Would a wealth tax save Rachel Reeves?

0:03This is a Global Player original podcast. But the appearance has been given that they have bogged down by their own imposed limitations. There are ways around that. They include asset taxes. Is the Labour government considering a wealth tax, yes or no? So some of the decisions that we've taken in the last year, we have asked those with the broadest shoulders to carry the greatest burden. So it is okay. We have an awful lot of taxes in our system currently that do tax wealth and assets. It's swirling around there somewhere. It's maybe not formally in the mix. It's the idea of a sort of one-off tax.

0:46People who have over 10 million pounds. As I say, the Chancellor will be looking in the round of the entire fiscal position. I don't have a view on it. I think Rachel Reeves will... You have to have a view. No, I don't. No, I don't. You have a view. No, I don't. It's your job title. No, not on wealth tax. Particularly when you come on a programme like this. Not on wealth tax. Rachel Reeves has paid a lot more money than I am to sit and work out how to balance the book.

1:12Do you have a view on whether Britain needs a wealth tax? More critically, does the Chancellor have a view on whether that is on the cards for her next budget? And the most interesting thing is that Downing Street is not denying that a wealth tax is under consideration. So would it work? Would it raise the money that Rachel Reeves needs? Or will it be a counterproductive measure that will have to be scrapped? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:49It's John. It's Emily. And it's very easy to say wealth tax and people go, yeah, wealth tax. Good idea. We must tax the wealthy. But it's actually quite complicated over what you do. So what's being discussed at the moment, the Neil Kinnock idea, is that anyone who has got assets over 10 million pounds should pay a 2 % levy per year on their assets. So that would be an additional£200 ,000 tax bill if you've got exactly£10 million. But how do you calculate the£10 million? And this is where the detail becomes devilishly complicated. Do you say it's the value of your house, the value of your pension, your savings, whatever else, whatever else?

2:31Or do you say if you've got£10 million in the bank or building society, then you're subject to it? And there is no kind of uniform way or agreed way of measuring this. And so a lot of countries have tried it and then a lot of countries have reversed it. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting phrase, isn't it? Because wealth tax, you can see politically, it's a very attractive way of getting a lot of people on board. Because if your question is, should the wealthy be taxed more, then probably there are more people in the country who think the answer to that is yes than no. And yet, if you break it down, in the Corbyn days, in the Ed Miliband days, we used to talk about sort of manifesto pledge of a mansion tax.

3:12You know, it wasn't a house tax, wasn't a property tax, was a mansion tax. In other words, if you have a socking great house, should you be paying more money on it? Now, curiously, we don't even properly reflect that as it stands in council tax. You know, yes, you pay slightly more for a bigger house, but you don't pay proportionately more for a much bigger house than you do for a smaller house. So maybe that needs sorting out before you start talking about mansion tax. And then, of course, you're into questions of, well, if you're somebody who bought their house, you know, 70 years ago and you live on your own without any other income.

3:47Is it fair that you get a whacking great tax bill because that's all you have? That you've already paid on your earnings through your life. You might have lost your husband. You're on your own pension. Where does this idea of what your wealth is become clear? And the other complicating bit of the politics of it, and again, it sounds attractive. The non-DOM tax sounds attractive. That non-DOM millionaires should pay tax on their global income to HMRC. Majesty's, you know, revenue and customs. But what happens, and it seems to be happening, and everyone has got anecdotal examples, if more non-DOMs who are fleet of foot leave the country because of this policy, and the Treasury ends up taking in less money than it was before, because non-DOMs were paying their tax on their UK income, they just weren't paying it on their global income.

4:43And so these people leave the country and say, screw that, I was happy to pay tax on the money I made in the UK, but I'm not going to have it taxed globally. So they go somewhere else and you've lost money. So it's not like the Treasury has got an extra two billion. It might have two billion less money as a result of it. Look, I think the caveat on that is that the wealthy have always used that as a threat. They've always said, if you do this, we're out the door. And to some degree, the globally wealthy will always do that anyway. You know, they will shift around, they will have different domains, different tax regimes, different businesses, all the rest of it.

5:17So it's kind of impossible to say at any one stage how many people are just threatening and how many people are actually leaving. But anecdotally, it feels as if the number of people leaving has accelerated. We don't know in real terms how much untaxed wealth is going out the door with them. We just actually, I mean, how much new untaxed wealth is going out the door with them because we don't really have the stats to show that. I mean, why we're talking about it now is a combination of things, I think. Neil Kinnock at the weekend, who might have just been going off piste, you know, might have just been saying I was Labour leader for, you know, nearly a decade.

