I hear the arguments all the time, the lower income households demanding the rich pay more, and richer income households saying they already pay huge amounts. It’s probably an argument that has been going since tax was first collected!
This blog is not designed to say who is right… that would be blog suicide! However, it is designed to relay some of the facts, all sourced from the same place to provide consistency. The data source is the House of Commons Library, who produce documents for the benefit of all MPs.
So here we go, strap yourself in, there’s quite a few numbers in here….
In 2020 / 21 the government raised around £800 billion in taxes, of which the big three sources are Income Tax, NI, and VAT, which together raise over £460 billion.
If we just look at the income tax portion of this £800 billion, then the top 10% of earners pay over 60% of all income tax receipts, and even more staggering, the top 1% pay 29% on their own. Wow! To be in the top 1% of earners you need to be earning over £182,900.
Another way of looking at this is that the top 10% of earners are taking 34% of all the income earned in the UK, but are paying 60% of all income tax generated in the process. This is the argument the higher earners use to say they are already contributing far more than anybody else.
Just for comparison, if we then looked at the lowest 50% of earners, they take 25% of all income earned in the UK and pay 9% of total tax collected in the UK.
So it’s pretty clear that if income tax was the only metric then the high earners would have a strong argument…. but it’s not the only tax collected.
There are fundamentally two forms of tax in the UK, direct and indirect. The direct taxes are things like income tax, NI, and council tax, where the tax is collected ‘directly’ according to how much you earn and where you live. As a rough rule of thumb, the rich pay more direct taxes, both in absolute terms and at a far higher marginal rate.
To quantify that, the average amount paid per household in direct taxes is £14,100 (in 2019/20), but the top 20% of earners pay on average £40,900, which represents 30% of their gross income. The lowest 20% of earners pay on average £3,300, which represents 17% of their income. Higher earners pay more at a higher rate.
However, when you look at indirect taxes the opposite scenario becomes clear!!
Indirect taxes, of which nearly half is VAT, but also includes tobacco, alcohol, and fuel duty, is paid based on consumption. Essentially the poor pay the same as the rich. It takes no notice of whether you can afford it.
All income bands spend broadly the same percentage of their household spending on indirect taxes, but the huge difference is when you consider affordability. For the richest 20% only 11% of their disposable income is spent on indirect taxes, whilst for the lowest 20% of earners, this figure rises to 30%. This is a significant increase and is the number one argument put forward that the UK tax system punishes the lower income households, particularly when so many of the items purchased that have VAT on are essential items to live! They are not optional or ‘nice to have’.
I know there are a lot of numbers in this article, but tax is complicated! The purpose is to prove that both sides of the eternal argument ,on who should pay more tax, are to some extent correct.
I’m no politician or tax expert, but I would suspect there is no right or wrong answer to this question, it’s probably ideological to a degree. What I would say is when I’ve looked at the numbers for 1999 that are readily available, there is some movement in the percentages, but it is not huge. So if you are red or blue, who seem to dominate British politics, it is basically tweaking the same structure.
If you then compare our structure to most ‘advanced economies’ around the World, despite the rhetoric, it is minor movements on the same theme. The major exceptions being some Scandinavian countries and France who overall take a higher percentage of income through taxation.
This blog is not going to change the World, but they are good facts to know!
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