What do we expect from the Pre-Budget Report?

The Pre-Budget report will be announced within the next few weeks. It may be too early to expect any radical upheaval of the UK tax system but it must surely be coming given the hugely altered economic and fiscal landscape.

With the UK taxpayer being obliged to bail out the banks, there is likely to be increased emphasis in the UK on tackling perceived tax avoidance. It seems to me that the obvious steps to ameliorate the effects of a deepening recession are to encourage investment in business and capital projects, while perhaps beginning to increase rates of personal income tax for those with higher incomes.

High levels of stamp duty are doing nothing to help the liquidity of the UK property market and where there are no transactions, there are no tax receipts. Economics suggests that we start to shift the emphasis from taxing transactions and incomes to taxing private wealth, but politics and the lobbyists may be saying something else.