5:56And actually seen as a moderniser, very much a moderniser at the time, but probably would belong to something that feels more like old Labour now. is saying, yeah, you know, we do need a wealth tax. We've got the socking great black hole. The OBR forecasts seem to be increasing by the month in terms of how much debt the Chancellor is going to rack up. And he's set this ceiling at 10 million. Sounds pretty generous. You know, one can guess how many people would be, you know, above the 10 million or under the 10 million. When he said that on Sky News at the weekend, the government could have come out and said, oh, we're definitely not doing that.

6:36Or they could have said, well, it's a very good idea. We're thinking about it. They haven't quite said either. They haven't shut it down, maybe because they genuinely don't know, or maybe because right now we are still waiting to see quite how big the black hole is going to be for the Chancellor. And maybe she realises that, you know, the cardinal error was boxing yourself in too quickly on what taxes would or wouldn't be on the table and i guess there is part of her thinking jesus we actually don't know we might need this i mean it's a really interesting debating point that what people will come to in years to come is what was this labour government's original sin was the original sin boxing yourself in and saying we won't raise income tax we won't touch vat was the original sin uh the the the tax on uh you know, the welfare reform policies, or was it winter fuel payments?

7:30You know, where did Labour really go wrong? The fact of the matter is that as a result of the U-turns and climb downs on welfare reform, we know that Rachel Reeves has got to find an extra few billion quid in the budget this autumn. There are varying numbers being bandied around by, you know, institutional think tanks looking at this and saying, oh, it's much worse than that. The black hole is this size. The black hole is that size. You know, you pay your money and takes your choice. But Rachel Reeves, we do know, has got some very difficult choices. And suddenly it seems the wealth tax is back in vogue.

8:04It's complicated, isn't it? Because when they were in opposition, they talked so much about growth. And I remember us being at the Labour conference the year before where they had absolutely hit home with business folk who wanted, who believed that Labour were going to be the, you know, the bringers in of wealth, of growth, of income, of investment. And so in a way, you know, going back to your point, you don't want to bite the hand that could be feeding the growth in your government, in your country, right? And I think she's super aware of that. All that stuff about her having these smoked salmon, scrambled eggs, breakfasts, which was meant to be her way of saying...

8:44The prawn cocktail offensive, it was also known as. Oh, is that right? Yeah. I wouldn't want those both at breakfast. I don't think. It was all the city lunches that were taking place in the Blair years. And this idea that, you know, we're not Corbyn. I think that was what she was trying to say. We're not trying to tax the wealthy. We're not trying to scare you off, frankly. We want your money in this country. We want you to invest. And so in a way, it would be very easy for her now to say, yeah, remember what I said. We're not trying to scare off business. We're not trying to scare off investment.

9:16we don't want that but she's also got this very noisy party and the potential of a new left-wing flank you know in the shape of Zahra Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn who will definitely be pushing for wealth tax she doesn't want to see more of her MPs their MPs suddenly leave and say well that's the Labour Party that I can believe in more so I think that's why kind of everything is sort of on the table at the moment right we're now joined by the deputy director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Helen Miller. That is if you're listening today, Tuesday. Obviously, if you're listening tomorrow, Wednesday, she's the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, being promoted the top dog.

9:59Helen Miller, welcome to you. Thank you very much for being with us. So, look, wealth tax seems to be back in fashion as an idea. Is it a good idea? Well, I think it partly depends on what you mean by a wealth tax. So, I think we absolutely should think about how we tax wealth. There's a lot of it. We don't tax it very sensibly at the moment. Economists don't really agree, actually, on whether an annual tax on the stock of wealth is a good idea, even in principle. I think where I'd come down on that is that, no, it's not a particularly good idea. At the very least, there are lots of things we should be doing first to fix how we currently tax things.

