In defence of VAT on private school fees
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Private schools are, on the whole, a good thing. They give parents greater choice in their children’s education, provide the state sector much needed competition and attract money from abroad by taking on foreign students. I start with this because where you stand on applying VAT to school fees is often treated as a proxy for whether you approve of private education in general.
But it really shouldn’t be. VAT is a tool for raising revenue, not a means of passing moral judgement on each and every good and service. It works best when it is applied broadly with few exceptions. That private schools are good for the economy, are often good for those who consume their services and have some positive externalities are not sufficient grounds for making them tax-exempt. The same can be said for pubs, adult clothes and toilet paper which are all, quite rightly, subject to VAT.
I recently took part in a debate (which you can watch here) against the Adam Smith Institute’s Max Marlow on Labour’s proposal to extend VAT to private school fees. Max is the author of a recent report which has raised some important points. For example, it interrogates some of the evidence used to argue that private schools have adverse social consequences, and shows just how shaky it is.
However, I remain unconvinced by claims that charging VAT on fees will lead to a mass migration of 10%, 15% or even 25% of students from the private to the state sector. These figures rely on the price elasticity of demand for places in British independent schools being relatively high.
But the independent school sector itself has provided – albeit unintentionally – very good evidence for the low responsiveness of demand to increases in fees.
Back in 1997, the average annual fee for a ‘day’ student in a private secondary school was £4,182. If average fees had risen in line with inflation they would now stand at just under £8,000 per year. In reality, they are now more than double that. Between 2009 and 2019, fees increased by 24% in real terms.
What has been the effect on the proportion of British children being educated in the private sector? Essentially none. In 2002, 5.98% of pupils in British schools were educated in the independent sector. By 2022, the proportion had actually increased very slightly to 6.05%.
This is not a criticism of private schools. Increasing prices is a perfectly rational response to persistently high demand for a service. But it does make it tricky for independent schools to claim a fee hike will crater demand when they have spent a generation betting the opposite and being proved consistently right.
There is also little reason to believe that schools will pass on the full cost of VAT at once. There is plenty of room in the industry to cut costs without significant competition from the state sector. The gap between private school fees (even subtracting bursaries) and spending per pupil in the state sector has grown from £3,500 in 2010 to £7,200 today. We have already seen several schools reassuring parents that any percentage increase in fees will be kept in the single figures.
But aside from these practical questions there is a more fundamental question at stake. Just how serious are free marketeers about simplifying the tax system?
Currently, the VAT system in the UK is riven by thousands of exemptions, carve-outs and reduced rates. As with VAT exemptions for school fees, each can be justified by its supporters in isolation, but overall they create an increasingly absurd and byzantine system – one that even HMRC struggles to navigate.
Many readers will be familiar with the legal battle fought by McVitie’s to prove Jaffa Cakes are in fact cakes, which are not subject to VAT, rather than chocolate biscuits, which are. But this case is straightforward compared to the question of whether a gingerbread man with chocolate decorations is subject to VAT. The answer is: not if he only has chocolate eyes, but add a smile and he’s a taxable chocolate biscuit. Pets are generally VATable, unless HMRC considers them edible – so non-ornamental rabbits, eels and five breeds of duck escape the tax. There is a flow chart for working out whether your goatskin coat is VATable: unlike most other adult clothes it isn’t, unless the goat came from Mongolia, Tibet or Yemen in which case it is taxed (obviously).
This labyrinthine system is brilliant at creating work for tax lawyers and accountants but a complete nightmare for businesses. It is particularly tough on small and medium-sized firms, which often struggle with compliance. On top of this, the various exemptions and reduced rates, though often trivial in each individual case, add up to almost £100bn in forgone revenue each year.
A broader-based, simpler and lower-rated VAT is not a fantasy. The UK is well above the OECD average when it comes to applying exceptions to VAT.
New Zealand provides us an example which the UK would do well to follow. It applies its equivalent of VAT, known as General Service Tax (GST), to essentially all goods and services at a fixed rate of 15%. This is simpler for businesses and also raises more revenue. In Britain, VAT accounts for around 15% of total tax collected; in New Zealand, GST accounts for almost 30%. This allows New Zealand’s other taxes to be lower.
New Zealand applies this tax to private education but also offers a small subsidy worth about £1,000 for each secondary school student attending a private school. This means that for the cheapest schools the effect of GST is mitigated to a large extent. If you are concerned about kids dropping out of the bottom of the private system, this sort of direct subsidy is a far more targeted means of doing so than using VAT exemptions. Under the current system, if you’re sending your child to Eton (termly fee: £16,666), the VAT exemption saves you about £7,500 per year, whereas if you’re at an independent school charging £12,000 per year it only saves you around £1,800. If you want to help the ‘squeezed middle’ it’s really difficult to think of a less efficient means than the status quo.
The perennial problem for achieving free market reform is that people like being winners. If the state stops picking winners, for example by simplifying VAT, those affected feel hard done by. But if we listen to special pleading on the part of industries we are sympathetic to, it only undermines the case for broader reforms we need to simplify the tax system and boost growth.
