Non-doms are abandoning London's wealthiest postcodes – and it matters more than you think

Independent

16-07-2025

The round robin emails come in weekly. 'Dear friends,' it begins. 'Our devoted housekeeper of 15 years is looking for new opportunities, as sadly, we cannot take her with us to Dubai. Thank you, Rachel Reeves, sad emoji.'
Where the residents of Notting Hill and Holland Park once stole each other's staff, now the same crew of cleaners, gardeners, tutors and chefs drop handwritten notes under my door offering their services at half the previous rates. According to recent payroll figures, the number of people employed in hospitality – and this includes our favourite local Italian trattoria on Holland Park – fell by 58,000 between January 2024 and January 2025. Some of this is because of the hikes in national insurance, but having called three local restaurants, it's also about the absence of regular European customers.
Cadogan Tate moving trucks are a daily feature on my street, as are goodbye parties. Here's just one of many examples from my WhatsApp. 'Hallo, as life moves on and taxes increase, we are celebrating ___'s birthday at home and our departure. Are you free?' At a recent dinner, I reckoned around three-quarters of the guests – all of them European – were leaving the UK against their will (practically at gunpoint is how they described it) because their (to be honest, very cushy) deal of the past 200 years was coming to an end.
George Osborne laid the foundations. Rachel Reeves poured the quick cement, particularly when she announced that non-doms would now be subject to the same inheritance tax as the British, which currently stands at 40 per cent, and that this would now apply to the global assets of wealthy foreigners who have lived in the UK for more than 10 years.
This, more than anything else, is what's driving the rich out. Britain lost more billionaires than any country in the world over the past two years, raising fears that more will flee abroad if the government introduces a wealth tax.
Non-doms, as they are known, or non-domiciles, describe a class of wealthy people born outside of the UK who previously were allowed to live full-time in the UK while declaring their permanent home overseas. This allowed them to avoid paying taxes on any foreign income or gains. The influential group of millionaires and billionaires to whom this status applied included Lakshmi Mittal and Rishi Sunak's wife, Akshata Murty.
The vast majority of non-doms who kept central London restaurants, shops and hair salons in employment were Europeans. Many worked in the same international banks as my husband, their children occupying the desk next to my own two sons.
Seamus Wylie of the Belgravia estate agent Ayrton Wylie tells me that anything that is top ticket – wine, art or luxury cars – is badly down. Non-doms may not have paid tax on their family's investment funds, but boy did they spend in London (also Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, where many bought second homes). Which doesn't matter, until it does and you realise London is the country's investment hub.
Many top-end London houses now sit unsold (20 luxury properties in Belgravia are on the market currently). 'Some houses on the £10-15m mark have been mothballed because this is just one of many properties owned,' he says. 'The inhabitants have moved to Dubai, Monaco or Switzerland for a few years.'
The cost to the local economy, he says, cannot be underestimated. 'My clients went to restaurants and stayed in country hotels on the weekend. They kept the local shops, butchers, dry cleaners and car dealerships going.'
A buying agent for the very wealthy who would like to remain nameless says kicking out the non-doms has been an incredible act of self-harm. 'When you had non-doms, they employed people because that's what homeowners do. They employ builders and decorators, they hire staff, creating a massive trickle-down economy. The ultra-rich are the most mobile people in society and there is the Labour government trying to chip away at them. There is no trickle-down effect. There's just the politics of envy.'
And if plans for a further UK wealth tax are implemented, as some have suggested, while it could generate billions annually, the revenue leakage – via capital flight, evasion, and offshore concealment – could be significant. Some are even predicting that it could wipe out 10-20 per cent of the tax base (potentially more than £200 bn), which would reduce what the Treasury actually nets. The TaxPayers' Alliance regularly points to OECD data that shows countries like Sweden, Ireland, and the Netherlands all scrapped wealth taxes, citing capital flight and administrative costs. Those that kept them (Spain, France, Norway, Switzerland) generate only 0.2-0.4 per cent of GDP, according to their cited data.
Of my group of international friends (this includes Brits who are also leaving because of the new tax regime), I would say almost 30 per cent have already left. At one recent dinner, we were the only couple without plans to relocate to some hybrid of Dubai/Milan/Cyprus.
