There is a particular kind of person this government seems to resent: the one who takes a risk, starts something, employs people, and tries to build a little wealth for their family. From April 2026, Labour is going after them again. The Business Asset Disposal Relief rate — the relief that rewards people for building a company — jumps from 14% to 18%. Dividend tax rates climb 2%. And the freeze on income tax thresholds now stretches all the way to 2031.

Taxing the People Who Build Britain

Business Asset Disposal Relief exists for a reason. When someone spends twenty years building a firm — missing family time, remortgaging the house, lying awake worrying about payroll — the country says: when you sell, you keep more of what you built. Raising that rate punishes exactly the people we should be cheering on. It tells the next generation of founders that success will be taxed harder the moment they achieve it.

Combine it with the dividend tax rise and you have a clear message to every small business owner in the country: Labour sees your enterprise not as something to encourage, but as something to extract from.

The Stealth Tax Nobody Voted For

Then there's fiscal drag — the quiet robbery. The personal allowance has been frozen at £12,570 since 2021, and the freeze now runs to 2031. As wages rise with inflation, more and more workers are dragged into higher tax bands without a single rate being announced. The Chancellor never has to stand up and say "I'm raising your taxes." She just leaves the thresholds where they are and lets inflation do the dirty work.

It is the most cowardly form of taxation there is: a rise by stealth, hitting nurses, electricians and teachers who got a modest pay rise and find the taxman has pocketed a chunk of it. A tax rise you didn't vote for and the government won't admit to is still a tax rise.

The Wealth Creators Are Voting With Their Feet

None of this happens in a vacuum. Britain is already watching entrepreneurs and investors look abroad, to lower-tax jurisdictions that actually want them. Every founder who leaves takes their jobs, their investment and their tax revenue with them. You cannot punish success and expect to keep it. The Treasury's own behaviour suggests it has never understood this basic point.

What Reform UK Would Do

Reform UK would raise the income tax threshold to £20,000, taking millions of low earners out of tax altogether and ending the fiscal-drag stealth raid. We would back business owners instead of bleeding them, keeping reliefs that reward genuine enterprise and risk. And we would send a different message entirely: if you build something in Britain, Britain is on your side.

Growth doesn't come from squeezing the productive. It comes from letting them keep enough of the reward to keep going. Labour has forgotten that. Reform hasn't.