UK should offer firms five-year tax break to relocate, says fund manager

The Government should introduce a five-year tax break on businesses to encourage them to relocate to the UK, a leading fund manager has said.

Stephen Yiu, head of the Blue Whale Growth Fund, a £1.1 billion portfolio backed by City veteran Peter Hargreaves, said offering the incentive to firms interested in basing their headquarters in the UK would ‘change a lot’. 

He said it would avoid firms with growth potential choosing lower-tax alternatives such as Ireland.

He added that such measures would be ‘cost-effective’ and pose less risk to the Treasury’s finances than more long-term tax cutting measures. 

He added: ‘Companies basing themselves in Ireland should be jumping at the chance to move to London and the rest of the UK but they don’t because our tax regime is not as helpful.’

After leaving the EU, many hoped the UK would reduce its tax rates and regulation to become a ‘Singapore on Thames’ – a low-tax, light-regulation and open-for-business economy that would rival the European Union’s heavily regulated business sectors.

In 2019, entrepreneur Sir Martin Sorrell said that Britain should be ‘Singapore on steroids’.

‘The UK should be the home of Amazon, Google and Facebook, not the regulatory nightmare,’ he said at the time.

Yiu added: ‘A temporary five-year tax break for companies would change a lot and be cost-effective for the Government.’ The comments came as Chancellor Rachel Reeves faced a backlash from businesses last week after unveiling £40 billion worth of tax rises in her October Budget, the majority of which will fall on firms.

Reeves raised the National Insurance rate paid by employers on staff wages from 13.8 per cent to 15 per cent and cut the threshold at which firms start paying it from £9,100 to £5,000 a year. The Chancellor also announced a 6.7 per cent increase in the minimum wage to £12.21 an hour for those 21 and over, while for 18- to 20-year-olds it is going up 16.3 per cent to £10 an hour.

Yiu said that despite its massive tax increase and Reeves’s promise to ‘invest, invest, invest’, her Budget had not ‘raised the growth profile of the UK’.

‘All the money has gone into places that won’t stimulate the economy,’ he added.

Lord Bilimoria, the founder of Cobra Beer and former president of the CBI, said last week that the Budget would do the ‘exact opposite’ of promoting growth.

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