The Conservative Party under Kemi Badenoch

[takno]

I read that and was a bit baffled by it really. I would've thought the greater revenue would come from people whacking their pay into pensions and company cars to reduce their pay to under £100k, especially if they are people who currently benefit from the tax-free childcare which drops off a cliff at £100k. We must lose a significant amount of tax over that.

I don't think many people are avoiding working more hours to avoid the £100k trap; in fact I'm not sure there's that many people working hourly on that kind of gross income, and if they are they're likely invoicing hourly from a limited company and would have other ways of avoiding it anyway, like expensing their commute travel and lunches or giving themselves trivial gifts or maxing the annual social functions allowance, or even having their partner on as a shareholder. So of course the OBR's conclusion is that it wouldn't raise enough revenue via working extra hours.

IR35 has put paid to quite a lot of your suggestions for hourly/daily workers using companies to avoid tax.

The groups you are missing are doctors and various other professionals who are able to cut down to a 4 or 4.5 day week. In the case of doctors they also have the ability to work hourly overtime, and the structure of their pensions makes it quite difficult to even use that as a way to avoid the trap.

I don't have access to the data of course, but it seems entirely believable to me that you could increase tax take by removing the trap. There's a lot of highly trained experienced people starting to reach that ceiling, and if they all realise that they're better off working less and having free time then we're in some significant trouble.

 

[styles]

I think many senior doctors (GPs, Consultants and Senior Registrars) are approaching or over the £100,000 limot once weekend and night working enhancements are included. This has led to some (many?) working part-time so has not to breach the £100,000 limit, which has a consequence on the availability of such doctors.

It would need to be more than just £100k gross mind, given NHS pension member contribution rates are 12.5% over £68k and are salary sacrifice. You'd have to find the clinicians who are paid over £100k after professional membership fees, pension (both the normal contributions plus any additional voluntary contributions), possibly company car from Fleet Solutions, etc have been deducted to find those who would be affected by the tax trap.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 19 Sep 2026 ==

IR35 has put paid to quite a lot of your suggestions for hourly/daily workers using companies to avoid tax.

Even working inside IR35, you can stick £60k a year into a pension - any reputable umbrella company will offer it, so if your financial goal is simply to minimise tax, we'd be talking about inside IR35 contractors who bring in over £160k/year.

 

[Bald Rick]

I think many senior doctors (GPs, Consultants and Senior Registrars) are approaching or over the £100,000 limot once weekend and night working enhancements are included.

Almost all senior doctors are well north of £100k. Many are double that with private work.