Paul Johnson

Spear’s Review

Paul Johnson is the voice of calm authority making sense of the numbers revealed at every UK budget statement in recent years, an economist whose social commentary has been instrumental in informing public opinion on the repercussions of the chancellor’s policies, especially concerning welfare, tax and pensions. But the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies is personable and no ivory tower academic.

Appointed in 2011, Johnson is deeply concerned about growing inequality. ‘One of the things that’s clearly happened over recent years is that there’s been a real stagnation in earnings,’ he says. He doesn’t think that a wealth tax is a workable solution. Instead, he says fixing the current system is more urgent. 

‘Data on [HNWs] is often hard to come by,’ he tells Spear’s. But it is evident that just by looking at the structure of the current system, he can deduce that, for example, ‘it is relatively straightforward to avoid inheritance tax if you’re very wealthy’. Reform, he says, will allow the government ‘get a few billion more’, ‘but not as some people seem to claim enough to be game-changing, as it were, in terms of the money available for public services’.

Johnson published Follow the Money, which the FT described as expressing a sense of ‘enthusiastic exasperation’ with the country’s economic policies, in 2023, and regularly contributes to broadcast and print media. He is a visiting professor of economics at UCL.