If anyone is fed up with being battered by Britain’s tax and regulation environment and is weighing up if they want to stay or head for pastures new, I have some advice: stay and be a part of the solution.
Andy Burnham stood outside Downing Street at the start of last week and said Britain needs to ‘regain our stability once again’. Few would dispute this. But unfortunately, the people who should be part of fixing the country, the wealth creators, are increasingly voting with their feet and moving.
It seems this Labour government believes that the wealthy will always stay put. They won’t. Anyone deciding where to base a business today isn’t choosing between London and Manchester, but between London, Singapore, Dubai and New York. And at the moment, they aren’t choosing to stay in this country. We now have the lowest number of sterling millionaires since the financial crisis, down 7 per cent in a year, according to the Adam Smith Institute. In 2021 there were more than a million of these high earners, now only 442,000 remain. Some of that is due to asset prices depreciating, a good deal of it is people simply leaving the country.
Entrepreneurs and wealth creators are where our growth has to come from, and there’s nothing stopping us from being a country they want to be in
