Jeff Whitton

@CliveJonesMP I would be grateful if you would reply to my message and email Clive.

Small Business Saturday is a brilliant annual event, celebrating the resilience of small businesses in our community. In Twyford, I had the pleasure of visiting Dolphin Brewery, Glass.Half.Full, La Fontana, H F Newbury and the Rural Pie Company to discuss issues that owners face.

@CliveJonesMP Would you be kind enough to follow me? I am a Wokingham constituent and lead a medium sized business employing over 1,000 people (HQ in Wokingham). I have emailed you but welcome the opportunity to raise an issue with you. Kind regards. Jeff

@DanNeidle Will BADR now apply on sale to EOT?

Budget thread. Basically this is it:

@Peston But what are "ordinary" employer pension contributions?

Significant reform of how pension contributions are made via "salary sacrifice" won't be implemented till 2029, a general election year, when it will raise £4.7bn. Here is what the OBR says about it: "Salary-sacrificed pension contributions above an annual £2,000 threshold will no longer be exempt from NICs from April 2029. This means that salary-sacrificed pension contributions above £2,000 will be treated as ordinary employee pension contributions in the tax system and therefore be subject to both employer and employee NICs. Ordinary employer pension contributions will remain exempt from NICs. The policy results in an increase in NICs which is estimated to raise £4.7 billion in 2029-30 and £2.6 billion in 2030-31."

@DannyKudos @LizHunterReward Good point!

@LizHunterReward Assuming CGT is charged at point of sale, this will kill sales to EOTs as most founders paid slowly over years via deferred consultation.

Big #tax change re reduction in relief for sale to EOT #EmployeeOwnership #Budget2026

@LizHunterReward Would BADR apply against the other 50%?

@RobNoLastName It is nothing to do with being her main home. It is now the only home she owns.

Rayner reportedly saved £40,000 in stamp duty on her Brighton and Hove flat by claiming it as her main home. For council tax, she told the local authority it’s her second home. This isn’t the first time she’s flipped her home designation and received tax benefits as a result.

@ZiaYusufUK You are going to pay Afghanistan significant money to take back people who fled their regime? They will be financially motivated to make more people flee!

I was just told by BBC Radio 4 that the £2 billion Reform has budgeted to do returns deals with countries to take back their illegals was a “drop in the ocean to these countries”. Fact check: £2 billion is 15% of Afghanistan’s GDP.

@fairylights22 @KirstieMAllsopp You can reclaim the higher amount of stamp duty paid on your new home when you sell your original home.

@KirstieMAllsopp I’m a carer for my partner who is a wheelchair user. I have to pay £20,000 in stamp duty bc I am unable to sell my property & buy straight away due to adaptations that will need doing to new home. Discrimination on disabled people who need things in place before they can move.

Wow, if Angela Rayner’s holiday home by the sea was £700,000 she would have paid £60K in Stamp Duty, if it was £800,000 as some papers are saying the stamp duty would have been £70K, either way at least she’ll have understood how much you have to pay in SDLT if you buy a 2nd home

@Richard49475 @andythorby @lewis_goodall The average persons “kids” are probably near pension age by the time they die. Inheritance is not usually about giving your kids a good start in life.

Saying nobody “deserves” to inherit completely ignores why people work in the first place. Most people don’t grind away for decades just for themselves they do it to give their kids a better start. That instinct is universal and it drives effort, saving and responsibility. If the state swoops in and says “your kids don’t deserve what you built,” it punishes exactly the behaviour society should want more of. Billionaires will always protect theirs. It’s nurses, teachers and shopkeepers who get told their lifetime of effort means nothing because their children “don’t deserve” it. That isn’t fairness. It’s a contemptuous way of telling working families their hard graft belongs to the Treasury, not to the people they love.

Globally, we're moving back towards an aristocracy of wealth, more akin to the 19th century than the 20th. Anyone who cares about social justice, about moving away from higher and higher levels of taxation on work, should be very concerned. Time to do something about it.

