The Rich List is an opportunity for people to question the extreme levels of wealth and inequality in our country. Our data presents a very clear picture that vast fortunes are being accumulated at the expense of everyone else - and by not properly taxing this wealth, the country is missing out on billions of pounds of investment.
Dr Ben Tippet, King's College London
20 May 2025
A 2% wealth tax on UK's richest could have raised £160 billion in 32 years
Report is the first dynamic analysis of a wealth tax on the UK wealth distribution.
A new study on the Sunday Times Rich List has revealed that the UK could have raised billions of pounds every year with a ‘wealth tax’ on the most wealthy.
Dr Ben Tippet, Lecturer in Economics and Wealth Inequality at King's College London, tracked every family on the Rich List from 1994 to 2025 to calculate how the wealth of the UK’s very richest people could have contributed more to the economy.
He said at least £160 billion could have been raised for the UK’s public finances over the past three decades if UK tax residents on the annual rich lists had been asked to pay a two per cent wealth tax on their assets over £10 million.
Funded by the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust, the report shows even with the two per cent tax deducted from the wealth of the very richest tax residents on the Rich List - roughly the top 0.001% - their share of total UK wealth would have nearly doubled to almost three per cent over the last three decades.
This year’s Rich List has a combined total wealth of £772 billion - more than 557% more in real terms than in 1994.
Dr Tippet’s analysis suggests if the government had invested and consumed these revenues at the same rate as those on the rich list, it would now have a fund worth £317bn and would have spent an additional £50bn in revenues over the last 32 years.
“Over the past three decades, the richest 250 families have seen their wealth grow on average by 9.1% per year in nominal terms - over double the rate of GDP growth, which was 4.3%,” said Dr Tippet. “Despite the headlines on billionaire wealth growth slowing down, the latest Rich List shows that the top 40 families in the UK now own more wealth than 50% of the population, meanwhile 14.3 million people - including 4.3 million children - are living in poverty in the UK.”
The share of wealth owned by tax residents on the rich list would have still increased from 1.7% to 2.7% even with a 2% wealth tax, he added.
His report differs from other revenue estimates of UK wealth taxes by estimating the dynamic impact of an annual tax on dynastic wealth over time, which is only possible with this long term dataset.
A detailed methodology is available in the report, which can be read here.
And you can hear Dr Tippet on the World: we got this podcast talking about wealth taxes.
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Lecturer in Economics and Wealth Inequality