Taxpayers Against Poverty responds to Dan Neidle's Wealth Tax analysis
- Tom Burgess
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
PRESS STATEMENT
London, 23 July 2025
Taxpayers Against Poverty (TAP) welcomes the growing consensus that the UK’s tax system needs urgent reform to redress the imbalance between income from work and income from wealth. Dan Neidle and Tax Policy Associates have made a valuable contribution to this debate by highlighting the importance of taxing wealth more effectively, and by endorsing reforms such as Land Value Tax.
However, we fundamentally disagree with their assertion that a 2% annual tax on net wealth over £10 million “wouldn’t work.” That view underestimates both the moral case and the practical feasibility of taxing the ultra-wealthy in a fair and proportionate way.
1. The moral imperative
We tax nurses, teachers, and carers at source — yet we allow billionaires and multi-millionaires to accumulate untaxed wealth, often benefiting from public infrastructure and services while contributing proportionally far less. In a country where food banks are becoming a permanent fixture, it's not good enough to say taxing extreme wealth is too difficult.
2. The numbers are clear
A 2% annual tax on wealth above £10 million would affect fewer than 20,000 individuals in the UK — less than 0.04% of the population — and could raise an estimated £24 billion a year. That revenue could fund the Real Living Wage for all workers in the public sector, eliminate the two-child benefit cap, and provide universal free school meals.
This is not a radical proposal — it’s a modest rebalancing of a system that has been skewed for decades.
3. The practical objections are overstated
Critics argue that a wealth tax is hard to implement or easy to avoid. But these are policy challenges, not policy killers. Other countries — including Norway and Switzerland — already operate wealth taxes. Valuation can be managed through self-declaration with audit triggers, and the tax could be levied on liquidity or deferred until realisation in cases of illiquid assets. With the right enforcement mechanisms, the risks of avoidance or capital flight can be mitigated.
If we can build a system that taxes every payslip with precision, we can build one to tax multi-million pound asset portfolios.
4. Land Value Tax is not enough
We support Land Value Tax as part of the solution — but it is not a substitute for taxing the enormous concentration of wealth in financial assets, company shares, offshore trusts, and private equity holdings. We must be willing to say: the ultra-rich can and must contribute more. Like Tax Policy Associates, TAP would like to see an end to Stamp Duty, Council Tax and Business Rates and for it to replaced in Dan Neidle's words " A new modern tax on land which is a much a much fairer and more efficient. The correct and courageous thing to do is to scrap council tax, business rates and stamp duty – that’s about £80bn altogether – and replace them all with “land value tax” (LVT). LVT is an annual tax on the unimproved value of land, residential and commercial – probably the rate would be somewhere between 0.5% and 1% of current market values.
TAP supports the Fairer Share Campaign for a Proportional Property Tax and Richard Burgon MP's call for a wealth tax as well as the work of TaxJustice UK, Patriotic Millionaires UK, Fairness Foundation, Equality Trust and Garyseconomics, to introduce taxes on wealth more than work, to bring down the high level of inequality in the UK.
Conclusion
TAP’s mission is simple: to prioritise poverty on the political agenda. That means shifting the tax burden away from work and toward accumulated wealth. It means refusing to accept that billions in untapped resources sit beyond the reach of a democratic state. And it means demanding courage from our political leaders — not caution dressed as pragmatism.
We invite all those serious about fairness to back a tax system that works for everyone — not just the wealthy few.
Taxpayers Against Poverty.www.taxpayersagainstpoverty.org.uk
Prioritise Poverty. Tax Wealth, Not Work.
About Taxpayers Against PovertyTaxpayers Against Poverty is a UK-based independent advocacy group dedicated to tackling poverty, inequality, and social injustice by promoting economic policies that have a direct effect on reducing poverty and the unnecessary financial hardship. TAP’s sister organisation and partner is Compassion in Politics which seeks to bring more truth respect and compassion into political life
For media inquiries, interviews, or to support the campaign, please contact:
Tom Burgess, CEO, Taxpayers Against Poverty