Merryn Somerset Webb

In many cases, it's often less the rate of tax, particularly when it comes to corporate activity and starting a small business, for example, or anything like that.

You don't tend to think about the actual rate of tax when you do that.

What you do think about is the admin hurdles, the admin and regulatory hurdles.

And these are so difficult.

And we know, you know, in the great tax of billionaires saga that we hear all the time, we know that actually the majority of the tax gap comes from corporates, from small businesses.

And a lot of that will, maybe some of it's deliberate, but a lot of it is just, I can't do this admin.

It's just too hard.

As someone who set my own small business a few years ago, I've felt the full force of that.

And I've been absolutely, you know, I heard the,

howls of derision.

But now having sampled this myself, I'm completely with small business owners and thinking this is an endless and rising tide of compliance, which again, individually well-intentioned, but the collective consequence I think is an overburdened engine of the economy.

Because of course, corporates are the engine of the economy.

And it's an interesting utter failure of the public sector to understand the extent of the friction that is involved.

I mean, we always say when it comes to investing, we talk about investing in personal finance a lot.

And one of the things that prevents people investing, prevents them sorting out their personal finance is friction.

It's admin.

Literally, there is nothing in the world that people hate more, apart from war, I guess, but in general, admin.

Admin is everybody's personal hell.

Yes, an overly complex admin of that that oozes from every port.

So there's lots that could be done.