Budget tax changes to amount to £54.5bn over next five years, reports finds
The £54.4bn of changes are spread across 40 tax changes
The tax changes announced as part of the chancellor’s Spring Budget last week will equate to £54.5bn in tax over the next five years, according to a report by Thomson Reuters.
The £54.4bn of changes are spread across 40 tax changes and have been reduced from the £222.2bn of tax changes announced in Kwasi Kwarteng’s ‘mini-budget’.
By contrast the September budget changes related to just 15 tax policies. The average number of tax changes announced in budgets over the last decade is 32.
The ‘mini-budget’ was followed by an ‘emergency budget’ in November 2022, with £287.4bn of changes.
They mostly consisted of revisions to tax policy choices made in September 2022 by Kwasi Kwarteng, the then-chancellor.
Simon Brookings, general manager, Tax and Accountancy Professionals at Thomson Reuters said: “[The Budget] marked a return to the scale of budgets observed pre-pandemic, with the value of changes close to those in the Spring 2020 statement.
“Corporations face challenges in navigating the UK’s increasingly complex tax regime whilst growing their business.Long term, reducing the administrative burden of dealing with taxes in the UK will be important. Having an easy to navigate tax system is also important to businesses looking to set up or expand their operations in the country.”
Brookings added: “Changes to tax over the next five years are considerable and accountancy firms will have to assimilate to 40 new tax policies. The financial risks of getting it wrong mean businesses are having to invest more in the technology needed to navigate tax compliance to ensure they don’t inadvertently fall foul of HMRC.”
