New justice secretary Michael Gove is set for a tussle with City lawyers after floating a plan to impose a multimillion-pound tax on commercial law firms to pay for the abolition of a controversial criminal court charge on guilty defendants.
Gove’s plan has been proposed as a means to replace the revenues generated by the court charge that was supposed to bring in between £65m and £90m annually. A report in The Times in October said that a 1% levy has been floated as a means of appeasing the Treasury. Such a levy on the top 100 UK firms, which have combined revenues of £20.64bn, would potentially generate more than £200m annually but promises to ignite controversy over arbitrary taxation of one industry.
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