10:32So capital gains, inheritance tax, council tax, before we try and design and implement an entirely new tax with an entirely new tax base, with all the apparatus that goes with that so yeah the short answer is yes let's think about taxing wealth i don't think we should be rushing to try and get a new tax where is there a place where the wealth tax is a really effective tool of taxation again if you're thinking of a tax on the annual stock of wealth again again i'm saying that because lots of countries have inheritance taxes or capital gains taxes then switzerland's always used as the example that has one it you know doesn't raise everything but it raises a couple of percentage of points of revenue what stands out about switzerland though is that their other taxes are actually quite low so they're not taxing incomes and gains at very high rates and they kind of therefore get away with having a having a decent size wealth taxes the more common experience across a bunch of european countries is always an example implement these things they don't go particularly well for various reasons they don't raise much money and they get rid of them so the intersection experience is not particularly rosy for wealth taxes i was reading stephen bush in the ft who said we've now got a sort of european level of taxation without having the spread of how our taxes actually work when you say there are other things to look at first where is the tax system predominantly going wrong oh it's hard to pick honestly i mean you could literally pick any tax and start with what problems if you're just thinking about wealth though you know capital gains tax i think we've got a big problem with so if you think about what's happening with people who've got wealth they're they're generating income on that wealth whether it's just somebody who's investing or someone's got their own business and we currently tax capital gains at lower rates than other incomes.

12:06We don't tax gains on main houses at all. We forgive capital gains at death. But at the same time, despite having those lower rates and those forgivenesses, we also managed to discourage investment because the way we design the tax base and without getting into the weeds of that, think of it as, for example, we tax inflationary gains. Well, that's a good way to discourage investment if you know that part of the tax will just be because prices are rising in the country. So we managed to get it wrong on both sides in some sense. And I think regardless of whether you want a new tax taxing the gains people make properly so fixing the tax base and then increasing the rates but not just increasing the rates on their own because that would be bad for investment that would be a good thing to do but you can do the same thing with council tax council tax is regressive so people who live in more expensive properties pay less as a share of their property value than people who live in lower value properties that doesn't make any sense maybe you could argue about how progressive you want it to be if at all but having a regressive council tax doesn't make a lot of sense so i think a lot of things you could do on those kinds of spaces and what we always hear when the question of wealth tax is raised is that you will scare off the rich the rich will just you know up sticks and leave is there actual data that confirms that is happening that is accelerating now are you seeing that the honest answer is no as in no there's not the data to look at that so part of the problem we have is that when you're talking about a very small group of people um actually there isn't very good data on those people to start with and if you think about the recent changes we've seen to the taxation of so-called non-dom so people who could you know easily move somewhere else a there aren't many of them be in any given year lots of them are leaving the uk because that's just inherently they're the kind of people who move across countries the fact that you see some moving across countries doesn't tell you very much that's true in every year so you have to see is it even more true than normal um and i think you can have lots of anecdotes i don't think we have good data on that do you think it's happening yes what and actually everyone thinks it's happening and everyone thought it would happen before the policy changed i mean the obr itself when they were costing the change of the policy said we think some people will leave what i don't know and have a i don't really have a view on because i just don't have i haven't seen the evidence is are more people leaving than we expected i think the difficult thing about that is it's not only going to be affected by you have a rich person their tax bill today it's going to be affected by what they expect is coming down the track and how they think things will change in future and what other governments are doing if other governments are trying to entice them in there so it's not it's not a simple well this one tax went up what's going to happen i think that's genuinely the question that sort of strikes me about the effectiveness or otherwise say the tax on non-doms if it ends up in a situation where the treasury is taking in less money than it was before because so many non-doms have left the country then that is an absolute failure as a It might make some people feel better that, good, we're taxing these rich foreigners.

