Damon Lambert: Time to throw a bone to Black Dog - ending the stigma against people with mental illness

Damon Lambert, Treasurer of ok2b - a charity seeking to achieve a positive shift in the public’s attitude towards people with mental health problems - and a Tax Director for a multinational Bank, describes the importance of tackling prejudices about mental illness.

Winston Churchill, the man voted the greatest ever Briton named his bipolar disorder, (sometimes referred to as "manic depression") "Black Dog". Yet despite the Information Age we live in, the Stigma around Mental Health is as pervasive as ever. Society's perception of the second most common health problem in the UK still abounds with ignorance of the illness, prejudice against its sufferers, and discrimination against them at work and in the wider society. Media attitudes, especially in parts of the deadwood press often use alarming, castigating and insulting terms when most sufferers are completely harmless and fully capable of working and parenting. Indeed there are several arenas, not least the Arts, Cricket - and scratch the surface hard because people do of course hide such illness - business, where people with mental illness are big achievers.

Stigma causes problems in many ways. Sufferers are deterred from seeking medical treatment due to social embarrassment and fears for their job. This causes deeper illness and slower recovery and in extreme cases, this can lead to what should have been preventable suicide. Stigma pervades not just the general populace but often health care providers, who consequently do not dispense effective treatments and may be unsupportive. In certain groups, e.g. ethnic minorities the problem can be especially acute. This all creates a vicious circle, sufferers may lose out on work and employment, hence impacting their housing, hence causing deeper stress, hence impeding recovery, deepening symptoms or both. There is also the economic cost of stigma. Mental illness is one of the biggest causes of absenteeism from work; both in days taken off, and also due to stigma, the barriers people with mental illness face in gaining, or returning to, employment. The loss of their contribution to the economy, both in terms of wasted talent and taxes foregone, is at least in the tens of £billions. When mental health and wellbeing is dealt with in the same form as physical disease the impact of earlier detection and treatment will include a financial benefit to the polity.

Damon Lambert: The Tax Reform Commission recommendations should become party policy now

Damon Lambert works as a Financial Services Tax Adviser at KPMG.  He was a member of the working party on Business Taxation that supported the Tax Reform Commission and assisted with the case studies included in the "Reform is possible and works" chapter.

Six months ago the Tax Reform Commission reported. Since then no serious commentator has made any valid challenge to its comprehensive and coherent, findings and recommendations. The TRC extolled cutting and reform taxes to make the UK more competitive; tax simplification that would remove market distortions creating a system that applied fairly to all; it would raise the personal allowance and cut marginal tax rates to improve incentives; and it would turn the making of tax law into a coherent process rather than an aside of political spin thinly disguised as a Budget Speech. The TRC numbers were properly costed, containing a prudent margin given the dynamic impact of rate reductions shown in the TRC’s evidence on the economically expanding, tax cutting nations.

Yet the main beneficiary of this Conservative commissioned report could be the government. We all know that the tax and spend dicta of the Iron Chancellor has rusted UK competitiveness. But in the latest Budget, his reduction of the UK corporate tax rate, the proposal that may see the end of the toll tax on profits brought back to the UK, and an advance clearance regime all nod, if gently, to the TRC. Lost for words? Well, unfortunately, on March 21st, our leader was.

Damon Lambert: Business taxation – policy to win votes, policy to win business

Damon Lambert authors the first of two Platform pieces on tax.

Business taxation has become an issue of intense global competition.  Corporation tax rates are reducing throughout the rest of the globe, yet the UK keeps its rate stagnant whilst Labour invents ever more complex tax rules in the name of ‘anti-avoidance’ that discourage investment into the UK.  Taxing capital and profits is dangerous, as these are increasingly transportable, and transported they will be if the UK refuses to reforms its corporate tax regime.    Yet the Conservative party has failed to produce sensible, if any, tax policies for business in its last three election campaigns.  No wonder, our economic competence is doubted.

So what should we have done?   Well, Conservatives should instinctively question the taxation of profits.  Profits are made by successful businesses, often largely owned, directly or indirectly by current and future pensioners via pension funds.  By definition, long-term profitable businesses are the best creators of jobs and the most effective investors.  Corporate tax takes money off such entities and gives it to government, classically the worst choice at creating sustainable jobs and investment. 

The Conservative party needs to get away from the idea that a cut in tax rates, means a cut in tax revenues, and hence public spending.  An analysis of  current tax revenues in the developed world, shows that regimes such as the increasingly harsh UK one tend to collect less and less revenues, at least in real terms and normally in historic cost terms.  Those, like the Thatcher governments, that cut tax rates and reform their tax regimes, who seek to remove fiscal distortions in capital allocation and remove supposed taxraising laws that discourage investment, tend to actually raise more revenue, just witness the increase in Australian, Baltic State, and Irish corporate tax income in the last few years. 

So it’s time for Conservatives to assume the Flat-Tax mantle, not so much as a recent invention of Eastern European states, but as a restoration of the brilliant work of Lords Howe and Lawson in the 1980s.  Unfortunately this has been messed up by Messrs Clarke and Brown, who in complicating the UK system, are close to having jointly tripled the size of UK tax legislation.   

First step should be to have a single corporation tax rate, cut from 30% for most business to 22%, and hence equal to the basic rate of income tax.  This would  put UK tax rate well below the OECD average, which is where it should be.  Second should be to simply delete the complicated rules on overseas investment that effectively charge a large entry fee on the repatriation of profits back to the UK for reinvestment and increasingly seek to penalize multinational investors for coming to the UK.  Third should be an all-out attack on the complicated UK tax regimeThere are many market-distorting lumps that need to be flattened.  It is time to get back to the Conservative taxation principles that won not just 4 successive general elections, but global respect.

If you would like to contribute a post for Platform please email your suggestion to [email protected].