Rachel Reeves would like to increase public ownership of shares by reducing the amount you are allowed to put into your Cash ISA from £20,000 to £10,000. This new restriction would not apply to the alternative Stocks & Shares ISA, which allows the public to keep all the profits from profitable trades they make. She evidently hopes that this would encourage some of the £300bn the nation has deposited in Cash ISAs to instead be invested in domestic markets.
There are, unfortunately, problems with this noble rationale. Firstly, there is nothing to prevent the British public from funnelling their money into foreign exchanges like the S&P 500 or Bitcoin, where buyers don't need to pay a 0.5% stamp duty on the order value when purchasing shares in a company incorporated in the UK. Reeves has predictably faced calls to remove the duty entirely, but she has so far only floated the possibility of making exemptions for newly listed companies. How about exemptions for members of the general public, from whom stamp duty revenues are quite small to begin with?
Secondly, Cash ISAs are only so popular because they offer a fairly high rate of return (up to 4%+) considering that there is no risk associated with them and that they often don't carry any penalties for early withdrawal. True, if someone had put £1,000 every year into a Cash ISA vs into their Shares ISA, they could have had over double the amount of savings. However, I doubt that many who value the flexibility and stability of Cash ISAs would jump headfirst into an unstable way to hold savings, which requires a lot more careful consideration. This is especially true in today's markets, where shares are selling at all-time highs relative to their inherent earning power. Influential figures like JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon have voiced concerns about a market fall in the coming years.
There is no one clear solution for bringing about the undoubtedly desirable notion of the general public as shareholders.
There is no one clear solution for bringing about the undoubtedly desirable notion of the general public as shareholders. While removing the stamp duty would certainly help, there are other things which could also be done here and there. For instance, all shareholders are, in theory, supposed to have voting rights and be able to influence decisions about how their company is run and when its profits are paid out to owners as dividends. However, in practice, many retail investors aren't properly informed on how to exercise their rights and/or simply go along with the company board, even when those decisions benefit insider shareholders like stock-holding executives at the expense of outsider shareholders who aren't in the know. Greater government oversight to enforce transparency and digitise shareholder participation to a greater extent could be a step in the right direction.