Welcome to the new tax year. If you are a working person in Britain, the government has a message for you this month: thank you for your contribution. Now hand over more. April 2026 is the month Labour's stealth tax raid finally hits home — and the bill is being delivered to households who can least afford to pay it.

The Personal Allowance is still £12,570. The higher rate threshold is still £50,270. They have been frozen since 2021/22 and they will stay frozen until at least 2028. While wages rise to chase inflation, more and more ordinary workers are being dragged into higher tax bands without ever getting a pay rise in real terms. The Treasury calls this fiscal drag. The rest of us call it daylight robbery.

Dividend and Capital Gains Tax: Punishing the Risk Takers

From 6 April, dividend tax rates jumped two percentage points across the board. Basic rate from 8.75% to 10.75%. Higher rate from 33.75% to 35.75%. This is a direct hit on every small business owner in the country who takes part of their income as dividends — a perfectly legitimate, perfectly normal way for entrepreneurs to be paid for the risks they take and the jobs they create.

The Capital Gains Tax rate for Business Asset Disposal Relief has gone from 14% to 18%. The lifetime limit is still £1 million, but the bite is now sharper. Anyone who has spent thirty years building a business and is finally ready to sell up and retire will hand a substantially bigger slice to HMRC. This is a tax on aspiration. It is a tax on success. It is precisely the wrong message to send to a country crying out for growth.

Council Tax, Energy, Rents — The Squeeze Tightens

Almost every council in England is putting bills up by 4.99%, the maximum allowed without a referendum. Many in Wales and Scotland are going higher. In Lancashire, families on fixed incomes are watching their council tax bill march up year after year while bin collections become less frequent and potholes get deeper. What exactly are we paying for?

Private rents are now 20% higher on average than when housing benefit was last properly linked to the market. The gap between what people pay and what the state will help with has become a chasm. Energy bills remain crippling. The cost of food, fuel, and basic services keeps creeping. This is the cost-of-living crisis Labour swore they would end. Instead they have entrenched it.

Labour's Big Lie About Working People

Rachel Reeves stood at the despatch box and promised that working people would not see higher taxes. It depends, of course, on what you mean by "working people" and what you mean by "taxes." If you draw a fine enough line, you can claim almost anything. But the truth is staring every wage-earner in the face this month: take-home pay is shrinking. Disposable income is being eroded. The state is taking more, and giving back less.

And what is all this money being spent on? Not on roads, not on policing, not on the armed forces, not on serious infrastructure. It is being spent on a bloated welfare bill, on hotel accommodation for asylum seekers, on consultants for the NHS, and on Net Zero schemes that save no carbon and create no jobs. The British taxpayer is funding their own decline.

What Reform UK Would Do

Reform UK would unfreeze the income tax thresholds and raise the Personal Allowance to £20,000, taking millions of low earners out of income tax entirely. We would scrap the dividend tax rise. We would cut council tax with central government support. We would slash the bloat in Whitehall and stop pouring money into projects that deliver nothing. We would let working people keep more of what they earn.

This is not radical. It is common sense. You cannot tax a country into prosperity. You cannot grow an economy by punishing the people who run businesses, take risks and employ others. Labour does not understand that. Reform UK does.