Andy Burnham's likely fiscal agenda risks triggering the largest outflow of mobile capital and entrepreneurial talent from the UK in a generation.
That warning comes from Nigel Green, CEO of global financial advisory giant deVere Group, as the UK’s presumptive next prime minister eyes a bolstered budget later this year, with allies urging a land tax as one strand of a broader interventionist push.
Nigel Green’s intervention comes as Britain is already grappling with its worst run of wealth departures on record.
Henley & Partners estimates the country lost around 16,500 millionaires in 2025 alone, taking an estimated 91.8 billion dollars in wealth with them, a bigger single-year loss than any nation has recorded since such tracking began.
Tax now consumes roughly 37% of GDP, the heaviest burden since the late 1940s, while the FTSE 100 has essentially flatlined over the past decade against a 183% surge in the S&P 500. Eighty-eight companies delisted from the London Stock Exchange in a single year.
Against that backdrop, the deVere CEO argues, a Burnham government stacking a land or property value tax on top of talk of expanded public ownership and a single mega-budget sends exactly the wrong signal to the people and businesses the UK can least afford to lose.
He says: “Britain doesn’t need another headline reform. It needs a reason for its wealth creators to stay.
“Bundling a new property levy, a bigger state footprint in utilities and a once-in-a-parliament budget into a few autumn weeks isn’t bold governance, it’s a stress test on the confidence of exactly the people whose capital keeps this economy moving.
“Confidence, once broken, doesn't return on command.”
Nigel Green points to previous experiments with wealth-linked taxation elsewhere in Europe as a cautionary tale.
France’s now-abolished solidarity wealth tax and Sweden’s earlier wealth levy both coincided with meaningful capital flight and aggressive tax planning among the mobile rich, even if economists still argue over the precise scale of the effect.
“France tried this. Sweden tried this. Both eventually walked it back, after watching entrepreneurs, family capital and long-term investment quietly relocate faster than any minister predicted. Governments always underestimate how mobile wealth has become and how little patience it has for uncertainty.
“The UK would not be pioneering anything here. It would be repeating a well-documented mistake with better technology to help people leave faster.”
On the land tax specifically, reports suggest economists close to Burnham are pushing for an annual levy of roughly 1% on property value, replacing Council Tax and Stamp Duty outright.
Supporters call it fairer and harder to dodge than a tax on income or transactions.
Nigel Green counters that homeowners and business owners with property-rich, cash-poor balance sheets, including entrepreneurs who have built value into premises rather than salary, would face an entirely new and recurring liability with little notice to plan around it.
He comments: “A 1% annual charge on property value sounds modest until you're the business owner who built equity into a building rather than a bank account, or the family whose home has appreciated on paper but whose income hasn’t moved in a decade. This isn't a tax on speculation. It’s a tax on staying still.
“For anyone with assets and options, that maths gets run within days, not years."
The timing compounds the risk. Non-dom departures accelerated sharply after last year's reforms, and Henley's most recent data shows British citizens now make up close to half of all applications the firm processes from UK addresses, a tenfold jump in the client base since 2018.
The deVere CEO believes a bolstered budget carrying tax reform on this scale, delivered in one sitting rather than staged over successive fiscal events, could tip hesitation into action for thousands more.
“We’re already watching British nationals, not just foreign non-doms, actively plan their exit in numbers we haven't seen before. A single autumn budget that confirms every fear about property taxation and state expansion at once won't slow that. It will accelerate it.
“The families and founders currently weighing their options will simply stop weighing and start moving. The reported plans could trigger biggest wealth flight in generation
Nigel Green stresses that devolution and utility reform, taken on their own, are unlikely to alarm investors in the same way.
It’s the combination, in his view, of an untested land tax, an expanded state footprint in essential infrastructure, and greater borrowing, all landing in a single autumn statement, that turns policy ambition into a flight risk for the wealth and enterprise Britain depends on to fund public services in the first place.
He says: “Devolution alone doesn’t frighten capital. Neither does a firmer hand on failing utilities. It's the stacking that does the damage, three or four structural changes landing in the same afternoon, with no time for markets or families to adjust.
“If Burnham wants reform without flight, sequencing matters as much as substance. Right now, sequencing doesn’t appear to be part of the conversation.”