I run a team of 40 across several countries. Over the past few years I have watched a pattern repeat often enough that I no longer think it is a coincidence.
A good engineer, working for a UK company, decides to stop living in the UK. Not to change jobs. Not to leave the industry. Just to do the same work from somewhere the money goes further.
There are plenty of explanations offered for this. Weather. Visas. Brexit. The state of the NHS. In my experience the reason is simpler and more boring than any of those. They cannot make the maths work.
The Number Nobody Moves
The personal allowance is the amount you can earn before income tax starts. It is 12,570 pounds. It has been frozen at that figure since April 2021, and at the Autumn Budget in November 2025 the freeze was extended again, this time to April 2031.
That is a decade at the same number while rent, energy, food and everything else moved considerably.
The technical term for this is fiscal drag. In practice it means that every year the threshold stays still, a slightly larger share of a normal salary becomes taxable, without any government announcing a tax rise. It is a tax increase that arrives quietly.
What This Looks Like From Inside a Business
I am not making a theoretical argument here. This is a conversation I have had with people on my own team.
The sum an engineer does is roughly this. Same salary, paid by the same UK client. Outgoings of perhaps a third. And a tax system that starts taking its share well before rent and bills have been covered.
Once someone has done that arithmetic honestly, the decision more or less makes itself. They are not rejecting Britain. Most of them like it here. They are responding to the fact that Britain is expensive and begins taxing them from the first 12,571 pounds.
For an employer, the effect is not that you lose the person. It is that you lose the person from the country. The work still gets done. The salary still gets paid. But the money is now earned in the UK and spent somewhere else.
The Change I Would Make
Raise the threshold to somewhere around 24,000 pounds. Roughly what it costs to simply exist here.
The principle is straightforward. Tax income above the cost of living, not below it. Someone earning barely enough to cover rent and food is not a sensible place to start collecting.
I am aware of the obvious objection, and I think it deserves a real answer rather than a dismissal.
The Objection: That Is Billions in Lost Revenue
It is. The personal allowance is one of the largest single costs in the tax system, and doubling it would not be cheap. Anyone claiming otherwise is not being straight with you.
But the comparison being made is not the right one. The choice is not between collecting that revenue and giving it up. It is between collecting a smaller share from people who stay and spend here, and collecting nothing from people who have already gone.
Money earned from a UK client and spent in Warsaw or Bangkok does not appear as lost revenue on anyone’s forecast. There is no line item for it. That does not mean it is not happening.
I will be transparent about the limits of my own position. I have not modelled this. I do not have Treasury figures showing that the behavioural response would offset the cost, and I would be suspicious of anyone who claimed to. What I have is a repeated pattern inside one business, and a strong suspicion that the leak is larger than the models capture because it is invisible to them.
Why I Care About This
I moved to the UK myself and built a business here. I would like the people I work with to be able to do the same without it being a financially questionable decision.
There is a version of this country that is genuinely attractive to skilled technical people. Good clients, real problems, a serious industry. What undermines it is not the work. It is the arithmetic of living here on a normal salary.
That is a fixable problem. It is one number in a Budget document.
The Short Version, On Camera
I recorded a shorter version of this argument while I was away. Same point, ninety seconds.
Tell Me Where I Have Got This Wrong
I put a shorter version of this argument on LinkedIn and asked people to challenge it, because I would rather be corrected than confidently wrong in public.
If you have run the numbers properly, or you have watched the same pattern from a different angle, I would like to hear it.
Related Reading
From Siberia to the UK: My Founder Journey – the longer story of how I ended up building a business in Britain, and what building cross-border teams actually involves.
Building From Scratch: The Immigrant Founder’s Guide to Resilience – what starting again in a new country costs, and what it takes to rebuild.