From reader derekscott1953, the above, and:

A rounding error, possibly, if people bother to read the Dan Neidle report. An earlier Dan Neidle report drew attention to the billions (not a mere £22m) being lost annually to the UK through tax evasion.

From How Andy Burnham could raise £15bn – without a tax rise, published 1 July 2026:

It’s the UK’s biggest and least discussed tax problem. There’s between £30bn and £48bn missing from each year’s small business tax bills. It’s been getting worse – and nobody knows why.

There’s no other issue where so much money is at stake but so little time is spent discussing it. It’s almost never mentioned by politicians, and HMRC devotes very limited resources to it. HMRC’s random audit programme checks only 330 small companies each year.

HMRC made spectacular progress on the large business corporation tax gap in the 2000s. If they made the same progress on the small business corporation tax gap, it would raise around £15bn. That revenue could be used to reduce the main rate of corporation tax down to 21%, benefiting all businesses. Or it could cover, for example, a major expansion in defence spending. And corporation tax is only part of the small business tax gap.

Full text at: https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2026/07/01/andy-burnham-tax-gap-15bn/