14:54But if they're leaving the country and our tax take is declining, that's a disaster. Do we have data on that? Would the Treasury know whether they've kind of lost money as a result of it? I think you might be able to know eventually. I think it's really hard to know in advance. I think the non-dom one is an interesting kind of thing about a broader point. Now, the way we tax non-doms, I think, was actually a bit silly. the whole concept of non-dom is really archaic and old-fashioned it like depends on where your father was born um and a whole bunch of circumstances which really the tax system shouldn't be caring about so the idea of getting rid of that concept and saying actually i don't care where your dad was born what i care about is how long you've lived in this country i think that kind of reform to the system was a good idea it was always a question really of you have people that aren't inside the uk tax system if you've been here for 80 years you should be inside the UK tax system how do you get from outside to inside that's really the question how quickly do you bring somebody in and I agree with you if you bring them in so quickly that you lose money you should stop doing that I think what's happened is that what started off more like let's reform the system has become more let's get more money from this group and you know we have it's possible we've got to the point where we're losing money so what you don't want to do is say if we bring in money here to invest you'll be worse off than if you leave it outside the country I think that's a problem and that's that's often a that was a feature of the old system we used to have i think really a residence-based system that kind of says when you move here we won't immediately bring your your non-uk income into tax but over time in some staged fashion we will start to bring it in makes sense then the debate is is it four years or eight years is it smooth and if they get four years first and then they go what have you gained yeah well in some ways nothing and that's fine right i don't i don't think the aim here should be to try to get everyone paying all tax on the uk the minute they get here i think it is partly a it's partly a fairness in the long run issue it's partly just a practical what can you get how can you balance the desire for fairness relative to people who've lived here all their lives but also not wanting to discourage people who want to sell businesses here so let's turn now to the rachel reeves conundrum which is how do you balance the books how do you deal with the fiscal black hole i just like this kind of first what is your assessment of the scale of what she's going to have to do this autumn the blackness of the hole the blackness exactly i hate the black hole in some ways.

17:09I mean, I think we don't know yet. And the reason we don't know is because what's going to really matter for Rachel Reeves is, in some sense, not even really what happens in five years time. It's the OBR's assessment of what's going to happen relative to their assessment in March. And actually, even relatively small changes in the kind of expectation for growth in the next five years can have pretty big effects. So, you know, she had roughly 10 billion pounds of wiggle room against her fiscal rule. She's already given away some of that by not doing the welfare changes, by not doing the winter fuel payments.

17:42Interest rates have gone up, that will shave some more off it because higher interest rates mean we spend more on debt interest. The OBR could easily punch more billions, 10, 20 billions possibly, but they might not. I think it really, and that's not me avoiding the question, I think we really don't know until the OBR has decided. And one of the reasons it's particularly uncertain right now is because data and the quality in the UK is pretty bad and the OBR is looking at recent data and trying to say well are things getting better or worse and the data quality is bad and therefore they're not they're not quite sure I think we can all reasonably expect that it's gonna be bad news not good news there is a world in which she gets really lucky and something really good happens and growth surprises on the upside it's not you know it's not impossible it's obviously more likely than not at this point that things get worse for Rachel Reeves but I don't think we know whether it's you know 20 billion or 30 billion pounds worse and that makes quite a big difference but i think we can reasonably expect that she needs to do some kind of fiscal consolidation which basically just means you've got to cut spending or you've got to raise taxes can i just put to you something that a former labor person who was in number 10 uh said to me he said the one area where liz truss was completely right was to talk about the idea that the obr runs the economy and that you can't do anything without OBR approval.

18:59Politicians take the risks. They've got to make the judgments. And if they get them wrong, the voters can kick them out at the next election. It shouldn't be the OBR. It should be Rachel Reeves able to make her decisions regardless. And I agree. But I think it is Rachel Reeves. I think the OBR is not legally stopping her. I mean, she could say, I'm going to borrow more money. And the OBR would say, OK, and that means debt's going to be on an ever-increasing path. And the market would then probably say, OK, well, I'm going to charge you higher interest rates. In that sense, it's not that she can't do these things.

19:27You can borrow more, you can pay more for it. It's not that she can't do it. It's just that the OBR helps the rest of us transparently see the effects of that and would help people who are voting for her or lending money for her see the effects of that. I think that imposes a constraint. The OBR's not stopping her. I suppose the big tax-cutting budget of the early Thatcher years, where there was the big cuts in income tax, an OBR then would have said, oh my God, you can't do this, you're add to debt. Would have scared a politician out of action. Yeah, whereas Thatcher backs, this is going to unleash animal spirits to boost, turbocharge the economy, etc, etc.

20:03What you can't easily do now, I guess what Liz Truss kind of tried, is say, we're going to cut taxes. I'm not going to tell you how we're going to pay for it. We're just going to hope that it pays for itself. And there's no evidence for that, but we're going to just, you know, hope it does. And we're going to throw out the institution as we go and it'll all be OK. And it wasn't the OBR that stopped her doing that. It was just the market decided, OK, if that's what you're doing, we're going to charge you more for lending to you. So in that sense, the OBR wasn't the constraint on that. Politicians were allowed to do it and they just found out that it's not a very appealing thing to do.

