Simon Lambert

It's a wealth tax, but it's a wealth tax only if you sell.

And also there is a point where basically when you pass on assets at death, there may be inheritance tax to pay, but there's no capital gains tax.

So at the moment, if you just hold on to the investments forever and ever and ever, and then you die, you can avoid the CGT.

You can also do it by leaving the country as well.

And there's calls for that to stop too.

But what you need to do there is you need to remove double taxation.

And you need to structure this in a way, as you say, that it doesn't discourage investment.

Because you may have noticed there's this squirrel wandering around at the moment telling people that they should be investing in the stock market.

Now, one of the ways to encourage people to invest in the stock market is that they can make some gains and then those gains will hopefully be made at a tax advantaged level.

Right.

You could do it by investing in an ISA, but you've only got £20,000 a year that you can invest in an ISA.

Most people can't invest more than £20,000 a year.

So do invest in an ISA.

Just do invest in an ISA.

But beyond that, you can't.

But there might be some people, for example, and there's lots of people in this position, who've built up quite large shareholdings in companies through work-share-safe schemes.

Now, you can shift those into an ISA at certain points, but lots of people don't realise this and they don't do it or they don't think about it.

And all of a sudden it builds up to a level where they're like, oh, wow, if I sold that, I'd have to pay a load of money in capital gains.

Or there may be people who just held investments and didn't worry about putting them in an ISA because it used to be the capital gains tax allowance was much higher.

It used to be £12,300.