Henley & Partners’ latest report predicts that a record 142,000 millionaires will relocate internationally this year, with the UK expected to see the largest net outflow.
In 2024, the company forecast that the UK would have the second-highest millionaire outflow, losing 9,500 high-net-worth individuals. A year earlier, it reported that 16,500 millionaires had left the UK between 2017 and 2023.
Henley & Partners did not respond to my request for comment, but it’s worth noting that the company denies attributing the so-called millionaire exodus to Labour’s tax policies, telling Tax Justice UK: “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.”
Still, that didn’t stop nearly 11,000 news pieces across print, broadcast and online media from covering the so-called millionaire exodus in 2024, with many continuing in the same vein this year and placing the blame on Labour.
What does the data say?
Mark Bou Mansour first came across the claim that millionaires are leaving the UK en masse while doing a BBC interview about how a wealth tax could work – and how countries can raise billions by copying Spain’s tax on the super-rich.
“It was the first I’d heard of it, and right away the numbers sounded odd to me. I pointed out that at the time, I think the number was about 9,500 and I said: ‘Well, there are something like three million millionaires in the UK, so this is less than 1%.’ It’s a non-issue,” Mansour told me.
Mansour and the team at Tax Justice UK then started searching to see what this report actually was. “We saw it getting more and more traction. This was last year, at a time when calls for wealth taxes were getting huge global momentum. It was being discussed among the G20. And so, all of a sudden these claims about millionaires leaving countries also gained momentum,” he said.
They started to look into the report and found several issues, ranging from how the findings are presented to how they are calculated.
“There is no millionaire exodus. If you look at their published migration numbers going back to 2013, millionaire migration rates have consistently stood at less than 1% every year since then, both globally and nationally. So, what their data actually shows, taken at face value, is that millionaires are highly immobile,” Mansour said.
What’s wrong with the analysis?
Mansour quickly reached the conclusion that the numbers used were highly unreliable and that the methodology was quite opaque. Some of the data appeared to be based on where wealthy millionaires self-report their locations on LinkedIn.
“My favourite example of how ridiculous this is, is that there were about six millionaires who got widespread news coverage in 2024 about leaving the UK due to tax reasons. All six of their LinkedIn profiles still say they’re based and working in the UK,” Mansour said.
Henley has pushed back on this, noting that the report relied on multiple sources, not just LinkedIn.
But the company has not published the underlying data behind its claim, according to Mansour, so we don’t know how many people they’ve actually tracked leaving each country. What they do share are broad estimates, but they don’t explain how they get from what they’ve observed to the bigger picture they present.
He also argues that the sample is unrepresentative and skewed towards centimillionaires and billionaires, something that was acknowledged by Henley & Partners’ report author in an interview with the BBC (you can listen to that exchange here).
Tax Justice UK tried to reverse engineer their 2024 numbers, based on the details they could access. They estimated that fewer than one billionaire and one centimillionaire were leaving the UK. “It comes to something like 0.3 of a billionaire, which is impossible to observe, because people are whole. So that gives you a sense of how absurd it is.”
How did the media report the story?
Some media went on to widely exaggerate the link between this report and taxes, Mansour said. “They’ve framed the so-called exodus as driven by fear of tax changes, even when the Henley report itself, to its credit, does not say that. In many places, it says tax alone isn’t enough to influence relocation decisions.”
The Henley & Partners report has been cited in several news and opinion pieces discussing the pros and cons of a wealth tax.
Mansour added: “The way we see it, this millionaire story is a scare story. It’s a distraction from what we should really be talking about: taxing extreme wealth. We call for a wealth tax, and so do many others. There’s an international campaign for it now. The key message is: wealth taxes are about ending the special treatment that wealth collectors get over wealth earners.”
What conversation should we be having?
It will come as no surprise that Tax Justice UK supports a wealth tax.
Mansour argued that governments, especially in the global north, tax income from wealth, such as dividends and capital gains, at lower rates than income from work, like wages. While most people rely on earned income, he said the super-rich make their money from owning things. “This lighter tax treatment has helped the richest massively grow their fortunes while paying lower effective tax rates than the average worker, contributing to wider inequality, rising debt and even shorter life expectancy for others.”
He compares extreme wealth to smoking. “At one point, we thought smoking was good. Then we learned it kills. The same thing is happening with extreme wealth. Trickle-down economics said if the rich get richer, everyone benefits. But the data shows the opposite and it’s killing economies and killing people,” Mansour said.
He added: “We’re in a moment where the evidence is out there, but the regulation hasn’t yet caught up. And stories like the so-called millionaire exodus are used to push back against taking action. What a wealth tax does is create fairness: whether you’re a wealth collector or wealth earner, you get equal treatment in the tax system.”
When asked for evidence on where it worked, Mansour pointed to Spain. “When critics say wealth taxes ‘don’t work’, what they mean is that wealth taxes are powerful enough to scare the super-rich into lobbying for loopholes. Where wealth taxes failed, it was usually by design – riddled with exemptions under pressure from super-rich interests. Spain shows that when you design them properly, they raise substantial revenue quickly.”
There will be many across the political spectrum who will disagree with Mansour and Tax Justice UK. Among them is the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which this week dug into what it considers the difficulties in implementing a wealth tax. It noted: “It would require the government to set up a new administrative apparatus to value wealth – and valuation would be extremely difficult for some assets, such as private businesses.”
Regardless of where you stand, we can all agree that the conversation needs to be based on better-established facts. The entire country, both rich and poor, would benefit from that.
