It's OK shutting down tax avoidance schemes - there are far too many of them, costing the country tens of billions of lost tax revenue every year - but the government refuses to tackle the bigger problem of tax evasion. London is known as the London laudromat because of the volume of corrupt UK and international money that is hidden in the capital. I wonder why that is?

In accordance with every other Law change, of whatever nature, any such reduction / limit CANNOT be retrospective.

e.g. You cannot be retrospectively prosecuted for not wearing a seat belt in 1978. Law changes can only be applied and enforced from the date they are adopted into Statute.

Hope this helps to calm a few worries?

As posted on two other threads on the same subject

https://capx.co/capping-...n-british-policymaking/

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 pensions

RF 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

The CEO is Torsten Bell. Was (is?) responsible for co-ordinating Labour Party policies. ex head of policy for Ed Miliband. Ex SPAD for Alistair Darling.

Why float the idea?

Sounds like Jeremy Hunt's kinda guy. Sort of lib dem labour tory type of person. All the same shower.