20:34Alan, is there something staring you in the face? Really obvious, easy tax rise in October? Not politically, because that's not your problem. In some sense, yeah, I mean, raising taxes is really easy. I mean, you can just put a penny on income tax. You get seven billion pretty quickly. Put two pennies on, you get 14 billion. I mean, raising tax is not difficult. It's actually very easy. You could, you know, you could increase it by a few percentage points. You could increase VAT. You could increase. I mean, we just cut national insurance fairly recently from 12 % to 8%. We could undo those four percentage point cuts.

21:05So the point is, there's a lot of income and consumption in the country. Putting taxes on that income and consumption raises money pretty quickly. It only really gets difficult if you suddenly say, I'm not going to tax most people's incomes or most people's consumption or profits. and then it's hard because you're scrabbling around for all the small taxes which are small because there's a small number of pounds that you're taxing and you have to do that for a lot to get some money so yeah I think raising taxes is actually pretty easy it's the mechanically it's the politics I think what this government and actually recent governments have really lacked which is kind of coming home to roost is kind of a vision for the tax system we've got really hung up in talking about could we raise a few more billion here or there which economically is really easy what we haven't done is the tax system is a mess we raise a trillion pounds in a way that's actually pretty bad for growth that's unfair in all sorts of ways and we try and cherry pick off individual changes like taxing farmers and i wonder why people get angry that you've picked them off rather than saying here's what a good system would look like a good end goal and let's move towards that and we could do that in a way that raised no more or less money or gave money away or increased money but we don't talk at all about like the structure of how we get this trillion pounds we talk about if we had to get 5, 10, 15 more billion.

22:22How could we do it where the exam question is you can't use any of your main tools. You have to do this fiddly thing behind the scenes. That seems like a really silly exam question in some sense. I'll stop my rant there. That was brilliant. Brilliant rant. It was really interesting. Thank you very much indeed. Now, back in May, we were told there was an epidemic of bad bosses using the legal system to cover up bad things. Well, the government is acting on it. And in a moment, the minister responsible.

22:58this is the news agents what has become secretly a quiet sort of pandemic is the fact that confidentiality is used by people in power and when i say people in power i think a really good job has been done in the last six seven years of showing high profile non-disclosure agreements and the harm that they hide but that every scandal essentially there is an NDA at the root I think Labour would be making a very dangerous mistake not to move on this because as as we've discussed and as Louise Haig also has been saying quite openly there is no reason there is no ethical moral legal reason why this can't happen.

23:47Back in May, you might remember hearing from Zelda Perkins. She was the PA to Harvey Weinstein. She witnessed his attempted rape of a colleague and she was under an NDA for nearly two decades. And when she broke it to me a few years ago, she began to make it her life's work, I guess it's fair to say, to release women from what we now know as gagging clauses, from being forbidden to speak about things that they know have happened in the workplace because of powerful bosses, usually men, who do not want them to speak out. And when she came on the newsagents, she was giving the government quite a hard time for not acting on this, for not being a bit more front-footed about a malpractice that was, she thought, affecting thousands of employees who didn't know how to act upon it.

24:46And overnight, in the last 24 hours, that has changed and the government has decided that it has to take this seriously. Justin Madders, who is Minister at the Department of Business and Trade, is with us now. What happened justin well i think i think it's fair to say that we always had sympathy with the case celda and many other campaigners indeed mps had been making we always wanted to do something but it was actually about designing something that would actually deliver the best results for victims there's an important balance here that we had to consider about where the line is drawn between those people who have wrongly been prevented from speaking out in the past and those people who just want to put it behind them and actually sign a gagging clause and move on.

25:38Wait, why would you want to sign a gagging clause? Well, some people have just found the experience so traumatic. They just want to sort of forget about it and move away. And there is a number of people who have said that that is what they want. What was happening, though, I think that's very clear from what Zelda said, is that people were just having these thrust upon them. whether they wanted to speak out or not. And there was no real free choice in this. There was a lot of pressure put on people. It was effectively a condition of any settlement for wrongdoing. And we think that the consequence of that has been that victims have been silenced, as Campaign Can't Buy Me Silence has always said.

26:20But also the perpetrators have not been challenged because the pattern of abuse has been allowed to continue because rather than address the poor behaviour in the first place, businesses have taken the option of resolving that individual complaint. That has, I'm afraid, and there's many examples of it, meant that those that were in the wrong in the first place have continued impunity. So we think that allowing victims to be able to speak out in this way will put an awful lot more onus on employers to get their house in order to actually tackle the root cause of the problem, which is the unacceptable behaviour.

