Paul Johnson

Of course, you then have inevitably all sorts of movement of money around the system so that London doesn't keep it all and no one else has any.

So I'm in favour, for example, of a system –

for regions or big regional authorities like we have in Scotland, where you can control a significant part of your income tax base.

We know that's possible because they can do it in Scotland.

Wales has those powers, although they haven't used them or they've got more limited powers, but they've decided not to.

And, you know, the English region, I mean, actually even places like the Manchester Combined Authority, West Midlands Authority, are on a similar scale, certainly to Wales.

And, I mean, Yorkshire's got the same population as Scotland.

I mean, these are countries

areas which are economically big enough to do this.

The only issue is that Scotland has clearly got that identity and quite an empty border area between the populated bits of Scotland and the populated bits of England, which makes life a bit easier.

But all of this is feasible.

Yeah.

I mean, I can understand the thinking behind it.

And an economic point of view, it makes some sense because that's the marginal decision that people are making.

Shall I work some more hours?

And if you don't tax that so much as other income, that's exactly the kind

incentive you want to provide.

The difficulty is the obvious administrative one, which is how on earth do you define overtime?

I mean, HMRC doesn't measure hours.

It measures the amount of earnings you've got.