Irregular Roundup, 28th September2026

We begin today’s Irregular Roundup with millionaires.

Millionaires

The Adam Smith Institute (ASI) noted that UK millionaires have hit their lowest level since 2008.

Numbers are down 7% from two years ago as taxes rise (and threaten to rise higher).

• Who will pay all that tax needed for £2 bus fares and cheap trips to Alton Towers?
• Or the £4.5K handout to parents on benefits whose children take up an apprenticeship?

Laffer Curve

Dan Neidel over at Tax Policy Associates has worked out that Scotland has lost money by increasing its top rate of income tax to 48% in 2024.

• He thinks the measure lost £22M in its first year.

Investment Trusts

Citywire reported that investment trust ownership has fallen to a five-year low.

• I would have thought it was much worse than that, but it turns out that Boring Money only started collecting data in 2021.

Fewer than one in ten UK investors now own an investment trust. The number of people with one in their portfolio fell to 2.18m, just 3.1% of the UK population.  

The sharpest decline in trust ownership came from those aged between 35-54, which almost halved from 12% to 7%. However, there was ‘a glimmer of hope’ among those aged under 35, with the number of trust owners increasing from 7% to 9% over the last year.

The downturn reflects a similar trend in open-ended funds over the period, which fell from 23% to 19% ownership among investors in the past year. By comparison, one in five UK investors currently owns an exchange-traded fund in their portfolio, which has surged from one in 20 five years ago.

This is hardly shocking – ETFs are cheaper to run and don’t attract stamp duty on purchases.

• They also come in many more flavours.

I started buying ITs back in the 1980s, when they were the cheapest way to access exotic asset classes.

• Then index funds took off, and later on, ETFs.

I only hold half a dozen ITs now, mostly in the “Wealth Preservation” category.

• And only 7% of my listed portfolio is in OIECs (mostly in trend and hedge funds).

For anything liquid, ETFs are hard to beat.

Monopsonies

Kristian Neimitz of the IEA explained that monopsonies (the reverse of a monopoly, with one buyer and potentially many sellers) don’t always work as we might expect.

The big monopsony in the UK is the NHS, supposedly working on all our behalf.

• The expectation would be that pay in the NHS would be low, and the cost of supplies would also be low.

British specialist doctors are not badly paid. Sure, you can find countries where their peers do better, but these are richer countries where everyone is doing better. 

If we express medical salaries as a multiple of national average salaries, British specialists actually do quite well. Not exceptionally so, but enough to disprove the idea that the NHS acts as a wage-suppressing monopsonist.

But it’s a different story on drugs:

American pharmaceutical companies that do business with it very much do see the NHS as a tough negotiator that knows how to make use of its dominant position – that is why the issue of drug pricing always comes up in UK-US trade negotiations. In their dealings with drug manufacturers, the NHS behaves exactly like the textbook model of a monopsonist.

Kristian puts the difference down to politics:

It is always presented as absolutely scandalous that drug companies want to make money. There is no way the public would ever side with the drug companies against the NHS.

In contrast, doctors’ strikes are usually presented as a conflict between ‘the NHS’, and an unsympathetic government (which probably secretly hates the NHS, and wants to privatise it). In that context, the public will, of course, side with the doctors.

So politics prevents the NHS from using its monopsony power.

The reason this matters right now is that Andy Burnham plans to double down on the national burden of the NHS by inventing a new National Care Service.

• And in his speech announcing the plan, he told an audience of care workers that they should be the best-paid people in the country (!)

No doubt much of the general public agrees with him.

• So we can expect care workers to become another group who, like the doctors, can hold the public to ransom.

Another step down the road to hell.

Who would be a Landlord?

On Movevator, Finumus told the story of his adventures as a landlord.

• It used to be easy, but now it’s not.

I looked into BTL in 1999 when property was cheap, and taxation was simple.

• My partner dropped out of the plan, and I lacked the courage to go it alone, so I threw away a lot of easy money.

Since then we’ve had the loss of higher rate mortgage deductibility, the Renters Rights Act – and the end to no-fault evictions – and Making Tax Digital (which I already suffer for VAT, and to all practical purposes, Corporation Tax) – not to mention a real-terms property slowdown (or crash in London).

• Finimus provides an example of how Section 24 tax treatment means that a pre-tax profit can become a post-tax loss (with an effective tax rate greater than 100%).

There’s also the problem of GCT on gains if you sell a property not within a company.

• A problem this government might well make worse.

You can still make things work through a limited company, but there’s a 5% surcharge on Stamp Duty, and you basically need to live up North to find yields above the cost of borrowing (essential if you want to juice your returns).

The old buy-to-let dream was that your tenants bought you a house.

The new experience is that your tenants, HMRC, the council, the letting agent, the mortgage lender, and the First-tier Tribunal all hold a committee meeting in your bank account.

The old buy-to-let equation was simple:

Tenant rent + mortgage leverage + time = wealth

The new equation is messier:

Rent − costs − Section 24 − tax − MTD − repairs − refinancing − tribunal delay− CGT anxiety + possible London comeback − guilt = shrug

If, like Finimus, you have a long-standing tenant in a southern property, the deal was:

If she paid on time, looked after the place, and the property roughly washed its face, I would not optimise every last pound of rent. That bargain relied on two things:

• Capital growth doing the heavy lifting
• My retaining the option to move the rent towards market if the numbers stopped working

Neither of these can now be relied upon.

One because prices in the South have stalled.

• Finimus calculates the average real price change in London over the last 20 years as minus 0.3%.

And two because the First Tier Tribunal can block a rent increase.

• The landlord has one shot a year to raise the rent to the “market rent”.
• For £47, the tenant can use the tribunal, which can only set a lower rent, not a higher one that the landlord proposes.
• Until the hearing, the rent stays as it is, and any subsequent increase is not backdated.

So at the very least, landlords need to keep the rent up each year.

Never again allow a reliable tenant’s rent to drift materially below market. Raise it every year. Keep comparables. Preserve evidence. Behave more like the spreadsheet. Congratulations – you have made the soft-touch landlord more commercial.

As always, market interventions produce the effect opposite to that intended.

Small landlordism increasingly resembles a business with:

• Safety and regulatory obligations 
• Licensing and possession risk
• Financing risk
• Tenant risk management
• Software compliance
• Tax complexity
• Political risk

…but all without the scale, limited liability, pricing power, professional management, and/or tax treatment that could make such a business attractive.

One more step.

Don’t let your daughter become a landlord, Mrs Worthington.

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That’s it for today.

• Until next time.