Get ready for the stealth Brit ISA

Forget stealth taxes, the Government might soon introduce a stealth Brit ISA, Mouthy Money editor Edmund Greaves writes.

One of the funniest aspects of Labour’s time in Government so far has been its ability to implement things we think should be Tory policies. 

Scrapping NHS England and slashing welfare hardly feel like core Labour voter issues and the Government has the backbench disquiet to show for it.

But there is another, inherently weirder area that Labour is implementing a Tory policy by stealth – ISAs.

When it came to power, Labour killed the Tory ‘Brit ISA’. It was a rubbish policy poorly thought through. 

So why are they now reintroducing it by stealth?

ISA reform

Ahead of the Spring Statement rumours abounded that Chancellor Rachel Reeves had her sights set on a cut to the annual cash ISA allowance.

Currently everyone over the age of 18 gets £20,000 allowance to use how they wish in an ISA. The exception here is the Lifetime ISA (LISA) which has a limit of just £4,000.

Supposedly, Reeves was looking to cut the cash limit to £4,000 too. This, so the story goes, would encourage investing over cash deposits which would be good for long-term savings growth. 

But while the Government has shied away from anything so specific for now, it has committed to looking at reforming the ISA system. Here’s exactly what it has said:

“The government is looking at options for reforms to Individual Savings Accounts that get the balance right between cash and equities to earn better returns for savers, boost the culture of retail investment, and support the growth mission.”

The interesting bit in this (for me, a money nerd) is the bit that says “support the growth mission”. This sounds specifically coded as an implication that the allowance could be directed at British investments.

Stealth Brit ISA

So are we about to get the Brit ISA by stealth? I’ve heard of stealth taxes but this is next level…

As a reminder: the Brit ISA was supposed to be a specific additional allowance for investing in British assets. It was criticised for being a difficult to implement idea with nothing more than a token impact on markets. 

The truth was that how you classify a British investment/asset is extremely difficult. Scottish Mortgage Trust is a UK-based investment trust and is traded on the UK FTSE. But it invests in loads of foreign companies. It meets the market criterion, but not the spirit of a ‘British Investment’. You can make this case for all sorts of stuff.

Labour, sensibly, ditched the whole thing as a waste of time gimmick. But it now sounds a lot like it might be back on the menu – potentially on even worse terms because the original Brit ISA was at least offering extra allowance (not just sucking up some of the existing one). 

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Tin foil hat time

If I’m going to put on a tinfoil hat at this point here’s what I’d then say:

Any attempt by the Government to force people to own UK-based assets over other foreign investments is what we like to call ‘financial repression’.

Financial repression was a tool used by Governments after World War Two to make the national debt seem smaller. It did this by forcing people with savings to hold British assets such as bonds. 

Those bonds saw values grow slower than relatively high inflation, which meant the face value of those bonds diminished. All the while the Government was able to increase its tax take in line with inflation. 

It made the debts look smaller and the Government more solvent. 

Here’s the rub: someone has to lose. The losers were the bondholders. The bondholders were FORCED to hold those bonds by the Government with tools such as capital controls that prevented money going abroad (something we now take for granted).

We’re not quite there yet, but compelling investors to buy British through their ISA allowances (when inflation is higher than it should be) is starting to look awfully familiar.

But maybe its just me (and my tin hat). 

Image courtesy of HM Treasury Flickr