This week's opinion: 6 February 2020

Afriend of mine showed me a headline a few days ago which read ‘Jersey could scrap “only husbands talk tax” rule’. She was appalled that such a rule could have existed in the first place. I agreed but pointed out that similar rules applied in the UK well within the working life of many of our readers. I know how many people in the Revenue resented having to write to a husband about his wife’s tax affairs.

Those rules, which were a relic of Victorian ideas about the legal status (or lack of it) of married women, disappeared 30 years ago (see Anita Monteith’s article ‘Together forever’, Taxation, 5 October 2017) and I cannot imagine that anybody would want to go back to the old regime. 

But of course there are problems when parts of the tax system look at the family unit rather than the individuals. Tax credits is one and, notoriously, the high income child benefit charge is another. Whether in the long run there could be a technological solution to those problems so that there can be some form of joint reporting under which each individual is treated separately remains to be seen, but I doubt that anything will happen over the next few years. 

While it is good that Jersey is catching up with the rest of the UK, we should not feel smug. After all it was only in 1950 that married women were removed from the definition of incapacitated persons in the UK taxes act. Sometimes the past seems a very long time ago.