@wallaceme It’s about proportionality. As a businessman I would prefer a higher proportion of total tax take to come from inheritance than it currently does with a decrease in income tax, particularly for lower and middle earners. Surely that makes more sense?

Bogus idea 1) issue is not whether a child has a right to inherit, it’s whether people have a right to spend their own money as they wish Bogus idea 2) he claims IHT incentivises moral goods like work - in truth it penalises moral goods like saving + looking after loved ones

@ZiaYusufUK About 30% of that increase is straight wage inflation over last 7 years. And pre Brexit, we were paying the EU about £17 billion - a portion of that towards EU civil service that clearly had to be replicated in the UK once outside of the union. That combination is the difference.

The annual salary bill for the civil service has grown 60% to over £15 billion in the last 7 years. The only part of the British economy that’s booming is the soul-crushing bureaucracy paid for by taxpayers.

@Alan57623976 @DanNeidle @PrivateEyeNews Yes, groups gross assets are less than the threshold.

@jeff_whitton @DanNeidle @PrivateEyeNews Though just playing devil's advocate, it could be a lot of intra-group balances which eliminate on consolidation and the group remains small?

Today's little mystery: how come three of Lord Ashcroft's companies haven't filed their accounts for last year?

@DanNeidle @PrivateEyeNews But the balance sheet is in the negative?

@jeff_whitton @PrivateEyeNews 50 employees and £7.5m balance sheet = no longer small. Don’t need turnover.

@DanNeidle @PrivateEyeNews They are just abbreviated accounts with no indication of turnover though?

@jeff_whitton @PrivateEyeNews it's in the accounts

@DanNeidle @PrivateEyeNews Out of interest, how does James know the size of the group?

@PrivateEyeNews And James Rylatt on LinkedIn spotted that the 2023 unaudited accounts suggest this is a group that's of the size that it should now be filing audited accounts.

@mtgreenee They are not doing it very well. It’s baking here!

First, they said we were crazy for saying they are controlling the weather and spraying chemicals in our skies. Now, they are admitting that they are controlling the weather and spraying chemicals in our skies, BUT that it’s not causing any harm. Call me crazy, I don’t care. but I’ll go ahead and say it. Weather modification and geoengineering is deadly and dangerous. And guess what, they can’t prove it’s not. My bill will ban weather modification and geoengineering. The government and companies who profit off of these practices don’t get to control our weather because we are all affected by it. We aren’t lab rats and weather is not a controlled environment.

@aarongillett @dontdelay Not surprising at all, although not relevant to the vast majority of businesses. If a policy of wealth tax were to be introduced, (there is not at the moment), we don’t know what the policy on business valuations may be.

@jeff_whitton @dontdelay It might sound surprising if you haven’t much experience with startups, but often valuations are higher when there’s no revenue let alone profit.

Question for supporters of a wealth tax. Assume I have a £200,000 tax bill because someone has (somehow) valued my private company at £20m If I have to sell shares in order to meet pay it, and realise a capital gain in doing so, are you still expecting me to pay capital gains tax too? Because then I’d have to sell more shares to pay tax on the gains I made selling shares to pay tax. And repeat

@LokisHuman @dontdelay Understood. You can carry forward capital losses, so there could be a similar solution for wealth losses. The reality is once one wealthy, it is very easy to accumulate further wealth without doing much. Something needs to change, but not sure what that should look like.

@jeff_whitton @dontdelay Sorry I didn't mean You you, I meant the universal you. I think trying to tax people on unrealised gains or assets is a bad idea & amounts to little more than theft. They certainly wouldn't return the money if the company went bankrupt & the shares ended up worth nothing.

@LokisHuman @dontdelay I haven’t said I want to do anything or agree with the idea. But I have said it’s a relatively small number compared to corporation tax, so shouldn’t require the sale of shares. And it is not currently a policy. But good to debate whether it would impact growth if we had details.

@jeff_whitton @dontdelay If you want to hobble the company & prevent inward investment & growth it is a fine plan. Holding shares in companies shouldn't be the basis for calculating tax. CGT will get taken at sale. The company is paying tax on profit + VAT. If you can grow the company more tax & VAT.