In a letter dated 7 September 2026 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the First Secretary of State and the Attorney General wrote to their ministerial colleagues saying, among other things, that from now on consultation should no longer be a first step towards implementation of policy. “Formal consultation should only take place where there is a statutory requirement to consult, where it would be conspicuously unfair not to consult, or where ministers believe there is a good case for seeking external input and that the right vehicle for doing so is a formal consultation.” The intention is to “unwind”, as far as possible, the requirement to consult at all. Thus ministers are being asked to put forward for destruction any current statutory requirements to consult under which they are labouring.
Leaving tax aside for the moment, is this generally a bad thing? Consultation is all too often a waste of time (and resources) and if the government goes further and abolishes (as far as possible) the myriad legal requirements to consider “impacts”, which use up fantastic amounts of civil servant person-hours, the machinery of government might genuinely become less sclerotic (and less expensive).
However, when we focus in from the general to the specific - tax in this case (and doubtless other commentators can claim special status for their areas of expertise) - the issue becomes more complicated, because the issues themselves are more complicated.
It should not be controversial to say this in the 21st century politicians of all stripes appear to have become less able to foresee the consequences of their policy positions. Civil servants probably point out some of those consequences but politicians do not have to listen to such advice and civil servants are (broadly) there to implement not to obstruct. In the tax arena consultations not only allow interested parties to highlight the more obvious consequences of a proposal but also permit genuine technical experts to drill down into the minutiae of what the proposal will mean in practice (and, often, why it won’t work, or conflicts with other provisions, or will have the opposite effect from that intended).
On the other hand, tax experts always have the opportunity to make representations on the Finance Bill (although these seem to have less currency at Committee Stage than they did and the timetable is always tight). Moreover, perhaps more importantly, genuine, helpful, practical responses to consultation are just no use if all the significant decisions have been taken in advance and the consultation is no more than lip service. Many people think that’s the position tax consultations have reached today, so abolition will do no harm.
