemployment figures rose by at least one civil servant on budget day.  We

We have a budget fast approaching in the UK and all we know is that our Chancellor has a deficit to plug and will be raising taxes. We don’t know which ones, but it seems likely that more messing around with the small taxes (e.g. IHT) and avoiding the hard choices on the big taxes