As posted an another thread on the same topic
[quote=Jesse M;254355]Apologies for the long post but you can read the whole articke below
https://capx.co/capping-...n-british-policymaking/
And here is the thread and author (Molly Broome) on twitter.
https://twitter.com/moll...zHmDMLHgPkcqvg&s=19
Some quotes from the article above from capx
Capping ISAs – the latest bad idea in British policymaking
By Sam Bowman @s8mb
A £100,000 limit on tax-free savings is a terrible idea that would raise negligible revenue
Punishing savers will only push up the cost of housing even further
It's bonkers to treat high interest rates as a windfall in the context of high inflation
The Resolution Foundation wants to cap ISAs (investment savings accounts), the UK’s tax-protected savings and investment accounts. You pay into an ISA with your post-tax income, and can either invest within it or just get interest on cash savings. Any interest, capital gains or dividends you receive within the ISA are not taxed.
Today you can contribute up to £20,000 a year, and besides that there’s no cap on how large it can get from those deposits and the growth you might hope for from investments. The Resolution Foundation wants to cap the size of the pots at £100,000, whether from investment growth, or from contributions, above which any extra money would be taxed as normal. I think its analysis is short-sighted and forgets the second-order effects that savings and investment have on the rest of the economy.
Capping ISAs would do even more to pump up housing demand
For investments held outside of ISAs, investments in the UK are taxed very heavily. For higher and additional rate taxpayers, dividends are taxed at 33.75% and 39.35% respectively. Capital gains – increases in the value of your shares – are taxed at 20%.
Over the course of, say, a 30-year investment period, this tax can make an enormous difference to the size of your returns: £296,000 invested for 30 years at a 5% real return, with the returns re-invested over that time, will earn about £1,026,452. But if you impose a tax of 33.75%, you get 3.3125%, and your return will be £502,504 – before capital gains tax. Impose the additional rate tax and you’ll make £438,332.
I chose £296,000 for a reason: it is the price of the average UK house. Unfortunately, because housing supply is constrained, houses are an investment too, even for people who only own the house they live in. For most people, their house is the biggest savings vehicle they own, and they hope to either be able to draw on some of its value in retirement via equity release, or leave the house to their children to inherit.
It’s hardly a surprise that the UK’s savings rate is low, when this does not include house “savings”. Nor is it a surprise that people with mortgages don’t have much left over for cash savings or equities investments.
Besides pensions, which aren’t accessible until retirement, ISAs are the only “safe harbour” for savings that receive anything like the same tax treatment as housing.
What the Resolution Foundation is proposing is to curb this safe harbour dramatically – so that housing is left as pretty much the only way you can save money in the UK without facing a large tax penalty for doing so. The consequence would be to shift even more money into “housing as an investment”, inflating the cost of UK housing even more, exposing more people to the risk of being invested in a single asset, and of course making it harder for future governments to let the cost of housing actually… fall.
That’s very bad. It goes in precisely the wrong direction: as well as making it harder for governments to let house prices fall, it makes it harder for them to reform the taxation of housing and property so that it is less advantaged compared to other investments.
This is, in fact, something that Resolution has written about previously, so it’s surprising that they would now propose something that would make that task – far more important, by anyone’s measure – even harder than it already is."
Comparing to LTA on pensionsRF has slightly undermined its own numbers by citing the pensions Lifetime Allowance as a precedent. In that case, an extra tax was imposed on pension pot savings above, at the time, £1.5 million. Resolution just wants to do the same for ISAs, and the revenues it says it would raise – £1 billion – are derived from assuming normal taxation of anything above that.
However, as Ben points out,
the Lifetime Allowance actually involves the precedent that existing pots would be partially protected from this kind of taxation. People with pots that were already above the threshold were eligible for a higher individual rate that protected their existing pension pots from the new allowance – so it only affected pots that hadn’t yet reached that point
. So if that precedent is anything to go by, the Resolution Foundation’s numbers could be way off, and its proposals would actually raise virtually nothing in the short run, and would depend on people continuing to save in taxable ways, rather than putting it into untaxed housing wealth, or consuming it, etc.[/quote