Change in dividend tax

No, if the total income you're getting is lower than the threshold for paying any UK tax on any income, you didn't need any kind of special allowance for dividends because there wouldn't be any tax on them anyway.

Although, if the dividend allowance is reduced and you have to rely more on your standard annual personal allowance to take the income tax free, it does leave less spare capacity in that personal allowance to do other useful things like get some employment income or pension income, give some of the allowance to a spouse etc.


Note the reduction to £2000 is not due to come in until April 2018 so you have some time to move some of the shares that generate these dividends into ISA or pension anyway (assuming they're not shares in private companies)

BJV wrote: »

Just wish that they would spend as much time chasing the mega conglomerates which pay almost nothing???

I suspect they do, spend rather more time and resources on that than they did on deciding to change the £5k allowance to £2k.

It is rather more challenging to convince mega global conglomerates to reallocate their global profits to create more net taxable income in the UK and less to elsewhere, especially when 'elsewhere' has a lower tax rate than the UK.

Things like the OECD BEPS initiative and country-by-country reporting will help, but it has to be coordinated with lots of global governments to make it work. And you could presume perhaps that if a global conglomerate wants to make £x or $y of profits after tax each year for its shareholders and the overall corporation tax bill goes up, that's not going to be particularly fun for the prices of goods.

The last referendum said that the people didn't want the UK to be part of things like the EU (wherein we are signed up to initiatives such as the Directive on Administrative Cooperation on tax affairs and automatic exchange of information between governments and financial institutions) because our people and businesses shouldn't have to be in scope of burdensome rules set at an international level that we can't fully control. So, the ol' "careful what you wish for" comes to mind.

But overall I'm sure that the government and HMRC between them did spend more time on such initiatives over the last couple of years than they did on flipping the switch to create a small change in the level of tax paid on unwrapped dividends by a small minority of individuals each year.