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Saturday 26 May 2012

If you own a house worth over £1 million, watch out for the Revenue’s Chippy Unit

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety

Now I’ve nothing against the Mail — I write for it regularly — but their definition of a millionaire is anyone who owns a house worth over a million pounds even if he or she has an 85 per cent mortgage. By that measure, I’m a millionaire. Indeed, 250,000 British homeowners are millionaires. Is the Revenue going to assign a ‘Customer Relations Manager’ to each one of us? I hope not, because the cost of doing so would surely outweigh the additional tax they’re able to squeeze out of us.

If the selection criteria of the High Net Worth Unit are as arbitrary as my friend’s experience suggests, I doubt whether it’s a cost-effective use of the Revenue’s resources. A better name for it would be the Chippy Unit — a crack team of investigators, set up at the behest of Gordon Brown, that can be sicked on anyone described as rich by the Daily Mail. Poor David Ross. I bet he has the High Net Worth Unit crawling up his bottom at this very moment.

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