Keri-ann Osfield

Multrees provides global custody, execution and investment administration services to wealth managers, private banks and family offices, giving it visibility into how clients are structuring their affairs well before any decision to relocate is made.

Chief financial officer Keri-ann Osfield says the impact of a wealth exodus is best understood as third-order: it ultimately hits the advisers, managers and administration firms whose business depends on clients remaining UK residents, a significant share of which operate outside London.

Osfield argues the financial services industry has not done enough to spell out what’s at stake when entrepreneurs and other internationally mobile individuals leave the UK, or decide not to relocate there at all, stressing that the consequences extend beyond personal fortunes to the jobs and professional services activity built around them. She adds that firms need confidence to invest and grow without being unsettled by every shift in the political climate.

While acknowledging that some wealthy individuals are leaving, or actively weighing an exit, because they see the tax regime as excessively punitive, Osfield maintains the UK retains major advantages in its financial and professional services sector, its top schools and its overall quality of life. Rather than a sudden mass departure, she describes a growing volume of conversations among wealth managers about asset location, structuring and whether the UK should remain clients’ primary tax base.

Given Multrees’ position within the broader ecosystem serving high-net-worth individuals, Osfield says the firm holds a strong view on the potential knock-on effects of a wealth exodus, warning that the fallout from policymakers pushing too hard would not stop at the individuals who leave, it would ripple through the advisers, managers and professional services firms that depend on them, and the wider economy around that.

Her message to government is to weigh carefully how much more tax burden a highly mobile group of people can absorb before the policy starts working against itself.

Multrees points out that Scotland offers a preview of this dynamic. With a top income tax rate of 48% and a marginal rate of 67.5% on income between £100,000 and £125,140, Scotland has effectively been running its own version of this policy experiment for longer than the rest of the UK, a point the firm says was underscored by recent analysis of Scotland’s top-rate tax receipts.

The comments follow the Adam Smith Institute’s latest Millionaire Tracker, an annual estimate compiled from Office for National Statistics data. It found there are now 442,000 “constant-price sterling millionaires” in Britain, UK-resident adults with at least £1 million in net worth across property, pensions and financial assets, measured in constant 2025 prices. That figure is down 7% since 2024 and marks the lowest count since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis wiped out asset values.

The think tank attributes the decline to a mix of factors: higher interest rates and weak confidence in the economy denting the real value of pensions and high-end property, a low household savings rate slowing the pace at which people accumulate seven-figure wealth, and an ongoing trend of high-net-worth individuals leaving the UK or choosing not to move there. It points to the abolition of non-dom tax status, high overall taxation and what it calls a culture unwelcoming to wealth creators as key drivers of that emigration.

The Adam Smith Institute is using the figures to renew its call for the government to scrap inheritance tax, phase out capital gains tax, and reassess the UK’s tax and regulatory treatment of non-doms and high-net-worth individuals. It also cautions against proposals for a wealth tax, noting that France, Austria and the Netherlands each abandoned similar levies after seeing significant outflows of wealthy residents or other avoidance behaviour.

The report notes that the top 1% of earners currently account for 29.1% of total income tax revenue, a figure cited repeatedly by the institute and politicians responding to the data as evidence of how much the Exchequer stands to lose if wealthy residents continue to leave.

Political reaction

Shadow Business and Trade Secretary Andrew Griffith argued that Britain having fewer millionaires should concern everyone regardless of their own finances, given the jobs, businesses and tax revenue at stake, and said it was a troubling signal that ambitious young people were choosing to leave the country.

Reform UK’s Shadow Chancellor Robert Jenrick blamed government policy for pushing successful people abroad, arguing each departure translates into less funding for the NHS and defence, higher taxes on working people, and fewer good jobs, and said Reform would seek to draw successful people back to Britain.

Mitchell Palmer, an economist at the Adam Smith Institute, said the fall in millionaire numbers should be read as a warning rather than a win, since each departure represents a loss of capital, international connections and entrepreneurial energy for the economy.

He argued that proposals such as a wealth tax or aligning capital gains tax with income tax rates would deepen the problem, and urged the government to focus instead on making Britain more attractive for people to build and retain wealth, including by cutting or scrapping inheritance and capital gains taxes.