There’s a few ways of growing the tax take.
Increase taxes/tax more stuff
Increase the tax base (more people / firms or at least more people working / paying tax)
Grow the economy so there’s more money to tax (Rachel from accounts’ Plan A)
Ideally you want to do 2 & 3 as 1 tends to distort the economy more, as we’ve seen with the employer NIC rise. But it takes time and effort.
I suspect there is also a lot going on in the ‘unofficial’ economy that’s entirely out of reach of HMG.
These could all be linked to the ‘30 by 30’ aspiration within RAFAC 
Anybody who is retired who has an income above the income tax threshold due to having a public or private sector pension, pays income tax. I certainly do.
I would disagree with this statement, while there is pensioner poverty there is also vast pensioner riches.
For the 2025/26 tax year, the full new State Pension is £11,973 per year (£230.25 per week), and the full old basic State Pension is £9,175 per year (£176.45 per week).
So to start paying income tax if you are on the old pension you only need additional income of £3,394.60 a year (£282.88 per month).
While those on the new pension need just £597 per year (£49.75 a month) to hit the threshold!
So pre auto enrolment (2012) perhaps some people had no private pension at all, however my partner started hers at 18 encouraged by her mum, well before auto enrolment.
Yes 25% of any pension income is tax free but many take this as a lump sum, so the regular annuity income is fully taxable.
Anyone on a CS pension is deep into this based on these stats..
The average annual Civil Service pension in the UK is £8,724 in the Civil Service scheme (as of 2023-24), though figures vary, with other reports citing £9,874 as the overall average.
That seems to be a major sticking issue with current view as they’re being seen to be taxing businesses to raise cash in the short term instead of giving businesses more breaks and allowing them to grow. Lets not forget that not all business is corporations, we’re a nation of shopkeepers and vast majority of businesses likely have less than 10 employees
I understand the minimum or living wage argument - need to move off low paid jobs.
But the NIC increase and how it hit part time work especially seems to have had a negative impact on employment and increased prices. Neither outcomes the Chancellor will have wanted.
We actually have a good start up culture but we’re less good at growing those businesses so they become medium to large employers. The reasons for that are probably barging off topic though.
Theres a lot of words above, but as a good Physics student i’m going to treat cows as spheres who roll in line
Tax the poor less
Tax the rich more
Scrap or adjust none means tested benefits
Invest in the north (anything north of the M25 really) .. gets richer .. more tax to fund investment
Alright you non spherical heathens, have at it
Define poor and rich
Sliding scale, all relative really.
Compare me to The duke of westminster and i’m worse off than a french peasant in the 1780s. Compare me to homeless boy growing up in bradford or East london and i’m haughty.
sliding scale with all things considered is how our tax should be done. Raising the thresholds on some Brackets and lowering on other
This is something where I think the government is missing a trick.
We should apply VAT or other taxes to these illegal practices as if there were legal.
So VAT at 10% on person to person cannabis sales.
It’s still illegal but it means that HMRC can get their cut before the proceeds of crime act kicks in & may be easier to prove.
If nothing else it’s might act a psychological deterrent.
I would want to do away with the tapering of personal allowance to eliminate the 60% tax trap.
When combined with the loss of tax-free childcare it puts people in a situation where they will do whatever they can to keep under the 100k threshold, even up to making the choice to earn less than their earning potential.
This then reduces the tax HMG generate from that cohort of people.
If those individuals didn’t feel the need to do this, it would generate approx £3.19 billion in tax revenues without that cohort feeling worse off.
The number of people at work who won’t do overtime because it pushes them up a tax band is phenomenal.
We are short of staff, we are expected to use overtime to make up the shortfall and the staff are going “no thanks, I’m doing overtime of the taxman is going to take over 50% in tax and national insurance”.
I can remember someone making a convincing case for replacing all current taxes with a single land value tax. I’ll see if I can find it …
Edit to add: I think it was Dominic Frisby, but there’s a campaign for it which details its arguments here.
https://landvaluetax.org/about-lvt/what-is-land-value-tax/what-is-land-value-taxation/
if OT Takes them over 100,000
I understand, that stupid thing you need a Maths A-Level to understand needs to stop. It’s a shameful way to tax the “rich” because aye it gets the treasury an extra £12500 in tax and whatever they save in childcare and whatnot, but it breaks the idea of a gradual tax system as it means they pay more as a % than many people over the £125,000 threshold
It’s pushing them into the 40% bracket that’s enough to put them off.
Far too many middle earners in this country are paying the higher rate of tax, we have inflation in the cost of living causing an inflation of wages buf tax bands are keeping pace. What’s the point of a 3% payrise if you are going to lose half to the taxman?
If you lose tax-free childcare & child benefit with that 3% rise, you’re actually worse off and therein lies the rub.
Especially when you consider that 100k isn’t that much spending power as it might seem when factoring in inflation.
100k today has the spending power of 46k when adjusted for the turn of the century. That would put you in the Basic Rate today - it’s actually quite sobering.
Inflation and spending power is of course reflected wherever your income lands you, but it does seem to demonstrate just how poorly the tax system has kept up with inflation and the cost of living pressures it generates.
This is one the Green Party policies i agree with fully.
At that bracket, people are still net better off than sticking to the lower bracket though…?
From a base pay point of view, but when it comes to overtime lots of people feel that it’s not worth their while as their time is more valuable than the money they will actually recieve.
Some reservists have a similar issue. Their main income pushes them into higher tax brackets and, since there isn’t a separate allowance for second incomes, they lose half of their reserve pay to HMRC. As such, those at higher rank can find their net pay is lower than those under their supervision.
No one does it for the money, but being paid an insulting amount can be a disincentive for some.
I have others who simply don’t claim any pay, because it would push them into a tax bracket that impacts on other allowances and benefits and would actively make them worse off.