According to BirminghamLive, Reform’s Treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick said the party’s flagship policies would include reversing what he described as Labour’s “job tax” on British workers, raising the VAT registration threshold to £150,000, scrapping income tax on overtime and replacing existing GDPR rules. The proposals were presented as part of Reform UK’s approach to reducing costs and regulation for employers.
Reform Targets Overtime Tax and Business Costs
Under Reform UK’s proposal, employees would no longer pay income tax on earnings received for overtime work. The party has not provided further detail in the material reported on how the policy would operate, including which workers or forms of overtime would fall within its scope.
Jenrick said a Reform government would seek to make the UK “the best place in the world to start and grow a small business”. He linked the proposed overtime tax measure to policies intended to reduce costs for employers, including reversing changes associated with what Reform calls Rachel Reeves’s “job tax” and increasing the VAT registration threshold to £150,000.
According to BirminghamLive, Reform leader Nigel Farage argued that small businesses had been placed under pressure by taxation, regulation and government policy. He said Reform would seek to support businesses by reducing those burdens while rewarding employees who work additional hours.
Farage described the proposed removal of tax on overtime as a way of “rewarding hard-work”, while also arguing that changes to VAT and employment-related taxation would support British enterprise. Reform says there are six million small businesses in the UK and describes them as central to high streets and the wider economy.
The source does not set out an estimated cost to the Treasury for removing income tax from overtime, nor does it provide figures showing how many workers could be affected. Reform’s statements focused instead on the principle of reducing taxation on additional work and easing costs faced by smaller employers.
GDPR Replacement Forms Part of the Wider Reform Plan
Reform UK also intends to change the UK’s approach to data protection regulation. Robert Jenrick said GDPR had “strangled small businesses and tech firms alike in a web of unnecessary regulation”, arguing that the existing framework continued to impose requirements associated with EU rules.
According to BirminghamLive, Jenrick said a Reform government would scrap GDPR and replace it with what he called a “light-touch” system modelled on New Zealand’s privacy laws. He argued that the UK should no longer be following EU privacy rules a decade after the Brexit referendum.
The proposal sits alongside Reform’s tax measures as part of a package directed primarily at smaller companies. Jenrick said successive governments had concentrated on large corporations while allowing small businesses to “fall by the wayside”, and pledged that Reform would support them.
Taken together, the policies announced by Reform cover taxation on overtime, employer-related costs, the VAT registration threshold and data regulation. The commitments remain proposals dependent on Reform UK winning the next general election, with the report setting out the party’s stated objectives rather than detailed implementation plans.
