The tax burden

Britain needs to decide what kind of tax system it wants. A much simpler one would be nice. Failing that, if the state insists on things being ridiculously complicated, it ought to make it easy to get help. Today, however, we can reveal that more than four million calls to HM Revenue & Customs went unanswered in the past year – amounting to more than one in 10. The Public Accounts Committee of MPS says that in many cases callers probably hung up because of long waiting times. Fourteen per cent of those who got through faced a delay of over 10 minutes.

The men and women hit hardest by this are the self-employed. The number of self-employed Britons has risen by 1.5 million since 2001. For some it is a necessity, but more often it’s a canny exploitation of the internet and the falling costs of doing business. Britain should encourage these new entrepreneurs, not penalise them, and traditionally the Tories have been on their side.

But this newspaper fought tooth-and-nail last year against a Conservative plan to raise national insurance contributions for the self-employed. The headache of filing taxes and getting help from HMRC is another example of the unnecessary roadblocks put in front of those who aspire to work for themselves.

There are two ways forward. The Government could reverse cuts made to staff in the context of its relentless focus on digital tax returns. Or, if it wants to save money, it could take the bold step of actually seeking to make paying one’s taxes easier by cutting down the forms, rules and red tape. The logical direction of travel is to make taxes simpler, then flatter, and then, best of all, as low as humanly possible.