Reform unveils ‘Robin Hood' policy to stop non-doms fleeing UK

Nigel Farage will announce a radical Robin Hood-style tax policy that will offer non-doms the chance to pay a £250,000 fee to shield them from tax, with the proceeds going directly to the lowest paid.
Under the new Reform policy non-domiciles — UK residents whose permanent home is abroad — would not be taxed on any wealth, income or capital gains earned overseas. They would also avoid paying inheritance tax under the plans, which are set out in a policy document seen by The Times.
Non-doms would be handed a new 'Britannia Card' and qualify for the tax exemptions by paying a £250,000 'landing fee'. They would be able to renew it every ten years by paying the fee again.
Reform said that 100 per cent of the revenue raised would be transferred by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) directly to the bank accounts of the lowest-earning 10 per cent of full-time workers. It would be tax-free and transferred within 90 days of the end of each tax year, and is likely to be dubbed Reform's 'Robin Hood tax' for redistributing money from the rich to the poor.
Reform said about 2.5 million workers earning a full-time salary of less than than £23,000 would be given £600 if 6,000 non-doms paid for the Britannia Card. The amount of money would rise and fall depending on how many non-doms took up the new tax offer.
Britannia Card holders would still be charged tax on a remittance basis, meaning they would be taxed in the normal way on any UK-sourced income and gains.
Reform said the policy is designed to reverse the exodus of wealthy individuals following increasingly onerous rules placed on non-doms.
• Naomi Wilkes: Wealthy should think twice before leaving Britain
Rachel Reeves is considering watering down plans to scrap the non-dom tax regime amid concerns about the exodus. The chancellor is weighing up reversing her decision to charge inheritance tax on their global assets.
Reform has undertaken analysis on a range of scenarios of its new non-dom policy. In a low-uptake scenario, in which 6,000 non-doms paid for a Britannia Card each year, the policy would raise £1.5 billion annually. This would lead to £600 going to the 2.5 million low-paid workers each year — an annual take-home pay rise of more than 3 per cent and the equivalent of an extra week's net wages. Under a higher uptake scenario in which 10,000 cards are issued each year, the annual payment for the lowest-paid workers would be £1,000, according to Reform's analysis.
The party said that the move would favour workers in Wales, Scotland and the northeast of England where baseline pay is lowest and where there is a larger share of low-paid jobs.
Reform said the policy would create a 'transparent link' between the richest and poorest in the UK and would 'restore the social contract' between them. It said it would also restore Britain's competitiveness and help repair the public finances.
Farage, who will announce the radical new tax policy at a press conference in Westminster on Monday, is expected to say: 'We are going to encourage those that have left to come back. They are entrepreneurs, wealth creators and big spenders. We are going to repair the social contract.'
• Rachel Reeves reconsiders non-dom tax changes to halt exodus
The announcement is the latest attempt by Reform to set out a detailed blueprint to show it can form credible government policies and be trusted to run the public finances.
An Ipsos Mori poll at the weekend suggested that Reform is on course to win an outright majority at the next election after finding its poll lead over Labour has increased to nine points. It found support for Reform on 34 per cent, Labour on 25 and the Conservatives on just 15 per cent — the highest level of support for Farage's party in any poll to date.
Farage has faced increasing scrutiny of his party's spending plans after he set out tax cuts and spending increases last month that the Institute for Fiscal Studies has costed at between £50 to £80 billion a year.
• Rich List tycoons tell Rachel Reeves her tax will kill family farms
His pledges to increase the income tax personal allowance to £20,000, scrap the two-child limit on benefit payments, reinstate the winter fuel allowance in full and introduce more generous transferable marriage tax allowances have opened up key dividing lines with both Labour and the Conservatives.
Labour responded by accusing him of a 'return to the chaos of Liz Truss'.
Farage has rebutted the charge by insisting he can pay for it by scrapping net zero and cutting waste and said the former prime minister had erred by failing to propose any cuts in public spending alongside her tax cuts.
Reform said that its plans to introduce a new non-dom tax regime will prevent the 'record-breaking and alarming exodus of high-spending, high-taxpaying residents' that it said had caused 'huge collateral damage' to the British economy.
It pointed to a study by Oxford Economics, which found that the non-doms it surveyed had invested £8.4 billion in the UK economy, with each investing an average of £118 million.
Reeves has announced that a much less generous residence-based system will replace the non-dom tax regime. The plans go further than an announcement by the then Conservative chancellor Jeremy Hunt in March last year to phase out the non-dom tax regime.
It has led to a sharp increase in business leaders moving out of the UK. An analysis of company filings showed more than 4,400 directors have left in the past year, including a jump in numbers over the past few months. Departures in April were 75 per cent higher than in the same month last year. The pace of exits was highest in finance, insurance and property, all sectors popular with non-doms.
Lakshmi Mittal, the steel billionaire, is among those said to be considering leaving the country because of the crackdown.

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