Important matters
Nothing on this website constitutes legal or tax advice.
Tax Policy Associates Ltd is a non-profit company limited by guarantee, no. 14053878. Our registered office is 124 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX.
All “tip-offs”, suggestions, comments, criticisms and similar communications sent to us, whether by Twitter/LinkedIn direct message, email, contact form, Whatsapp etc, will be held in strict confidence and only disclosed with your explicit permission.
If we believe you are threatening us (for example threatening to sue us for defamation), then absolutely no duty of confidence is accepted, and we will probably publish everything you send us. We do not accept that copyright law prevents such publication. Nor do we accept such correspondence is “without prejudice”. Sending us threatening correspondence that says “this is not a libel threat” doesn’t fool anyone.
Copyright
All articles and content by Tax Policy Associates, including data and infographics, © Tax Policy Associates Ltd 2026, and licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 licence (unless it says otherwise). In short, you may freely use any of our original material for any purpose, and adapt it how you wish, provided you attribute it to Tax Policy Associates Ltd. We’d appreciate you letting us know, but you don’t have to.
All guest articles and comments are owned by the respective author/commentator, with Tax Policy Associates Limited having an implied licence to publish the articles/comments on this website, but no other rights.
The website is fully open to the internet and so everything published on it (including your comments) will be crawled by search engines, AI agents and others; we expect it will also be used to train large language models and similar machine learning systems.
Open source
This website is built using a large number of open source projects, to which we are very grateful.
The website itself uses WordPress, the open-source content management system, licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). None of this would be possible without WordPress, the WordPress community and contributors worldwide. WordPress® is a registered trademark of the WordPress Foundation.
Site features use open source software including Pagefind (MIT), html2canvas by Niklas von Hertzen (MIT), jsPDF by James Hall, yWorks GmbH, Lukas Hollander, Aras Abbasi, Aaron Spike, Willow Systems Corporation, Pablo Hess, Florian Jenett, Warren Weckesser, Youssef Beddad, Lee Driscoll, Stefan Slonevskiy, Jeremy Morel, Christoph Hartmann, Juan Pablo Gaviria and contributors (MIT), LeaderLine by anseki (MIT), Apache ECharts by the Apache Software Foundation and contributors (Apache-2.0), Quill by Jason Chen and contributors (BSD-3-Clause), Bootstrap Icons by Mark Otto and contributors (MIT), GLightbox by Biati Digital (MIT), Leaflet by Vladimir Agafonkin and contributors (BSD-2-Clause), and Mozilla PDF.js by Mozilla and contributors (Apache-2.0). Blockrain.js by Aerolab (MIT), based on work by Peter Coles / @mrcoles, with jQuery and the jQuery UI Widget Factory by the jQuery Foundation and contributors (MIT) and normalize.css by Nicolas Gallagher and Jonathan Neal (MIT).
Fonts are Poppins by Indian Type Foundry / Google Fonts and Source Serif 4 by Adobe Originals / Adobe Fonts, both under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
Other open-licensed source material includes Crown copyright legislation and government material from legislation.gov.uk, The National Archives, HM Treasury, No 10 Downing Street and the UK Government Web Archive, reused under the Open Government Licence.
Privacy policy
This section sets out some details on how we use your personal information.
When you post a comment on our blog, we securely store your name, contact details and comment. Your name and information you post as a comment is publicly available and not securely stored because, by definition, it is viewable by anyone at any time (but your email address is not). You should be aware that, whilst we can delete blog comments, they may be cached by internet search engines and other websites over which we have no control. Please therefore assume that any comment you post will be permanently visible on the general internet.
We may on occasion use any email address you provide to contact you to discuss the contents of your comment; if you don’t wish us to have your email address then you can of course provide a fake one.
When you send us a message (via email, Twitter, website contact form etc): contact details, message. Information you send to us in a message will be treated as confidential and only shared with other parties with your consent, or if required by law (or if, as mentioned opposite, you are threatening to sue us).
Information in a message you send us will be securely stored in an email system (for which Google is the data controller) and retained for an appropriate amount of time having regard to the purpose of the message. In the unlikely event it is asserted that we are required by law to disclose your message to other parties, in all but exceptional cases we would take all reasonable steps to resist that disclosure. We would also (to the extent possible) notify you of the required disclosure and give you the opportunity to resist it.
This website uses cookies so it remembers your name if you leave a comment, and so you can change settings (like making glossary items highlighted). You can reject the cookies if you like. We use analytics from Google and Cloudflare to understand how people use the website – all this data is anonymised. We don’t serve any advertising.
If you subscribe to our mailing list then we will email you updates. Before 2026, we used Substack to manage subscriptions (including email addresses and related personal data) and mail out newsletters (and Substack has warranted they comply with GDPR). From 2026, we use our own secure server instead for this purpose. Emails are sent using an email service within the EU which has warranted that it complies with EU and UK GDPR. You can unsubscribe at any time. We will not disclose you are on our mailing list, pass your name or email address to any third parties, or use it for any other purpose.
We are registered with the Information Commissioner.
The Information Commissioner’s Office insists that we include a much longer text, including boilerplate that is of little relevance and nobody is likely to read. It is as follows:
Under UK data protection law, we must have a “lawful basis” for collecting and using your personal information. There is a list of possible lawful bases in the UK GDPR. You can find out more about lawful bases on the ICO’s website.
Which lawful basis we rely on may affect your data protection rights which are set out in brief below. You can find out more about your data protection rights and the exemptions which may apply on the ICO’s website:
- Your right of access – You have the right to ask us for copies of your personal information. You can request other information such as details about where we get personal information from and who we share personal information with. Nobody will click here. There are some exemptions which means you may not receive all the information you ask for. Read more about the right of access.
- Your right to rectification – You have the right to ask us to correct or delete personal information you think is inaccurate or incomplete. Read more about the right to rectification.
- Your right to erasure – You have the right to ask us to delete your personal information. Read more about the right to erasure.
- Your right to restriction of processing – You have the right to ask us to limit how we can use your personal information. Read more about the right to restriction of processing.
- Your right to object to processing – You have the right to object to the processing of your personal data. Read more about the right to object to processing.
- Your right to data portability – You have the right to ask that we transfer the personal information you gave us to another organisation, or to you. Read more about the right to data portability.
- Your right to withdraw consent – When we use consent as our lawful basis you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time. Read more about the right to withdraw consent.
If you make a request, we must respond to you without undue delay and in any event within one month.
The lawful basis for collecting or using your personal information is consent: you submitted a comment or subscribed to our newsletter.
We keep your personal information for as long as you would like us to; you can unsubscribe at any time, and delete your comments at any time. If you do this, your personal information is permanently deleted from the systems we control.
To make a data protection rights request, please contact us using the contact details at the top of this privacy notice.
None of the above relates to personal information that we hold in the course of our journalism activity (for example if your details are relevant to an ongoing investigation). UK GDPR provides a wide-ranging journalism exemption which applies where (broadly speaking) we use personal information for a journalistic purpose; act with a view to the publication of journalistic material; and reasonably believe both that publication would be in the public interest, and that complying with a specific requirement would be incompatible with our journalistic purpose. You can read more about the exemption here.
If you have any concerns about our use of your personal information, you can complain to us.
If you remain unhappy with how we’ve used your data after raising a complaint with us, you can also complain to the ICO.
The ICO’s address:
Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF
Helpline number: 0303 123 1113