Policy Publications

This CAGE Policy Briefing studies the offshore income and capital gains of the UK’s ‘non-doms’ – individuals who are resident in the UK but who claim on their tax return that their permanent home (‘domicile’) is abroad. We use de-identified confidential data accessed via HMRC to analyse all individuals who have claimed non-dom status between 1997 and 2018. We show non-doms at least £10.9 billion in offshore income and gains. Most of these unreported income and gains (55%) belong to non-doms who arrived in the UK in the past five years. Looking at previous reforms that restricted access to the non-dom regime, we see these led to very little emigration. Those who did leave were paying hardly any tax. Consequently, abolishing the non-dom regime would raise at least £3.2 billion even after accounting for migration and other tax planning, and the loss of existing revenue from the remittance basis charge.

This CAGE Policy Briefing studies the UK’s ‘non-doms’ – individuals who are resident in the UK but who claim on their tax return that their permanent home (‘domicile’) is abroad. We use de-identified confidential data accessed via HMRC to analyse all individuals who have claimed non-dom status between 1997 and 2018. We show non-doms are globally connected and economically elite: almost all were either born abroad or have lived abroad for substantial periods, and their incomes are very high. Non-doms are highly likely to work in finance and other ‘City’ jobs. They tend to come from Western Europe, India and the US. Within the UK they largely reside in and around London, although there are sizeable shares in Oxford and Cambridge, working in research and education, and in Aberdeen, working in oil.

This CAGE Policy Briefing studies the individuals who make up the UK’s Sunday Times Rich List (STRL). These are the 1000 richest people or families with strong ties to the UK. We link together information in the STRL with multiple other data sources to analyse the foreign connections of STRL members, the industries with which they are associated, and their corporate ties to UK land and property. One in seven appear not to be UK resident for tax purposes. Among billionaires, one in seven are located in tax havens. Collectively they own almost £2 trillion in UK wealth.

This CAGE Policy Briefing studies alternatives to the government’s new Health and Social Care Levy. Using publicly accessible tax data from HMRC, we find that removing the current National Insurance exemptions for investment income and people of pension age would raise £12 billion. This is the same amount of revenue as the Government is targeting from its new Levy. Equalising National Insurance on higher earnings with the rates already paid by lower earners could raise an additional £20 billion. This would be enough to fund a cut in the main rate of NICs by 1.25p, instead of raising these rates, as the government is planning. Under this alternative package of reforms, more of the revenue would come from London and the South East, and from older, wealthier individuals.

This report presents the final findings of the Wealth Tax Commission into whether the UK should have a wealth tax. It concludes that if the government chooses to raise taxes in response to COVID, it should implement a one-off wealth tax in preference to increasing taxes on work or consumption.

This briefing summarises new research on the impact of capital gains – which are excluded from existing income statistics – on measured inequality in the UK

Household income statistics are a crucial lens for understanding UK living standards and inequalities. But what counts as ‘income’ is not always clear-cut. Capital gains (the profits from disposing of an asset for more than it was worth when you acquired it) are not included in existing UK income statistics.
This exclusion – part of a broader exclusion of irregular receipts – has led to some important trends being missed. In this report we set out what we know about taxable capital gains over recent years; share ground-breaking research that shows the effects of including capital gains in top income measures; and discuss whether and how the UK’s income statistics could be improved To account for a broader range of income.