Prestigious leadership award for CAGE's tax expert

CAGE Research Associate Dr Arun Advani has been recognised for his ambitious research agenda with a Future Leaders Fellowship award from UKRI, the UK's national research funding body.

Founded in 2018, Future Leaders Fellowships aim to provide long-term support to talented researchers investigating complex problems with funding, career development and skills training. Around 500 fellows have been appointed since the scheme began.

Dr Advani will become the University of Warwick’s third Future Leaders Fellow and the first from the Faculty of Social Science.

The award will support new research from Dr Advani into the use of trusts and other ‘split ownership’ structures by the wealthy, the impact of such schemes on inequality, and whether the taxation and regulation of trusts should be reformed.

Dr Advani is widely recognised as an expert on the complex and arcane UK tax system. The award will enable him to bring his skills to bear on this under-researched topic, which is also a feature of wealth management in the USA and in Commonwealth countries.

He explains: “Trusts are a key tool in wealth management and tax planning. While they can offer benefits such as protection for minors or others who are unable to manage their own finances, they can also be exploited as a means of concealing the true ownership of assets and a way of evading tax. They also make it difficult to accurately assess wealth inequality, a key issue for the new UK Government.

“We found with our work on non-doms that a major barrier to reform is the lack of real, robust data. Without quantitative evidence it is difficult for policymakers to model the outcome of reforms.

“This project will close the evidence gap in the area of trusts and work up practical, implementable reforms.”

Congratulating Dr Advani on his Fellowship, Head of Department Professor Ben Lockwood said: “Arun is committed to using his research to achieve real-world change. He has been at the forefront of research into UK tax issues for the best part of a decade and has developed an outstanding reputation as analyst and commentator on tax and equality issues.

“This Fellowship award will allow him to lead an entirely new area of study in the understanding of inequality and tax policy, and establish the UK as the global hub of wealth trust research.”