In a recent Tax Journal article, Andrew Howard examines UK tax
trends over the last decade.
How things have changed.
At the beginning of the last decade attitudes to company
taxation in the UK had already begun to change. The corporation tax
rate, stable at around 30% for most of the previous decade, had
just begun its downwards trajectory to what looks like being the
low water mark, its current rate of 19%. At the same time the
ability of companies to manage the rate they actually paid had
already begun to come under scrutiny. The story of the first half
of the decade was a lower rate, but one which needed to be paid.
The UK introduced a general anti-avoidance rule in 2013 (which
could come as a surprise to the political parties which currently
have a GAAR in their manifestos), which made a point of
specifically disavowing some old tax cases which were used to
justify tax avoidance, most famously Lord Tomlin from the Duke
of Westminster case in 1936: 'Every man is
