Let’s be straight: that’s not a fact. It’s a guess based on data from a newspaper league table built entirely from public accounts. That list covers footballers, pop stars and listed-company founders.
It is completely blind to the thousands of private business owners, dealmakers and investors whose tax never surfaces in a Companies House filing and whose tax remittance therefore remains private.
I’d be amazed if the King is in the top 100. Frankly, I’d be surprised if he’s in the top 1,000 — and I do this for a living.
Here’s the maths everyone skips. The top 1% of income taxpayers — around 340,000 people —hand over close to £90bn a year, nearly 30% of all the income tax in this country. The top 10% pay about 60% of it. The top 0.1% pay more between them than the entire bottom half of the country combined.
So spare me the annual sermon that “the rich don’t pay their share.” On income — the thing people actually mean — the top 1% earn 13% of the money and pay nearly 30% of the tax. That is more than double their share.
And these aren’t powdered-wig heirs. Roughly 70% of today’s wealthy built it themselves, up from 40% a generation ago. They are entrepreneurs who took the risk, made payrolls, and now hand a third or more straight back to the Exchequer.
Which brings me to what genuinely angered me last week. HMRC published its annual “tax gap” report, and the headline was that small businesses are the single biggest contributors — 62% of an estimated £59bn. Cue the familiar tune: naughty little businesses, not paying their way.
It’s nonsense, and it’s backwards. Start with the number. The “tax gap” is an estimate — and by HMRC’s own admission, a third of it is now rated “highly uncertain,” up from 8% a year ago. They revise it upwards by billions every single year. It is a guess dressed up as a debt.
Then look at what’s inside it. The biggest single cause isn’t fraud — it’s “failure to take reasonable care.” In plain English: people getting it wrong. And why do they get it wrong? Because the rules are monstrously complex, and a small business is expected to shoulder the compliance burden of a multinational with none of the help.
A big corporate gets its own HMRC relationship manager to talk things through. A small business owner trying to get a tricky VAT question answered? Good luck.
I recently had a client pursued into bankruptcy by HMRC over a VAT position. They had taken proper professional advice. That advice was correct. HMRC eventually lost. But the business was already gone.
So here is the message, and it’s simple. We have the narrative upside down. Fair play to His Majesty for tax transparency, but we should be celebrating the entrepreneurs and businesses who, overwhelmingly, also pay their taxes — and a great deal of them.
They are the engine our future growth depends on, and a tax system can either enable that engine or strangle it.
Right now we’re choosing strangle: more inquiries, more complexity, and soon an AI-and-Making-Tax-Digital machine that plugs into your records and spits out “errors” as if tax were ever black and white. It isn’t.
Andy Burnham fancies himself our future Prime Minister. Here’s a manifesto line for him for free: back business and entrepreneurs, don’t shake them down or overlook their already strong tax contribution.
They may not be headline grabbers, but they might just be the key to everything you want to achieve.
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Andy Oury is a partner at the accountancy firm Oury Clark.
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