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Summer often brings the pleasure of non -stressed absurd advertising emails from tax advisers. Until now, my favorite has been the news of Blick Rothenberg according to which people pay the income tax on profits, or as the company said: “HMRC net of more than £ 750,000 of the victory of Lionesses Euro 2025”.
The most popular current complaint is that there is an exodus of the United Kingdom of rich disgusted by the tax plans of Chancellors Rachel Reeves. The best known survey on the subject comes every year from Henley & Partners, with data from New World Wealth, a council in South Africa. He claims to calculate the net millionaire migration for many countries. The United Kingdom arrived at the bottom of this league in 2025, with a net of 16,500 million millionaires which was fleeing the reeves tax entries. The precision of these estimates was convincingly demystified (with the help of FT journalists) by Dan Neidle, who founded the reflection group of the tax partners.
Despite a statistical cancellation as brutal as this one, the workforce would be reckless to conclude that its tax policies are good, or that it should consolidate public finances of the United Kingdom with a new tax on wealth to wealth. Neither Henley & Partners, who advises people who are looking for residence and citizenship abroad, nor anyone else can know how many millionaires leave the United Kingdom because the data simply does not exist. It is quite difficult to know how many millionaires live in the United Kingdom, because the investigation into wealth and assets was considered officially unreliable in June. But that doesn’t mean that no one is going. There is corroborant evidence, difficult to ignore, a net flow of people who are rich in the United Kingdom and a correlation with significantly higher taxes on those who have the widest shoulders.
The FT has undertaken a rigorous attempt to examine the departures of the directors of the company, but the data behind it can only represent a small sample of behavioral responses. He comes next to many anecdotal evidence. Whether it is the drop in the demand for butler, bad yields on the most expensive property in London, financial concerns in clubs of exclusive private members or reports of wealth managers, the super-rich London is less comfortable than it was. The Office for Budget Responsibility said that it expected a quarter of the richest taxpayers with non-Domaine status to leave the United Kingdom following the last budget, noting that the estimates are “very uncertain”.
Mayfair Flats and suffocating clubs may not be so important for a British economy roughly in full employment. But a country with precarious public finances should not be jaded about a person rich in emigrant. The United Kingdom would not lose much tax of a non-Domed billionaire in the Middle East which only pays taxes on consumption on services purchased during occasional visits. But that loses a lot when the bankers to complain about high managed to live in the United States or in France while remaining in the same jobs.
Given their mobility, it is unlikely that many more tax revenue can be extracted from the very rich. The forecasts of non-domic fiscal variations in the budget last fall were low, the OBR estimating an average transport for the taxpayer of 4 billion pounds sterling per year between 2026-27 and 2028-29 before the disappearance of additional income.
Any British government who wants to “tighten the rich until the pips creak” must remember that there is already a lot of joy. The profits of the higher 10% and 1% higher has dropped compared to the average of the United Kingdom since 2010, the proportion of taxes they pay has increased. Wealth is already more imposed than in other advanced savings, with taxes on properties, transactions and expensive successions. It is reasonable to reject studies warning an exodus of the rich from the United Kingdom as statistically unrelated. But the Labor government should not ignore the wider evidence than the tax base of the United Kingdom has shrunk. This risks a real exodus of the rich and it would be terrible for public finances.
chris.giles@ft.com
