All going Pete Tong

The Treasury has published the consultation paper on residence and domicile.

The paper does very much give us the feel that we might now all be going through the motions; the commentary is noticeably on the skinny side for such an important and complex topic, and there still remains no draft legislation although this continues to be promised for this month.

There are, further, some quite blatant typos. For example, para 1.4 says a "package of measures ... designed ... ". Which is a shoddy way of typing "... half baked drivel scrawled on the back of a beer mat in a political panic".

Depending on whether you are pro or anti the rule changes (or, more accurately, for or against the manner in which the rules are being consulted over and introduced) there is plenty of opportunity to see one big advance excuse now being trailed in the appendices.

B.1 includes all the magic phrases "where data is limited", "crucially", "prudent and cautious". Are these not all the same expressions which have been used for the past two decades in previous consultations, and which have all led to the same tacit conclusion of ditching the idea of change ?

Elsewhere, some of the empirical data is now downgraded when compared to the previously touted estimates. What was, only a few weeks ago, an extra income tax take from non-doms of £4BN pa is now only £1BN. Moreover, this comes with the caveat, at B.12, (and made twice over in case anyone might miss it) that the figure would be a very weak basis for policy making.

For those that have now spent too long in the tax profession to be anything other than cynical to the core, one always now has to go looking for those interpretative aids to formal government announcements and see what is being published in the press. To which end, it has to be bizarre in the least that the Guardian, no less, published a piece on Friday which very much has the feel of doing the Treasury's bidding.

Given that, in London at least, the prognosis for business is now looking the grimmest for a decade, and we need all the investment and spending we can get, might this consultation document now be the forerunner to an admission by the government that, regardless of whether the idea of change is worthwhile for wider reasons, now is not the time to risk finding out the hard way what happens when you get it all horribly wrong. (Or are we still going to risk the UK's very own SOX; a matter which we know the Chancellor is alive to because he admitted as much in his FT Interview in July.)

There are isolated aspects of the proposals, as a whole, which many find unobjectionable and for which change could be enacted with relative ease. The change in the days count for residence would be no bad thing, and especially if the change found its way into primary legislation. Similarly, a revision to the anomalous closed source rule has been long overdue anyway. Might we not all be better off with a few of these isolated changes being made and everything else being set aside to allow for a proper period of consultation ?