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**Hugh** · 22-07-2025, 10:46

Quote:

Originally Posted by OLD BOY

Can or won't?

Reform have indicated they are going to make changes to our system of taxation. They have come up with alternative plans for non doms as well.Here's one of them. We'll know the exact details of more changes when we see his manifesto.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/ta...les-will-work/

[EXTRACT]

The Reform UK leader promised sweeping tax breaks for married couples in a bid to boost birth rates and make family “a more important element in British life”. Estimates suggest it would save the average couple almost £2,500 a year in tax.

Currently, workers pay 20pc income tax on earnings between £12,570 and £50,270. Under Reform’s plans, one spouse would be spared from paying tax on the first £25,000 of income. It means a worker earning £50,000 would save about £2,500 in income tax.

The party has already vowed to raise the tax-free allowance from £12,571 to £20,000, which estimates suggest could cost as much as £80bn. On top of this, it has promised to raise the higher rate threshold from £50,270 to £70,000, to release the millions more workers being dragged by stealth into the top rate band, shown in the chart below.

If Reform delivered on all three promises, a worker earning £70,000 would be better off by almost £6,500.

---------- Post added at 08:47 ---------- Previous post was at 08:21 ----------

That’s a stretch, Russ. Why do you say that? The Conservatives were ready to fly the first illegals to Rwanda but the election put paid to that.

The main issue they had was the legal machinery that the human rights lawyers were able to exploit. Pull out of the ECHR and substitute the Refugee Convention 1951 and it’s 1967 Protocol for a UK Bill of Rights and put us back to where we thought we were when the Agreement was first passed, updated to be relevant for the 21st Century.

The problem is that successive governments and court over-reach have painted us into a corner which has resulted in us not being able to do anything anymore. This must change. If legislation or belonging to some sort of treaty gets in the way of what we want to do, we re-negotiate or abolish it. That’s the way to get things done.

We don’t need any more ‘can’t do’ governments - we need a ‘can do’ government which can achieve what so many people are demanding from our politicians.

Two independent reviews of Reform UK’s tax proposals

https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/06/17/...anifesto_2024/

Quote:

Reform UK has published its manifesto. They plan personal tax cuts which they say will cost £70bn; however our analysis shows that they’ve miscalculated, and the actual cost will be at least £88bn.

Reform UK says it will fund these tax costs with £70bn of savings and additional revenue, but it provides few details. Their proposal to change Bank of England reserve rules is over-stated by at least £15bn, and the cost would likely fall on businesses and consumers, not banks.

These two factors mean that Reform UK’s plans have a total unfunded cost of at least £33bn – about twice the unfunded cost of Liz Truss’ ill-fated 2022 “mini-Budget“.1

We hope other estimates become available soon, but for the moment this is the only currently available estimate of the impact of Reform UK’s proposals. We asked Reform UK for the calculations they had used; they did not respond.

We have published our methodology in full, together with the supporting spreadsheet and modelling. We welcome suggestions and corrections.

Our analysis is for tax year 2025/26 only; the cost will be higher towards the end of the Parliament. And, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies points out, the long-run annual cost will be higher still.

https://ifs.org.uk/articles/reform-u...festo-reaction

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An assessment of the tax and spending changes proposed in the 2024 Reform UK general election manifesto.

Carl Emmerson, deputy director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said: “Reform UK proposes tax cuts that it estimates would cost nearly £90 billion per year, and spending increases of £50 billion per year. It claims that it would pay for these through £150 billion per year of reductions in other spending, covering public services, debt interest and working-age benefits.

This would represent a big cut to the size of the state. Regardless of the pros and cons of shrinking the state, or of any of their specific measures, the package as a whole is problematic. Spending reductions would save less than stated, and the tax cuts would cost more than stated, by a margin of tens of billions of pounds per year. Meanwhile the spending increases would cost more than stated if they are to achieve their objectives.

A reduction in tax of £90 billion a year, while sizeable, would still see tax revenues higher as a share of the economy than in 2019–20. But in reality the package of tax cuts proposed would, if and when fully implemented, cost tens of billions of pounds a year more than that. For example, Reform UK plans to cut the rate of corporation tax from 25% to 20% immediately, and then to 15% in year 3 of the parliament. The manifesto costing of £18 billion a year over the course of the next parliament for all its business tax cuts is less than half of what official estimates suggest the long-run cost of just this cut in the corporation tax rate to 15% would be.

Of the proposed spending increases, the largest is for the NHS (£17 billion per year). However, this would not be nearly enough to meet Reform’s incredibly ambitious commitment to eliminate waiting lists within two years. Eliminating the waiting list entirely is a feat that has not been achieved in the history of the NHS and seems near impossible within two years.

The cost-saving measures would save less than set out. There is a respectable argument for changing the extent to which the Bank of England pays interest to commercial banks, and indeed some other central banks don’t pay interest on all the reserves they hold. But whether a good idea or not, it would raise a lot less than £35 billion per year. Reform also propose to reduce “wasteful” spending by £50 billion per year across all government departments, quangos and commissions. But saving this sum would require much more than a crackdown on waste; it would almost certainly require substantial cuts to the quantity or quality of public services.

Even with the extremely optimistic assumptions about how much economic growth would increase, the sums in this manifesto do not add up. Whilst Reform’s manifesto gives a clear sense of priority, a government could only implement parts of this package, or would need to find other ways to help pay for it, which would mean losers not specified.”