This week's opinion

I had intended to write an article welcoming the Office of Tax Simplification’s (OTS) report on the closer alignment of PAYE and National Insurance. I was going to commend the authors on their impressive work in getting to grips with how the move to a cumulative-based system would affect different segments of the population. I was also going to congratulate the OTS on the realistic timescale it had proposed for the change: five years. I could not help contrast that with the timetable for Making Tax Digital.

So why do I write about what I would have done? Because hardly had the ink dried on the publication than the chancellor published correspondence with the OTS in which he said: ‘On the basis of the scale of change required I do not consider now to be the right time to make this major reform but I am grateful to you...