The Media ‘Manufactured’ Millionaire Exodus From UK, Campaigners Tell IPSO in Open Letter

An open letter to Culture Secretary Nandy and Chancellor Healey

Since 2024, around the world about 30 news articles have been published every day about an exodus of millionaires and billionaires fleeing taxes. The UK, we’re told, has had the worst of it thanks to the Labour Government’s tax policies.

This coverage was almost entirely based on the claims of a single study, the Henley Private Wealth Migration report. The study has now finally admitted it does not have the data to back up its claims.

The study was propelled to the national and global stage by parts of the UK press, who chose to extensively cover it, without fact-checking and doing journalistic due diligence, and despite multiple warnings from experts against trusting it.

But the press didn’t just spread the study widely – some reporting radically distorted it.

Eight UK publications – The Times, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Evening Standard, The Spectator, The Daily Express and This is Money – attributed findings to the study that ultimately had an effect of misleading the public.

The publications in question said the study blamed the Labour Party’s electoral victory for kicking off the exodus in 2024. But the study – even if their data is discredited – said it started with Brexit.

The publications said the study warned that migrating millionaires would take £66 billion out of the UK with them. But the study said they would not do so.

The publications said the study determined that millionaires were leaving because of tax. But the study said tax was only one of several reasons.

Even the publisher of the study thought the publications were “deliberately” spinning the study’s findings:

“We have never claimed that Labour tax policies were the sole or root cause. If papers such as the Telegraph, Times, Mail, decide to add their own layer on to that, and deliberately exclude from their story our standard reminder to them that these were the Conservatives’ tax changes, then I think your argument is with them not with us… We have consistently reported a net outflow of millionaires from the UK from 2016 (and not just since Labour took office last year).”

The publications’ misleading reporting was repeatedly cited by MPs and Lords in parliamentary debates.

In response to the manufactured narrative, the Labour Government weakened plans announced by the Conservatives to reduce the special tax break we give to wealthy individuals who live in the UK but who are allowed to pay tax as though they live abroad – ie, “non-doms”.

A recent HMRC review has confirmed the exodus of the press’s scaremongering has not materialised. Despite this, and despite the Henley study’s admission that it does not have data to support the exodus claims, much of the press have continued to report the same fabricated story.

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A Narrative That Won’t Go Away

Some papers have continued to use the study’s now-abandoned claims unashamedly.

The wealth exodus narrative has continued to feature prominently in reporting, with coverage increasing ahead of the Autumn Budget.

They reported millionaire exodus claims from a “millionaire tracker” whose only evidence of an exodus was the abandoned claims from the Henley study. They reported that billionaire David Reuben, who has been resident in Monaco since 2014, moved to Monaco this past summer. They reported that billionaires were taking £120 billion out of the UK according to a Bloomberg report, even though this is inconsistent with Bloomberg’s own data.

The truth is nine in 10 (88% of) millionaires in the UK are proud to live in the UK, and 75% of them would pay more tax to help protect and strengthen the social, cultural, and economic foundations they value here.

Astonishingly, despite the fact this inaccurate coverage has been exposed in the public domain for many months, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), which oversees most of these publishers, has not lifted a finger to investigate or sanction the publishers responsible.

Now, in the absence of any proactive action from IPSO, we are directly calling on the body to launch a full standards investigation to get to the bottom of it.

IPSO says it can only investigate when publishers have been responsible for “serious and systemic” breaches of the code.

The papers’ misleading of the UK public with these inaccuracies manifestly meets that threshold, and a detailed report documenting the papers’ misleading reporting has now been shared with IPSO.

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A Challenge to IPSO – and the Publishers Which Control It

Less than 1% of complaints to IPSO succeed. And IPSO has, literally, never exercised its power to conduct a Standards Investigation.

A review by the Press Recognition Panel, the watchdog regulating the regulators, concluded that IPSO acts as “a de facto trade body rather than a regulator” and “does not provide the public with effective protection from press harm.”

This is little surprise given its rules are controlled by the “Regulatory Funding Company”, a committee of newspaper executives on which executives for the Mail, The Times and The Telegraph’s publishers all sit.

This is a do-or-die moment for the IPSO system, and a wake-up call for anyone concerned about how the UK protects its free press from the influence of media barons.

There is an alternative. The UK has a formally approved, independent press regulator, IMPRESS. But all of the eight publications behind this misleading coverage are instead practising self-regulation, either via IPSO or their own internal processes. They argue this is sufficient.

But their lack of action over the manufactured millionaire exodus suggests that self-regulation, whether with IPSO or internally, is indeed not fit for purpose.

So let this be the final test for self-regulation.

IPSO must investigate the misleading reporting of a wealth exodus narrative.

And the non-IPSO publications must deliver meaningful accountability or sign up to an approved regulator.

Failing that, the Government must see through the self-regulation charade and finally require newspapers to join an approved independent regulator, in line with the findings of every major inquiry into press standards over the last century.

Anything else will send the papers a clear message that they can continue to mislead the public – and the Government – with impunity.

Signed:

• Tax Justice Network
• Hacked Off
• Taxpayers Against Poverty
• JustMoney Movement
• Church Action for Tax Justice (West Midlands)
• The Press Justice Project
• Patriotic Millionaires UK
• Better! Coalition
• Tax Justice UK
• Newscord
• Oxfam

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