Alex Ranahan at FSL comments on the HMRC tax receipt data.
The total receipts for the year to March 2025 were £857bn, up from £828bn in 2023-24.
There are some interesting underlying trends in the data. For one thing, CGT receipts have gone down again this year to £13bn, the lowest figure since 2020-21. This is the second year in a row that CGT receipts have decreased. There are several key reasons for this: higher interest rates suppressing the cash available for transactions; an unstable economic and political background encouraging investors to hold on to key assets that are felt to hold their value better (or rebound quicker); more assets being sold at a loss in order to realise cash.
Inheritance tax has hit its highest annual receipts on record: £8.2bn, an increase of 10% from the year before and significantly above any historical amounts. Stamp duty on shares has gone up by 35% on the previous year, although the figure of £4.3bn is not dissimilar to amounts in the past.
Income tax went up by 9.3% to £301.3bn in the 2024-25 financial year.
What this tells us is that taxes paid mostly by investors and the wealthy are going up, but also middle income earners. Since these figures relate to the date of receipt – that is, the CGT and income tax receipts relate in part to the 2023-24 tax year but are paid in 2024-25 – what they actually do is explain what people are paying over in real time and why they respond the way they do.
We have seen a great deal of dissatisfaction (to say the least) on the part of investors and the wealthy in relation to the amount of tax they pay. Much media attention has been paid to individuals formerly known as non-doms, focusing on the tax revenue they bring in and the implied loss of tax revenue if they leave. These fears are not unfounded (though I think they go too far and in some cases are based on questionable statistics), and on the basis of the data we have, care must be taken by the government to maintain a healthy environment for investors.
