The myth of Britain’s fleeing non-doms

According to popular imagination, the skies over Britain have been full these past few months of fleets of private jets carrying their non-dom owners to fiscally safer climes. According to your point of view, this has either rid the country of parasites or denied us investment and trickle-down wealth. Two glossy reports pumped out by financial companies in the past month seemed to promote the idea and were immediately leapt upon by those who oppose the abolition of non-dom status.

First, there was the UBS Global Wealth Report 2024, which predicted that the number of dollar millionaires living in Britain will plunge by 17 per cent between 2023 and 2028. Then Henley and Partners, which helps the rich shift themselves and their piles of money around the world, published its Private Wealth Migration Report, making a similar sort of claim. During 2024, it claimed, Britain will lose a net 9,500 dollar millionaires, more than any country other than China. The company launched its report with an opinion piece opening with an anecdote of a billionaire who ‘promptly loaded himself and family on to the private jet – presumably vowing never to return’.

But is it true that the wealthy are leaving Britain? There is – to my knowledge – no official publicly accessible register of personal wealth in Britain, and if there were few of us would get anything done, as we would be too busy looking up our friends, exes, neighbours and celebrities. What we do have are HMRC’s published figures for the number of non-doms resident in Britain. While they don’t quite cover the same thing – wealthy UK citizens fleeing the country wouldn’t show up in these statistics – they appear to tell a different story to the UBS and Henley reports.