A wealth tax on assets over £10 million to fund public services

The top 1% of households in Britain hold more wealth than the bottom 70% combined. That is not a statistic from a pressure group, it is from the ONS. Wealth inequality is now greater than income inequality, and it is growing faster, because wealth generates wealth through property, inheritance, and capital gains, all of which are taxed more lightly than work.

A 1% annual tax on net assets above £10 million would affect approximately 22,000 households and raise an estimated £10-15 billion per year. That is enough to reverse most of the cuts to local government since 2010.

The standard objection is that wealthy people will leave. The evidence from countries that have implemented wealth taxes, notably Norway and Switzerland, is that very few actually do. People do not uproot their lives, families, and businesses over a 1% levy. And those who would leave over that amount were never meaningfully invested in the society they lived in anyway.