The deputy leader of Reform UK, Richard Tice, has maligned London’s ‘anti-wealth culture’ and called for entrepreneurial risk-taking to be rewarded if the capital and the rest of the UK are to recapture their economic mojo.
Tice, speaking at Spear’s 500 Live, which took place at The Savoy on 6 May, said over-regulation of the financial and planning sectors and excessive taxation on wealth creators in general were among the factors holding London back and creating an environment that was stymying economic growth.
‘That’s been driven from the political class and it’s been catastrophic,’ he said. ‘People say, “Why would I stay there? Why would I pay all these taxes?”’
The Boston and Skegness MP, who splits his time between the UK and Dubai, noted that law and order concerns were also driving internationally wealthy residents away from the capital.
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He told the audience: ‘We need London to be growing at a much faster rate. We need people to be coming to London, not leaving London – the entrepreneurs, the wealth creators, the risk-takers.’
Advocating simplification of business regulations and a corporation tax level of ‘20 per cent or lower’ (compared with a main rate of 25 per cent today), Tice declared: ‘We all want smart and safe regulation in any industry, any walk of life. What we don’t want is the daft dither and delay, and we’ve got far too much of the latter, and that is crowding out the former.
‘We want to celebrate wealth creators, [but] we’ve ended up in a situation where it can become a sort of source of resentment and envy amongst the political class, and that has been disastrous.’
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Tice spoke alongside leading economist Vicky Pryce, chief economic adviser at The Centre for Economics and Business Research, and prominent London property developer John Mulryan, CEO of Ballymore UK. All three agreed that urgent action was required to get London back on track.
Feeding, not starving, London
In recent weeks data has shown double digit-falls in central London property values, while the city is suffering from high unemployment – running at 7.4 per cent compared with a national average of 4.9 per cent.
Pryce described London as Britain’s ‘lacklustre golden goose’. She also described the government’s 2024 £25 billion hike in National Insurance contributions as a ‘complete mistake’ and denounced it as a ‘tax on jobs’.
She did support the government’s attempts at a ‘reset’ in relations with the EU but noted that the effect of Brexit had not been as ‘disastrous’ on financial services as feared.
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‘Despite Brexit and everything else, London still seems to be the number one or two location for investment coming in, and the financial sector has done rather well, despite leaving the EU,’ she said.
Scoring Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ record on managing the UK economy at a five out of 10, Pryce, who formerly worked in government, remained bullish about London’s ‘unique’ legal and financial ecosystem and praised recent deregulation in the City that makes it easier for firms to list on London’s markets.
She voiced fears that London’s Labour mayor, Sir Sadiq Khan, is preparing to use powers to levy a £350 million per year tourist tax on overnight visitors to the capital.
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‘Do we really want to charge people to come here when we depend on them coming here?’ asked Pryce, who also called for the expansion of Heathrow Airport. ‘It affects the rest of the country as well as being a hub that earns a great deal of money for the UK as a whole,’ she said. ‘London is the treasure that we absolutely need to continue to feed, because if London were to go then the rest of the country would suffer hugely.’
Bending over backwards to attract wealth
Mulryan pointed to the collapse in home building in London – last year construction began on just 4,550 homes, 72 per cent lower than 2023/24 – and blamed it in part on rising costs put on developers by local governments, as well as the impact of inflation.
He called for the scrapping of stamp duty on property transactions – which can rise to 19 per cent for overseas buyers acquiring second homes in London’s golden postcodes – and replacing it with a simpler property tax.
This, he said, would free up the housing market by allowing people to move and encouraging international buyers to invest more readily in London property.
[See also: Multi-million-pound stamp duty bills prompting super-prime renovation boom]
Mulryan also called for a rethink of the tax regime in response to the departure of hundreds of former non-doms.
‘If you look at other countries around the world, they’re bending over backwards to try and attract wealth and wealth creators to their countries,’ Mulryan said. ‘The non-dom change was a mistake.’
Mulryan also noted that it sent out the wrong message. ‘Some people have left, but how many people haven’t come that would have otherwise come? It’s the same topic as when we talk about how financial services haven’t collapsed post-2016 – have they grown at the rate they should have grown at?
‘It’s not just about maintaining what we have, it’s about looking to how we grow things. How do we attract more wealth? How do we attract more investment? I think when you send out messages that we’re going to have higher tax, [that] we’re attacking wealthy people – all those kind of messages are probably more damaging than the economics of it.’
Will it get worse before it gets better?
The panel agreed that London’s former success had led to complacency.
‘It’s just taken for granted that it will always thrive,’ said Tice, who warned that some international investors now regard London as ‘a great place to go on holiday but becoming completely uninvestable’.
‘It’s a competitive world out there, and people are ever more mobile. Capital is ever more mobile, and the consequences of that is London hasn’t grown at the rate that it should have done.’
Asked how long he thought it would take to return London to where it was, he added: ‘I fear it’s going to get worse before it gets better. But if you’ve got the right direction of travel, the right leadership, the right pro-business, pro-growth, pro-wealth creation attitude, then I think four to seven years is a sort of time frame that I think many people would think is realistic.’
[See also: Most wealthy UK residents expect more income from abroad, Investec study finds]
During the discussion there was also time for Tice to respond to questions regarding his own tax affairs, which were first raised last month amid scrutiny from the Sunday Times and tax expert Dan Neidle – who was interviewed at Spear’s 500 Live later in the day.
Neidle has alleged that companies controlled by Tice may not have paid around £98,000 in tax that was due on income from a property business that Tice also runs. Tice said Neidle’s coverage was ‘full of wrong assumptions, wrong numbers, wrong dates’.
‘[I]n a sense, what they’re trying to do is to smear and attack and, frankly, libel people. We just ignore it. We push on.’
[See also: The Spear’s Tax & Trust Indices]
Tice added that a previous ‘politically motivated tax investigation into me’ revealed that he had actually overpaid tax, to the tune of ‘a five-figure sum’.
Asked to point to any specific errors in Neidle’s analysis, Tice said: ‘Are we going to check our numbers? Of course, you know, when you employ advisers and you ask them to do a job, they do the job most of the time. They get it right. Occasionally, they might get it wrong. If they get it wrong, then you look at it and correct it.
‘The key point is: what do we want from our key wealth creators, and what do we want from our key politicians? And if you want really successful people to help run London, to help run this country, then we’ve got to celebrate success. Celebrate wealth creators, celebrate people who’ve built thousands of homes, as opposed to drive them out of the world of leadership, of the world of politics.’
Find out more
Spear’s 500 Live is the premier live event for private client professionals and leading figures from the private wealth and family office ecosystem. The 2026 edition took place on 6 May at The Savoy in London.
Spear’s 500 Live was presented in association with our partners the Charities Aid Foundation, CMB Monaco, Guernsey Finance, HCA Healthcare UK, Payne Hicks Beach, Riverstone, Scott Dunn Private and Stewardship.
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