The Centre for a Better Britain (CFABB) has published a 183-page report called "Boosting Britain" that amounts to a supply-side wish list dressed in the language of productivity. The headline proposals: abolish capital gains tax, inheritance tax, stamp duty, digital services tax, and air passenger duty; cut corporation tax from 25% to 15% over eight years; and — the detonation charge — eliminate the state pension entirely. The estimated cost to public finances is £75bn, roughly half the existing tax code by the thinktank's own reckoning. The report's organisational DNA makes its neutrality claim difficult to sustain. CFABB was founded by Jonathan Brown, Reform UK's former chief operations officer. Its advisory board was until recently chaired by James Orr, Reform's former head of policy, who was suspended from the party this month after an undercover investigation appeared to show him helping orchestrate a scheme to circumvent electoral laws on foreign donations. CFABB's offices sit in Millbank Tower, near Reform headquarters. The authors insist the party has not yet reviewed the document. On the pension replacement, Brown described the current state pension as "essentially a Ponzi scheme" and proposed a "lifetime investment account" seeded with £1,000 at birth, into which workers would contribute up to 15% of earnings. The state pension — which costs £146.1bn in 2025-26 according to DWP forecasts — would shrink to a means-tested safety net. The transition mechanics are unspecified: who pays current retirees while new workers divert contributions into personal accounts is the structural question the report does not answer. The tax cuts track a familiar pattern: eliminate levies that disproportionately affect asset-holders (inheritance tax, capital gains tax, stamp duty) while proposing spending cuts that hit workers and public-sector employees (closing the public pension plan to new teachers and civil servants). The beneficiary class and the cost-bearing class are different populations. Corporation tax would drop to 15%, a rate designed to compete with Ireland's historic offering, though Ireland itself is moving away from that model under OECD pressure. Additional proposals include breaking up the Treasury into separate departments, creating a "Department for Economic Growth," introducing sliding-scale bank taxes, and linking Bank of England senior pay to inflation targets. The report will be formally launched at a private event with City executives on Wednesday — a venue choice that tells its own story about the intended audience. The timing matters. This lands weeks before Prime Minister Andy Burnham's government presents its first budget, positioning CFABB's proposals as a ready-made counter-narrative. Whether Reform UK formally adopts the platform or maintains plausible deniability while its ideas circulate is the political calculation to watch. The report's fundamental tension is arithmetic. It proposes £75bn in tax cuts and names the state pension (£146.1bn) as a spending target, but provides no transition plan, no fiscal scoring, and no timeline for balancing the books — only the caveat that spending cuts must match to avoid "a Liz Truss-style market meltdown." The Truss reference is revealing: the authors know the risk but have not done the work to mitigate it.
