UK billionaires worth $160bn have left or loosened ties since Labour's wealth measures

The $160bn is a sum of net worth. It adds up the fortunes of people whose residency or ties to the UK changed after 2024 ^[1]. Tax paid is a separate figure, and the report has one example of it. Chris Rokos, the hedge fund manager, paid an estimated £350m to the Exchequer last year before swapping his UK residency for Greece ^[10]. The analysis puts the $160bn at more than half of UK billionaire wealth ^[2], so its total for UK billionaires is below $320bn ^[14]. City AM's account does not name who ran the analysis, and it does not split the total between residents who left and those who only loosened ties ^[1].

The causal claim is weaker than the headline number. According to City AM, the reforms have been cited as driving record numbers of super-rich residents overseas, together with persistent speculation over similar crackdowns at future Budgets ^[15]. Advisers call the pattern a 'wealth exodus' ^[15]. That makes expectation a cause alongside enacted law. I'd expect each Budget, and the talk before it, to become a fresh decision date for anyone who can choose where to live.

The reforms are aimed at reducing wealth inequality and raising revenue ^[4]. Other governments are competing for the same people with a flat price. Greece, Italy and Portugal have introduced regimes in which wealthy newcomers pay a single annual charge and in return pay no levies on their foreign-held assets ^[9]. Rokos went to Greece ^[10]. Goldman Sachs vice chair Richard Gnodde left for Milan after the non-dom changes ^[11]. The trade-off is a wider charge on the rich who stay against the risk that the largest individual taxpayers move to a country that sells residency at a known annual cost.

Earlier this year Magda Wierzycka, Sygnia Asset Management's founder and chief executive, moved from London to South Africa and gave changes to overseas trusts in the non-dom overhaul as a reason ^[6]. She told City AM the crackdowns had been "hugely damaging" for confidence ^[6]. Her complaint is about people an index of UK residents cannot count. "The number of people leaving is one thing, but no one is focusing on people who are not coming," she said ^[7]. She said the entrepreneurs and wealthy people previously drawn to London had looked at the changes and decided they were not coming, meaning no investment, no job creation and an inability to balance the budget ^[8].

For founders who plan to stay, the change that touches the business most directly is the end of inheritance tax carve-outs for family businesses and farms ^[5]. Leslie Macleod-Miller, chief executive of Foreign Investors for Britain, described how far the non-dom change reaches. "The end of the non-dom regime has left international families facing UK inheritance tax on their worldwide assets, including wealth created overseas, often long before they came to Britain," he said ^[13]. For a family-owned company, succession structure and the owner's residency now come up together at board level this quarter. What happens after that depends on future Budget measures that so far exist only as speculation ^[15].

On this evidence the $160bn is a firm measure of scale and a weak measure of consequence. To turn it into a cost, you would need what the group paid in UK tax and what it invested in UK companies. The Sunday Times reports that property tycoon David Reuben, worth an estimated £28bn and among the UK's biggest taxpayers for several decades, has now fully quit the country after loosening his ties over several years ^[12].