It's time to be bold, argues John O'Connell: tear up our tax system and start again.
George Osborne called our tax system a "spaghetti bowl" in 2010. He had a point. We have one of the world’s longest tax codes at over 11,500 pages, and this has real consequences for families and businesses in the UK. If someone sat down to design a tax system from scratch, they wouldn’t come up with the one we have now. It exists because of years of tweaking at the edges to raise more revenue from more and more people, and offering breaks to preferred industries.