Wealth. It’s not about the money.
This is how a recent advert from an investment platform begins. The friendly voiceover continues:
It’s the space you always dreamed of and the freedom you always said you’d like. It’s investing in life’s greatest asset. You. It’s choosing how you spend your time and who you spend it with. It’s about everything made possible, even the things you didn’t plan for. Because wealth isn’t about money. It’s the means to more.
It’s one of the most accurate and honest adverts I’ve heard for a while. Rich List chasers aside, aspiring to wealth isn’t about the money for most people. It’s the security to know you can cope with unexpected misfortune like illness or home repairs. It’s the psychological freedom of not having to think carefully about every expenditure, from the weekly shop to larger one-off purchases. It’s the ability to enjoy yourself guilt-free. It’s having the option to take time out from work to study or care for children and not struggle financially. It’s giving your children the opportunity to travel, or take the internships or voluntary roles that get them a foot in the door of their preferred career.
Wealth means security, freedom, access and assurance. For those without wealth, life can be precarious, constrained, and uncertain. For these reasons, wealth inequality is more telling than income inequality. The Biblical principle of Jubilee understood this well – that land, as the primary source of wealth in an agricultural economy, should not be allowed to accrue in perpetuity.
Which? reports that over half (52%) of UK households made at least one adjustment to cover essential spending in the last month. This included dipping into savings (30%) and cutting back on essentials (28%). The cost of living crisis, most sharply felt in food prices and bills, continues to bite. Over a third of households on low incomes had to cut back on essentials – these households are less likely to have savings and are already buying cheaper food, so have fewer choices available when prices increase.
When we look at the very richest families, the wealthiest 40 families have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the population – roughly 34m people. The very rich can afford to pay more in tax, and many want to pay more, to help fund key services and to deal with the cost of living crisis.
Our current tax system allows income from wealth (e.g. property, assets, investments) to be taxed at much lower rates than income from work. The higher rate of Capital Gains Tax is only 24% compared to 45% on Income Tax, and one estimate puts the effective average taxation of wealth at just 4% compared to 33% on work. This encourages those who can to route their income through different sources to pay the lower rates.
As a result, while real average earnings increased by just £16 a week between 2010-2024, UK billionaire wealth has sky-rocketed over the same period from £250 to £620 billion.
The Autumn Budget will be announced on 26th November, and while Rachel Reeves faces difficult choices, she must hold this inequality in mind. As Christians we want to live in a society where everyone can flourish, and particularly where the poorest are cared for – through good things like healthcare, a social safety net, a thriving environment. It is just and right for the super-rich to contribute more to this society through taxing wealth, rather than squeezing at the lower and middle ends or making cuts.
To do this, we are calling for:
- a wealth tax of 2% on assets over £10 million, which would affect 0.04% of the population
- reforms to existing taxes on wealth such as Capital Gains Tax, which would ensure wealth and work are taxed equally
- closing the ‘tax gap’ by properly funding and resourcing HMRC to tackle tax abuse
The Budget should not just be seen a narrow exercise to make numbers add up and fill black holes. This Budget – and every Budget – is an opportunity to seek justice and the common good. It is a statement about what kind of society we want and how we should pay for it.
Email your MP using our easy tool to make the case for taxing wealth in the upcoming Budget:
For further reading: https://taxjustice.uk/campaign/taxing-wealth/
I really appreciate how this post reframes wealth beyond just numbers in a bank account. The reminder that true wealth is about security, freedom, and opportunity resonates deeply—especially when so many people lack those basic assurances. It underscores why discussions about fair taxation and redistributing wealth aren’t about punishment, but about creating a society where everyone has access to that same sense of stability and dignity.
Appreciated this piece — the specifics you included make it genuinely useful rather than just high-level overview.
Really useful post — practical takeaways I can apply directly. Thanks for taking the time to write this up.
Thank you for this definitely one of the best guides I’ve read on this topic.
A wealth tax is such an obvious conversation to have in the UK right now, and this article lays out the case clearly. Fair taxation really should be part of the solution to inequality — glad organisations like this keep pushing it.
A long-overdue conversation in the UK, and your framing of wealth vs. income tax is exactly the point — most working people only ever feel the second one. It would be useful to see which wealth tax models the campaign holds up as realistic precedents, ideally ones that have survived a change of government. Either way, glad someone is pushing the Big Bank Switch angle alongside the tax argument, because what people do with their money matters as much as what the Treasury does with it.