Tax Prats and Citizen Stakeholders
| Published date | 01 June 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663915574013 |
| Author | Wendy Bradley |
| Date | 01 June 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Tax Prats and Citizen
Stakeholders:
Professionalism
in the Gap Between
Tax Priority Setting
and Tax Policymaking
Wendy Bradley
Sheffield University, UK
Abstract
The 2010 UK coalition government set itself four priorities for tax policymaking: to
make the UK tax system more competitive, simpler, greener and fairer. This study uses
data from tax information and impact notes, a new application of impact assessment
methodology, to assess progress towards these goals. Findings show in 2010–2013 a
third of tax changes did not contribute to any of the goals, a quarter related to fairness
and a fifth to simplification. Whilst competitiveness was poorly served in number of
measures, it was significant in terms of tax foregone as a result, and external assess-
ments of UK competitiveness mean it could be argued the objective has been achieved.
Green measures were fewer than 7% of any fiscal event and the green objective has
been quietly dropped. The article goes on to examine the differing understanding of tax
objectives between tax professionals and the wider public and argues that othering
non-professionals as ‘tax prats’ should cease in favour of inclusion of ‘citizen
stakeholders’.
Keywords
Citizen stakeholders, impact assessment, simplification, tax, TIINs
Corresponding author:
Wendy Bradley, Department of Law, Sheffield University, West Bank, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK.
Email: lwp12wb@sheffield.ac.uk
Social & Legal Studies
2015, Vol. 24(2) 203–224
ªThe Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0964663915574013
sls.sagepub.com
Introduction
If a government fails to do what it says it will, who calls it to account? There is a
continuum of reliability in government utterance. At the one end, there are commit-
ments that are firm enough that failure to achieve them might lead to judicial
review, and at the other end there are election promises that are, like Samuel Gold-
wyn’s apocyryphal verbal contract, ‘not worth the paper they’re written on’. In this
article, I consider the coalition government’s initial statement of priorities for the
tax system and analyse the material it produces which enable us to track its progress
towards those priorities, with results showing a gap between promise and achieve-
ment. I go on to consider the language used in contemporary discussions of these
results and other tax issues and postulate that there are two discussions taking place
in parallel. In discourse among tax professionals, there appears to be a common
understanding of the meaning of the objectives the government has set itself,
whereas outside of this magic circle the ordinary citizen can find themselves
excluded from the discussion because they, literally, do not speak the same lan-
guage. This can lead to the general public’s dissatisfaction with the results of tax
policymaking being dismissed by the tax professionals as unfounded – rather than,
perhaps, being the result of a different discussion entirely.
The second section of this article outlines the changes to the tax policymaking pro-
cess introduced by the coalition government, particularly the changes to cost/benefit
analysis from regulatory impact assessment (IA) to the new process of publishing
‘tax information and impact notes’ (TIINs). The third section analyses the TIINs
from 2010 to 2013 and examines the relative emphasis given in practice to each of
the four commitments entered into by the coalition. It finds that the work on ‘com-
petitiveness’ could arguably be said to be concluded, that the commitment to a
‘greener’ and ‘simpler’ tax system is not evidenced and that the apparent consistency
of the commitment to ‘fairness’ may be illusory. The fourth section looks at some
possible explanations for these tentative findings grounded in the consultation pro-
cess and in particular at who has a seat at the consultation table. It concludes by ques-
tioning whether the tax professional is the only voice to which government should be
listening and asking if the ordinary citizen, without an understanding of the techni-
calities of tax or of tax policymaking, nevertheless needs to be on board with the
direction of travel for tax changes. Should the citizen become, in fact, a ‘citizen sta-
keholder’ in the tax policymaking process.
Tax Policymaking
The Coalition Government’s New Approach
In May 2010, the new coalition government published a number of papers documenting
the agreement between the governing Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties.
Together these form a kind of post hoc election manifesto, setting out what the two coali-
tion partners agreed they would try to achieve in government. Detailed policy objectives
were set out in The Coalition: our programme for government (HM Government, 2010)
covering 31 policy areas, alphabetically, from banking to universities.
204 Social & Legal Studies 24(2)
To continue reading
Request your trial