Opportunity missed - they had a great chance to rip the whole thing up after the shambles of Boris and Truss. Instead it appears they set up a few focus groups and tried to govern based on the feedback from those. They caved in on their one progressive tax policy relating to inheritance/wealth.
For thirty years the UK built a tax system that rewards owning assets and punishes working for a living.
Council tax in England is still based on property valuations from 1991. A house bought cheaply decades ago, then renovated, extended and inflated in value tenfold, is often taxed as if it barely changed. Meanwhile wages are taxed immediately and relentlessly.
The result is upside-down:
- The worker pays income tax and national insurance on every payslip.
- The renter pays the council tax.
- The landlord benefits from rising property values they didn’t create.
- Empty homes appreciate while contributing little back.
- There are over 1 million empty homes in the UK, so why is property so expensive?
- Wealth stored in property compounds across generations with far lighter taxation than labour.
A person can become rich purely by sitting on an asset in London while someone earning decent money through work gets hammered from every angle — income tax, frozen thresholds, student loans, childcare cliffs, impossible rents.
The system taxes effort more heavily than accumulation.
That creates a divide between:
- people who earn well but own nothing, and
- people who own assets and no longer need to work.
The asset owner gets richer while asleep because housing scarcity pushes prices up. The worker has to run faster every year just to stand still.
And because housing costs absorb so much income, younger people delay or abandon milestones entirely:
- can’t afford children,
- can’t afford a home,
- can’t afford both.
This means the economy is now entirely reliant on immigration.
The problem isn’t that older generations bought homes cheaply. Fair play to them.
The problem is that governments never modernised how property and wealth are taxed after prices exploded. They left a system designed for a completely different economy:
- no proper property revaluation,
- weak taxation of land wealth,
- huge incentives for property speculation,
- heavy taxation on labour instead.
So capital floods into housing instead of productive investment. Workers become poorer relative to asset owners. Wealth concentrates upward across generations.
The UK economy increasingly rewards passive ownership over productive work, and the balance is now broken.
If I'm a 25 year old college graduate, there's no jobs for me because of AI.
I can go to my GP, say I've got x mental health issue.
Get universal credit, food, rent, car (motability) covered.
I can get on with having kids then, and do all that without needing to work.
I'd be better off doing that, financially, than going to work in Tesco, or in another low paid role.
The arse is falling out of the workforce, because it doesn't pay people to get up in the morning.
fullfact.org