The man seated next to me, a scion of a European banking family, boasted that by moving to Cyprus, he was saving vast amounts on tax, even though his wife later told me she hates travelling every weekend from Oxfordshire to see him. Noteworthy was the fact that his two children had moved to America, which allows no tax exemptions and therefore he would not be joining them.
Where once we heard comments such as 'if Labour gets in, we're going', we're now getting emails which include four changes of address. Wealth advisers Henley & Partners who help the rich obtain those ever more elusive 'golden visas' (which I suspect are rapidly turning into a thing of the past) estimate that more than 10,000 millionaires left the UK last year, with all the consequences of turning off the tap of wealth trickling into the local economy that comes with that.
While their numbers are challenged by other wealth advisers and even the government, I don't need a graph. My hairdresser was on the verge of tears last week as we sat in an almost empty salon in central Notting Hill. 'My European clients used to leave for July and August. Now I see them once or twice a year on their allotted 14 or 19 days,' he says.
The ability to return to the UK is based on individual (tax) situations, meaning that some of my friends can only come to the UK for two weeks (even if their children live here). Others are allotted 90 days. This exodus is also affecting gyms and private clubs – 5 Hertford Street and The Walbrook Club in the City of London among them. '[HMRC] have cited membership as evidence of ties to this country, and so they've had to resign from us,' says Walbrook managing director Philip Palumbo.
But there is a price to leaving, too. A European friend, whose children live here and whose closest friends are British, chose to stay. He tells me: 'My wife and I have talked about this endlessly and we decided we didn't want to live in Dublin. Dubai is a hellhole, and Switzerland is about to put in an inheritance tax. There is growing resentment, if not hostility, across Europe towards wealthy tax exiles and their golden visas. In an uncertain world, Britain feels safer than most.'
The non-doms exodus has already scared Rachel Reeves into offering a new package called FIG (foreign income and gains), which allows former non-tax residents to bring in money at a lower tax rate for four years. Word is she could be reconsidering inheritance tax as well.
Everyone I spoke to for the purposes of this article said they would return to the UK if new decisions were made, meaning London is still the city they most want to live in.
There is sympathy for how these taxes are affecting the wealth creators, versus the wealth protectors. Like the young British entrepreneur who moved to New York or Hong Kong for business purposes and opportunities (then came back and bought properties). That is different from the tax-exiles choosing simple wealth protection, those living in some sad Maltese development in order to fulfil their 'obligatory' tax residency days. To many, they have made a Faustian pact.
Ole Lehmann, a German tax exile who moved to Cyprus and eventually returned to the UK, described his sad life. 'Building real, lasting in-person relationships became nearly impossible,' he writes. 'I've watched friends disappear for months at a time, returning only to maintain residency [then] only to vanish again.' In the end, he says, 'I traded one prison (high taxes) for another (day counting).'
'Day counting' means you get an email from European friends saying, 'we're back next week for Wimbledon and would love to see you', to which many of us now shrug our shoulders. Those of us left behind, paying our dues, contributing to society however unhappily, have closed ranks. A member of my book club who has relocated to Ireland now misses half the meetings – do we kick her out?
We have a grandchild now – do we really want to see her twice a year or whatever HMRC allows? Our adult children pop in weekly, a great luxury for me as the daughter of a diplomat whose parents lived on the other side of the ocean for most of my life. Do my husband and I really want to move to Italy or Lisbon, where the residents not only ignore you but actually dislike you for hiking up property prices and not bothering to learn the language?
A friend sums it up. 'The trouble with the non-dom thing is that it puts a price on what is essentially above price and invites a discussion on what is wealth. True wealth, it seems to me, is about love and friendship and belonging and making a difference. Unfortunately for many non-doms, it looks like wealth is defined by dollars.'
It's about core values. 'Friendship is about consistency and time spent: it's an investment. When a non-dom says 'we're coming next week', I don't respond anymore. They made their choice.'
It's just a shame that their choice is having a miserable effect on so many of the people who loved having them here, and those whose businesses depended on them being here. Rachel Reeves, take note.