The Telegraph reported on 20 September 2026 that Prime Minister Andy Burnham is weighing a rise in capital gains tax (CGT) as part of a plan to fund an estimated £20 billion in support for the lowest earners, under the headline “Burnham weighs £14bn capital gains tax raid.” The £14 billion figure tracks a proposal modelled earlier this year by the Centre for the Analysis of Taxation (CenTax), reported by City AM, which found that equalising CGT rates with income tax bands — 20%, 40% and 45% depending on the taxpayer’s income tax band — could raise close to £14 billion a year, with most of the additional revenue coming from income tax rather than CGT itself as the incentive to shift income into gains falls away.
Ecotricity founder Dale Vince, a backer of the Patriotic Millionaires UK wealth-tax campaign, publicly urged Burnham to raise the levy, saying the move would “give millions of people” a cost-of-living boost, according to The Telegraph. Burnham himself has said the frozen £12,570 income-tax personal allowance was “the thing I heard the most on the doorsteps” of his own constituency, Makerfield — a remark the paper tied to the government’s search for ways to ease costs for lower earners specifically, rather than to CGT payers, who tend to sit higher up the income scale.
The push to align CGT with income tax rates has drawn support from other figures in Labour’s orbit. Former Labour leader Lord Kinnock has urged Burnham to make the change ahead of “Labour’s first Budget on October 28,” arguing it would raise “a further £12 billion” a year, while Wes Streeting, who resigned as health secretary, has called a similar approach “a wealth tax that works.” Not everyone agrees: Andy Haldane, the former Bank of England chief economist, has cautioned against treating capital gains tax as a “cash cow,” and other economists have warned that a poorly designed increase could prompt investors to defer sales or move assets abroad, cutting into the revenue actually collected.
Chancellor John Healey is due to deliver the Budget on 28 October 2026, when any final decision on CGT would be confirmed. Zagdim covered the broader pre-Budget tax speculation on 18 September, including a wealth-tax petition delivered to Burnham’s Manchester operations hub that bundled CGT reform with a proposed 2% wealth tax. Today’s reporting narrows that speculation into a specific, costed CGT proposal tied to a defined £20 billion spending package — a step beyond treating capital gains tax as merely one option among several still under discussion.