A version of this article was first published on CapX
8 thoughts on “In defence of VAT on private school fees”
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Simplifying the tax system would imply levying VAT on nursery and university fees as well as private schools – a somewhat harder sell.
But private school fees are not like any other vatable service. The very fact that a family pays school fees means that the state is being saved over £8000 in educating that child. It simply isn’t right for the family saving the state money, to then also be penalised for doing so.
You’ve completely missed out the two biggest economic societal effects of private education, which the Adam Smith paper explores in detail.
1. Private education delivers social benefit, because education is social benefit regardless who pays for it.
2. Private education saves the state £8-12k per year, depending if you include fixed costs and overheads.
Any account or commentary that does not start with these two observations, which dwarf all others, is a complete waste of time. They go to the heart of the “unfair tax break” claim (it’s not a tax break, it’s a tax saving, and a big one), and they show why the negative impact of larger-than-expected migration is so large.
These are far from the ideological, laissez-faire, libertarian ideas that the Adam Smith Institute is commonly associated with. These are mainstream observations, based on that not-very-laissez-faire economist Arthur Pigou, and taught to every A-level economist.
You also omit to mention that the VAT exemption for education is broad. It covers not just independent schools, but the entire industry. If Labour were proposing to end the industry-wide exemption, I would concede it would be a system-wide simplification. But it’s not. By targeting only part of the industry (conveniently, only the part that competes with the state, which should stick in the craw of anyone calling themselves a free-marketeer) it creates more complexity, not less. The legislative, avoidance and enforcement challenges associated with dozens of boundary issues have not been thought through. As Marlow wrote, this doesn’t eliminate an anomaly, it just creates dozens of new ones.
It’s painful that the IEA omits to mention them. Back of the class.
I think Richard nailed it. Education is a merit good and all decisions are made at the margin. People will opt out of or not opt into private schools will be those that can least afford it those opting out will likely already be in debt and will be repaying this so no “opportunity vat”. Given that private school leavers, according to UCL earn 17% more any drop in attendance can be calculated with the following.
C% * 17% * GDP where C% is the amount opting not to attend private school. I think you will be astonished how large the impact on GDP is.
Has anyone calculated the number of private schools that will have to close, since the cost will have to be passed to some extent on to parents who will then be stretched possibly to beyond the limit. Numbers of pupils will drop, the schools will have to close, the state sector will then have to take them with class numbers (if the children are accepted in the area needed) increasing to non-workable numbers. The numbers of teachers thrown into the state system will increase considerably leading to retirements while others who cannot do so will have great difficulty crossing to different types of curriculums and emphasis differentials. The threat of this move by Labour had already caused the number of parents looking to use the private school system to drop considerably. The lack of Grammar schools also means that many of the brighter children will not fit into the current state school curriculums. The loss will be to the United Kingdom in the long run.
Firstly, this will result is a reduction of foreign students who are sent to the UK to be educated. This brings additional revenue into the country, as currently around 5% of independent school pupils are from overseas, mainly from China, Hong Kong, and Germany.
As a previous comment states, sending your child to a private school saves the country somewhere in the region of £8k – £12k per year. Seems a bit unfair to charge VAT when we are already paying a lot of money for something that we would ordinarily get for free.
Education is essential. Will Labour be charging VAT on other private services that are also essential? Private Medical Care for example? I’m sure that won’t do this, but what makes it okay to charge VAT on any essential service?
If just 10% of children leave private education because of VAT, this will require an additional 3500 teachers in the state system to cope with the additional demand. There will also be a lot of additional cost in making the changes to the tax system, and as some schools will sadly close, there will be the loss of jobs, national insurance, income tax, and contribution to the local economy.
This is terrible plan which will sadly leave the UK worse off.
This concept of elastic demand is fundamentally flawed.
Like many economists the models assume rationality and ignore many other market conditions. For example, during the same time as the fees have raised, tax at marginal rates has also significantly increased. We currently have higher interest rates than most of the last 20 years, and tighter mortgage affordability test rules.
Many commentators for the tax on education, simply don’t understand that most families aren’t oligarchs, that pay fees from borrowings and very limited expendable income.
There are many problems with the reasoning in this article.
Firstly, it seems hard for an economist to argue demand is inelastic to prices. What is I think the most likely outcome is parents with children in private schools will keep them there, but new pupil flow will reduce. This will allow Labour to claim revenues have been raised over an electoral cycle. Over a longer term, many smaller schools who are run on a tight budget (especially primary schools) will go to the wall. My own borough has at least two who are already on the edge financially – and these have the children of aspirational parents from the middle classes, rather than the ‘toffs’ of popular imagination (it’s worth remembering Rishi Sunak is the son of a Southampton GP).
If it is such a good idea, why does the US, EU and Australia not charge sales tax on school fees? The UK competes with all of these for international students, at much benefit to it’s ‘soft power’. Why kill the goose laying the golden diplomatic egg?
Lastly, the exclusion of all other educational services reveals the policy for what it truly is – nakedly populist with little economic rationale. It may very well get votes (Labour has no chance in my borough), but that doesn’t make it sensible policy.