26:57You said you had to find the balance. I just wonder what the countervailing argument was against it. You didn't get calls from bad bosses saying, I want to carry on to you. I mean, that is essentially the issue, that no business is going to go around and say, we want to defend our bad behaviour. We want to cover this all up. But we had to think about how we deal with situations where people do genuinely want to keep it private. And there are circumstances when that happens. We have to think about how we treat people who might not be directly employed, because we know in particular in some industries, lots of freelancers and self-employed people are affected by this as well.

27:36And also what we do about people who have been witnesses to these issues who may have also been caught up in it as well. So there was a wide range of considerations we had to factor in. As you know, lawyers like to take their time to get things. But this does apply. I mean, this does apply to freelancers and this does apply to witnesses, right? Like this is world-heeding. And I think that if we're going to do this, we should do it properly. When you say it's our intention, is that not actually in the... No, it is, but there will be secondary regulations to go through the detail. But we've given ourselves a broad enough power to cover all those circumstances.

28:06And it absolutely is our wish to make sure that as many people as possible can recover by this. And is this going to have cross-party support? We hope so. I would be surprised if many people argue against people not being able to speak up when they've been mistreated. There's been examples in the past in other areas where there has been cross-party support on this. We know the Conservatives aren't particularly disposed to improving workers' rights, but I think on this one we will hopefully get everyone on board. Is there a nervousness, do you think, amongst employers who think that it could be open to abuse, that there could be employees who wanted to be vindictive, who wanted to get their bosses' names out into the open, knew nothing was stopping them now?

28:47I mean, there's nothing to stop people doing that. Anyway, this is about when people have actually signed an agreement. And if a business feels that a complaint has been made vexatiously, is not meritorious, they don't have to enter into a negotiation. I mean, that's the point, isn't it? Why would you, I guess, why would you enter into an agreement if you were the boss now? Why? Because you're legally responsible for the actions of your workforce. And if someone has been harassed or discriminated in your employ, you should be taking consequences for that. But do you think they will choose to fight those cases now more readily?

29:19I guess you could say if you were a boss and you feared the publicity, you'd say, right, I'm just going to pay up and that's going to be the end of it. Whereas actually, if you're not putting an end to that and these employees can speak out, would you say, actually, I've got nothing to use. I've got the weight of lawyers behind me. I'm going to fight this. Well, I think there's experience in other jurisdictions, particularly the United States, where similar provisions are already in place. And actually, the evidence is that it hasn't had that effect. And I would hope, actually, that most businesses get the message that if someone is behaving unacceptably, they have to deal with it, not hide behind a raft of lawyers.

29:59So when Zelda was here, she used this phrase, it was very striking, she called it a quiet pandemic of powerful figures misusing NDAs in workplace harassment and abuse cases. Would you be able to put a figure on that? I mean, when she calls it a pandemic, that sounds quite widespread. Well, in my previous life, I was an employment lawyer. So I did lots of settlement agreements where employees have left their employment. And I struggle to think of any occasion when a non-disclosure agreement was not part of the settlement. I think that is something that will change. And you could have a conversation about whether it was absolutely necessary for that to be in there.

30:40But very often it was made, you know, a condition of the deal. And I mean, really, what we want to be able to say as a result of this is that actually businesses are more willing to challenge unacceptable behaviour because they know in future they won't be able to cover it up. They won't be able to get victims silenced. They will actually have to tackle the perpetrators head on. And as we know from the examples that we've heard of in the past, quite often it is one individual, very powerful individual in an organisation who is a serial offender. So, you know, I think that actually what I hope this will do is drive a change in the culture in workplaces where this kind of behaviour is really robustly challenged and called out.

31:22Can we turn the corner with you for a second, Justin? The first story that we've been covering today has been about wealth taxes. Obviously, those comments from Neil Kinnock at the weekend sort of started ball rolling. The government hasn't yet ruled out this idea. Would it be a good idea for the Chancellor to introduce wealth taxes? I mean, you're a business and trade minister, so do you have a sense of that? Well, as a business and trade minister, I'm very definitely not part of the Treasury, and therefore it would be inappropriate for me to provide advice. Would you worry that it would send people scuttling away?