A widely cited report on millionaires leaving Britain has been criticised for making unsubstantiated claims, as its author admitted the study for years wrongly claimed to record property wealth.<\/p>\n
New World Wealth (NWW) produces an annual estimate of the global number of rich individuals, along with figures for millionaires who have migrated to other countries.<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s report estimated 16,500 millionaires would leave the UK, on top of an outflow of 9,500 in 2024 \u2014 departures that critics have blamed on chancellor Rachel Reeves\u2019 first Budget, which abolished the non-dom regime and imposed inheritance tax on more estates.<\/p>\n
But the lack of official, credible data relating to the effects of the 2024 Budget on the UK\u2019s wealthy population has fuelled political and economic arguments.<\/p>\n
Andrew Amoils, the founder and sole employee of South Africa-based NWW, told the Financial Times there was \u201cjust a lack of information around and we\u2019ve tried to fill the gap as best we could\u201d on the migration of rich individuals.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fact that it\u2019s been so heavily linked to non-doms is a little unfortunate because, to be honest, we don\u2019t know whether someone is a non-dom or not,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Amoils\u2019 Wealth\u202fMigration Reports are published in association with Henley & Partners<\/a>, a London-based consultancy that markets schemes selling passports and residency permits in more than 40 countries.<\/p>\n The report has come under fire from Dan Neidle, founder of the Tax Policy Associates think-tank, who said that \u201cuntil an independent audit is carried out, the Wealth Migration Report should be treated as marketing material, not evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n Neidle noted that the report relied heavily on LinkedIn data, which was \u201cnot reliable\u201d for finding someone\u2019s tax residence, as opposed to the location where they were working. <\/p>\n He also pointed out that a 2025 NWW report\u2019s definition of \u201cprivate wealth\u201d included bonds, gold and crypto holdings but not property, unlike previous editions.<\/p>\n This change should have led to a sharp drop in the number of dollar millionaires reported if their property was now excluded, Neidle said. Instead the 2025 report showed an increase.<\/p>\n His analysis <\/a>also found that the patterns of digits in the data, such as the numbers of millionaires, centimillionaires and billionaires in each country, deviated from what would be expected in real-world numbers<\/a>, suggesting that they had been inputted or adjusted manually. <\/p>\n This is because they exhibited more odd numbers, zeroes and fives than would be expected in a random sample of data.<\/p>\n Amoils told the FT he tracked 150,000 individuals\u2019 changes of location using LinkedIn and other sources including international schemes selling residency or citizenship, such as Henley & Partners, corporate registers and data from \u201chigh-end international removal firms\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWe track city location, company details and sector details for all 150,000,\u201d he said, declining to give further details on how he keeps the information updated. \u201cWe also have hobby and university details for over 40,000 of them.\u201d<\/p>\n Amoils admitted that the definition of \u201cprivate wealth\u201d had changed in the recent report, adding: \u201cAs far as I know we\u2019ve never really included property in the numbers themselves. The benchmark numbers when we estimate somebody\u2019s wealth, we try and strip out property.\u201d<\/p>\n Amoils said the wording of the methodology was changed because there had been \u201ca lot of question marks about why our numbers were so much lower than Credit Suisse\u2019s numbers [in the bank\u2019s own wealth reports]\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009We probably had to refine the methodology to explain that.\u201d<\/p>\n He declined to comment on the digit patterns. Amoils said liquid wealth, including bond and crypto holdings, was assessed by looking at the wider market and then distributing those figures at a population level, rather than tracking individual holdings.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re not checking every one on our database. We\u2019re doing it on an aggregate basis for each country. And then we\u2019re modelling each country against one another in terms of various metrics.\u201d<\/p>\n Amoils, who has a master’s degree in economics from the University of Johannesburg, worked as an equity analyst before turning to wealth analysis in 2011 and founding NWW in 2013.<\/p>\n The company has had three employees at most, Amoils said, and its recent reports include The Rise of Florida, Tech Hubs of the Future and Australia\u2019s Great Advantage.<\/p>\n According to NWW\u2019s figures, there were 10.5mn dollar millionaires in the 10 richest countries at the end of 2023, rising to 10.9mn in 2024.<\/p>\n Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at Oxford university, also said the figures were \u201cnot reliable\u201d because they were extrapolated from a sample of rich workers on LinkedIn and \u201cassum[ed] all the UK\u2019s millionaires behave in the same way\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009This is unlikely to be true.\u201d<\/p>\n Alan Manning, a professor of economics at the London School of Economics, said it wasn\u2019t \u201ctotally crazy\u201d to use LinkedIn data for migration, but that millionaires presented particular difficulties and NWW should be \u201cmore transparent\u201d about its model.<\/p>\n The dispute around NWW\u2019s method highlights the wider gap in information on the number of millionaires in the UK \u2014 and the extent to which they are moving overseas as a result of the government\u2019s tax policies. <\/p>\n Anecdotal evidence of an exodus of rich people has sparked concerns that Labour\u2019s changes to the non-dom tax policy will lead to so many departures that it fails to raise money for the Treasury.<\/p>\n Official HMRC figures for those non-doms who have left will not be available until 2027. The FT has in the past cited NWW\u2019s statistics.<\/p>\n Henley & Partners did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A widely cited report on millionaires leaving Britain has been criticised for making unsubstantiated claims, as its author…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25436,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344],"class_list":["post-25435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}